On any given day, Dusty Stutsman Terrell can find herself in entirely different circumstances. The jungles of the South Pacific, the streets of Paris, a club in Manhattan. Last week she was smack in the middle of the Nevada desert, sidling up to a cactus, spray gun in hand, watching the sun set in the west.
Actually, she was making the sun set in the west, with a broad swipe of her sprayer. Terrell is Riverside Theatre’s scenic charge artist; a muralist, faux-finisher and trompe l’oeil specialist who paints the theater’s backdrops, flats, floors, props and furniture.
Her sleight of hand was college-taught. She had started out a performer herself, playing multiple instruments through high school, then entering college as a theater major with emphasis in performance. But a switch seemed to flip when, as part of a work-study program, she was asked to help out with the crew backstage.
“I started out doing carpentry, and I thought, this is cool. I could do this,” she recalls. That soon led to painting, something she had never seriously tried before. Today, her portfolio includes examples of her work on dozens if not hundreds of sets, in an astonishing array of techniques, surfaces and subjects, executed with the finesse of a fine artist.
“She’s a rock star,” says Oscar Sales, Riverside’s marketing director.
Part of Terrell’s challenge is the scale of much of her work. To create a backdrop, she must paint on a piece of muslin nearly the size of the stage floor. And that’s where she was painting last week, the backdrop to next season’s “Crazy for You” stretched flat across the main stage, fans rigged to blow beneath it so the paint dries as it is applied.
In the wings, on and around a folding table were various five-gallon buckets of paint and containers for mixing. The pigment-rich paint is specially formulated for theater use.
Key to the process is layering, Terrell says. She points to the bands of color from the sky that meld into one another. Toward the front edge, she has sprayed a brown silhouette of shrubbery, to be filled in by brushwork.
“You have to be able to look at a painter’s elevation or rendering and understand where to start first,” she says. She nods at the backdrop that in next spring’s production will tell the audience the play’s protagonist, a New York actor, has just landed in the middle of nowhere.
For the moonlit jungle scene in last season’s “South Pacific,” she started with black velour and applied the bright greens and yellows so that the paint set just at the fabric’s surface, to “pop out at you,” she says.
Terrell works from digital images or drawings from the show’s scenic designer, in this case, Michael Anania, based in Maine. He also designed the sets for “I Love a Piano” last season. Frequently, it’s Riverside’s executive director, Allen Cornell, who doubles as scenic designer along with directing.
Not all the details in the designer’s plan are replicated by rote. There are times when Terrell is handed a concept she knows needs adjustment – a yellow backdrop, for example, tends to make people look sick, she says. “I may have to overglaze with a purple wash.”
She begins by mapping her giant canvas, marking off the stage with numbers corresponding to a grid on the original design. This summer and last, she has been helped by Noelle Ruegg, a recent graduate of Ball State University in Indiana; she is part of Riverside’s intern program.
Ruegg is in her early 20s, and nimble. Terrell is 37, and the previous day’s eight-hour stretch of stooping with a loaded paint gun left her aching. “I was in pain,” she says, laughing.
Summer is prime time for set building, and Terrell and Ruegg are cranking out a backdrop every ten days. In addition to the desert scene, there are three more drops to paint for “Crazy for You,” including a New York night skyline, to be lit with neon paint.
For ”The Bikinis,” a 1980s musical revue opening in October, there’s another skyline and a beach scene. “We haven’t gotten the info for ‘West Side Story,’ says Terrell, anticipating the set of the next season’s blockbuster. “That’ll be next week.“
Her schedule has been stepped up this year, with earlier deadlines” so when we get into the crazy time, we’ll have most of it done. That’s what got me here – the craziness.”
Terrell is referring to the ambitious productions Riverside began undertaking after the success of “42nd Street” in 2010. That big-budget hit which set attendance records for Riverside was followed by others like “Les Misérables,” “Miss Saigon,” and “South Pacific.” With a growing band of “patron producers” funding the shows, it was time to have an in-house scenic artist instead of hiring people on a show-by-show basis.
Terrell was hired in 2011. Along with a master’s degree in theatre design, Terrell’s resume includes the touring production of “Sesame Street Live” and “Dragon Tales Live,” and eight years with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. It was there that she met her husband Larry Terrell, who joined Riverside last year as stage operations supervisor. They have a 2-year-old son, Ezra.
Just as her talent transforms a stage into a scene, it also changed her real-life circumstance. Though today, her overalls are spattered with paint, once it was mud and manure. Raised on a farm in Oklahoma, 12 miles from the closest town of 2,500 people, she grew up with horses, 100 head of beef cattle and a couple dozen Guernsey dairy cows. Her father, like his father before him, was a rodeo bull rider until his injuries drove him to quit and start judging instead; Dusty ran the 8-second timer for the ropers.
At home, her days began before sunup going out to the barn to milk the cows – she and her younger brother were in charge of feeding the newborn calves of her 4-H show cows “so their nipples wouldn’t get stretched.”
“I’d lean my head on the fence and fall asleep with these giant bottles of milk under my arms,” she recalls.
Then when she was 11, her father lost his job as a grain salesman. “We had to sell everything,” she says slowly.
Her mother went to work at 7:30 in the morning as a seamstress in a Lane Bryant factory, and Dusty got dropped off at her grandmother’s, who lived near the town’s tiny high school.
“I really had a great education,” she says. “Especially when I got into high school and they started AP classes.” Her freshman year, she had an inspirational teacher of speech and debate, and believes her love of the stage may have evolved of that class. She learned extemporaneous speaking and had to recite poetry and prose. She also performed monologues.
In a senior class of only 30 students, she graduated as co-valedictorian and went off to Oklahoma State University; she went to the University of Minnesota for an MFA in theater design and technology. She returned briefly to Oklahoma to teach at her alma mater, but moving back to anything like her childhood home, on “the hill over the creek bed,” was always out of the question.
“I knew I would never live there,” she says, shaking her head with a grin. “I have a big personality.”
