This Music Should Not Be, by Wendy A. Schmidt

June 10, 2024
1 min read

Last week, I received an unexpected last-minute request from playwright Wendy A. Schmidt to photograph her play, This Music Should Not Be, which will open in July.

This Music Should Not Be

Playwright Wendy A. Schmidt.

“Emily must learn an alien language for her job. It’s tough at first, but the more proficient she becomes, the more she loses interest in things she used to care about. Like breathing. A tragicomedy of technocapitalism.“

—This Music Should Not Be synopsis

Wendy A. Schmidt created The Terror Cottas to cultivate an audience for experimental playwrights, and much more. Check out their mission here.

Wendy’s play This Music Should Not Be is The Terror Cottas’ first foray into matching a piece with the right director, and Shea Leavis’s experimental style complements it. The play features Dana Pepowski, Donaldson Cardenas, Melody DeRogatis, and Ethan Embry, with stage management by Reagan Stevenson.

The play will premiere on the Labyrinth Club stage. I snapped some behind-the-scenes images as the cast and crew prepared for their production run:

Preparing the technical elements for the show (including a great many balloons)!

Photographing the Run

I photographed a technical run of the thirty-minute show, in which the artists rehearsed at the Labyrinth Club. I did my best to capture the rehearsal process and all the people involved in while the artists ran various moments in the play, followed by a complete run of the show.

Over the course of the evening, I sought to capture the short production’s cool visual elements—the actors’ neon socks, the bouncing blue and purple balloons, and the bare bulb actor Donaldson Cardenas holds, Gandalf-like, a cool effect that illuminates half his face and leaves the other half in shadow.

I’m extremely grateful to Wendy for reaching out to cover this last-minute shoot. It was a pleasure to join this thoughtful group of artists for the tech run of their show, and I wish them the best of success when they open in July! If you’d like to see the show, please check The Terror Cottas website and Instagram and become a part of that experimental theatre audience Wendy is working to grow!

A small sampling of images from This Music Should Not Be, by Wendy A. Schmidt.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

  1. Practicing Patience with Personal Projects
  2. A Bright Room Called Day, with Blank Theatre Company
  3. Changes
  4. Alone at Last, with Laughing Stock

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Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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