Perspectives / Matt Callahan Matt Callahan is Actors Theatre's resident sound designer. "It’s like crack for theatre people." That’s what Matt Callahan says about the Humana Festival. 2005 was his first designing sound for festival shows like Hazard County. "It’s nutty. You’re basically taking a five- or six-week process and overlapping three of them—or in some cases four. Once you do it for a while, I don’t know if your whole adrenalin system gets out of whack. But that whole festival, you’re in big show mode. I got to the end of it and I was like, ‘I need a project.’ That’s the sick thing. You actually feel this loss. You want to be in a tech somewhere." Matt said the full impact of the festival is brought more fully into focus when you consider its geographical location. It’s not a metropolitan city with a big theatre community. "The festival is like the carnival comes to town. All of a sudden, a medicine show comes in and then you pack the wagons and it goes out. It’s the theatre jamboree. It’s like a big party. You’re reunited with people you know from other times and other contexts. You have old friends and you have people who should have been your friends because you were both in Pittsburgh at the same time." While the process of working on Humana shows is not unlike working on any other show, it’s intensified by the compact rehearsal period. "You've more or less got to have your ideas and then you go into the work tunnel. There are embellishments all the time, that’s the way it is. But there’s no pulling the rabbit out of the hat. You have to hang your hat on a concept," he says. "It’s not the sort of environment where you go on stage and it turns into something totally different. There’s not enough tech time for that." One of the best parts of the festival for him is getting to experience first-hand the rising careers of some of the nation’s future leaders in playwriting. "Allison Moore was great, as was Adam Bock, who wrote The Shaker Chair. The playwright’s big career break is happening in this rehearsal room. It’s exciting because you are there with them as it’s happening." — Raven J. Railey