Art House Is BU’s Homegrown Sitcom
A comic highlight of Art House was the demented interpretive dances by Summer Sage, played by Michaela Lazarou (CFA’24) and their impact on Candy Baker, played by Katie McRae (CFA’23), and Lil Bub, played by Aidan Close (CFA’23). Photo by Michael D. Spencer
Art House Is BU’s Homegrown Sitcom
CFA School of Theatre and COM Department of Film and Television collaborate to get laughs
This article was first published in BU Today on May 10, 2023. By Joel Brown
Excerpt
Twentysomething Barb returns to her family home after a breakup to find a quartet of artists using it as a studio and crash pad: an interpretive dancer, an obsessive baker, a sculptor, and an inept but enthusiastic rapper.
“Hop on this beat with me!” the rapper says.
Barb, understandably, pulls out her can of mace: “You have three seconds to back away.”
Welcome to Art House, a sitcom co-produced by the College of Communication Department of Film and Television and the College of Fine Arts School of Theatre (SOT). Student actors, directors, designers, writers, and camera operators from both ends of Comm Ave created the show under the watchful eyes of industry-veteran faculty.
A traditional three-camera sitcom shot before a live audience—like I Love Lucy and All in the Family—Art House was taped over several nights at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre in late April. An elaborate three-room set and a live audience gave it that Hollywood feel.
Halfway between live theater and a single-camera show like The Office, few multi-camera sitcoms have been produced these last few years. But Acsa Welker (CFA’23), who plays Barb, says, “Honestly, it feels like the perfect learning space, because it’s kind of the best marriage of the two forms. I just feel kind of ready to—hopefully—step onto a set in the future. Even if it’s not the same, I still feel like I’ve learned a lot.”
A first-time collaboration
Paul Schneider, COM professor of film and television and department chair, and Susan Mickey, CFA professor of costume design and director of the School of Theatre, started talking about a collaboration two years ago. Work began in earnest in spring 2022.
“There’s nothing for us to fall back on in terms of what other universities have done or anything else,” Schneider says. “We’re taking a step off into the unknown.”
“We were looking for different means of expression in which our students could perform, collaborate, and travel their artistic journeys,” says Mickey. “We’re a natural fit. We’re hoping this will be the impetus for more work together.”
COM Students working on the show could get academic credit through a class created for Art House, while it was one of the scheduled productions at CFA for which students there could get credit. By last fall the writing staff was hard at work, with about 20 students from COM and the School of Theatre undergraduate playwriting program. Eventually there were table reads with the cast. Gags came and went, as did characters, while the best survived to the final shooting script.
We were looking for different means of expression in which our students could perform, collaborate, and travel their artistic journeys. We’re a natural fit. We’re hoping this will be the impetus for more work together.
When two men in welding masks carry a metal sculpture into the house, Barb glares and asks, “Daft Punk?” (Spoiler: It’s not the headgear-friendly rock duo.)
Adam Lapidus, a COM assistant professor of film and television who has written episodes of everything from The Simpsons to Full House, ran the writing staff with Bill Broadis, also an assistant professor of film and television, whose credits include Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist.
“In the real world, you know, someone has written a pilot somewhere, and the network buys it and turns it over to the staff and says, OK, let’s work on this,” Broadis says. “We started with nothing, so it was tough to wrangle 15 people’s opinions of what should happen.”
Art House director Eli Canter (COM’23) and some writers attended the annual School of Theatre season auditions last September, where acting students demonstrated their talents in hopes of getting cast in productions during the year.
Schneider had already picked Canter to direct Art House before his student film—coincidentally titled Artboy—all but swept the 2023 Redstone Film Festival with top finishes, alone or tied, in almost every major category: best film, best screenplay, best cinematography, best sound design, best editing, and best actor.
“Everything I’ve directed up until this point has been something that I’ve written and come up with myself, so it’s a very different experience,” Canter says.
“At first I thought, I’m gonna have every scene storyboarded, kind of like what I’m used to. And I did that. And I’m happy I had that prep,” he says. “But in the first few rehearsals I realized quickly, oh, wait! I actually don’t know anything that we have to see. And the camera operators have to feel it out, and then we can go from there.”
There were some upsides.
“On my student film sets, I’m the one making sure, are the actors gonna come? What time should we start? And what are we gonna serve them for lunch? I’ve had to worry about all those things myself,” Canter says with a smile. “Versus now, on Art House, the stage manager deals with all that. So that’s been really nice.”
Early rehearsals at CFA looked similar to any SOT production, with tape on the floor representing the boundaries of the set. But in March, when they added three cameras and a “video village” where Canter and his team would watch the feed, the degree of difficulty went up.
There was a lot of Hollywood-style “hurry up and wait” as blocking and camera movements were adjusted under the eagle eye of Tim Palmer, a COM professor of the practice in cinematography whose credits include the hitwoman thriller Killing Eve.
“Don’t chop off his fingers,” Palmertold one camera operator. Presumably he just meant, “Don’t cut them out of the frame.”