This Music Should Not Be, by Wendy A. Schmidt

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

“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!