“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.”
If Shakespeare were describing Greenbelter Sarah McCarthy’s life, he would have gotten partial credit. McCarthy’s world does revolve around the stage, not as a player, but rather from the wings and the control booth.
McCarthy, who graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 2016, is a professional stage carpenter, stage manager and general backstage theater magician. Recently her title was Automation Operator for the show A Strange Loop at Woolly Mammoth, a theater in Washington, D.C.
Her world continues to be centered on the stage even though the musical, which won both a Pulitzer Prize and the 2022 Tony Award for best musical, has moved on to Broadway.
McCarthy didn’t move with the show because of union rules. But, she said, that is okay. “I don’t need to be on Broadway to feel like I made it,” she said. “I just need to do a lot of theater.”
A Strange Loop is a self-referential musical by Michael R. Jackson. It features a Broadway usher, named Usher, who wants to write musicals that show real people, in his case, people who are Black, queer and fat. Usher’s doubts and internal critics are played by other actors.
The set also plays an active role in Usher’s struggle. As the automation operator, part of McCarthy’s job was to make a house gain importance for Usher by remotely moving a large piece of scenery from upstage (the back of the stage) to downstage (the front). For the audience, the movement appears magical – that is, the mechanism is hidden.
“I found it very scary to move,” she said, even though she did it for every show. “It’s really big; it’s a two story house.” McCarthy worried that something would fall and hurt someone. The worst that happened, though, was that a curtain ripped.
Oddly enough, it is these imperfections that make McCarthy love the theater.
“A play is never perfect, and that’s what I find so wonderful,” she said. “Everything fails at least once, but it’s okay. The audience is engaged.”
She said she loves seeing a play evolve from a two-dimensional script to a three-dimensional show – with scenery, lights and the rest. That was a process she saw more clearly when she worked as set designer on The Wheel, by Zinnie Harris, as part of her college career. There she had to figure out how to use six pieces of set to show different wars in American history. She also enjoys the live-wire feeling of running a production as a stage manager, a job she will step into soon for the Renaissance Festival in Maryland.
With A Strange Loop, she really liked seeing how the re-writes of the script improved the show during its pre-Broadway run at Woolly Mammoth. “It’s beautiful to see the play come together,” she said.
In a way, the magic that comes from work backstage matches the themes of A Strange Loop.
The show’s star, Jaquel Spivey, told the New York Times that one of the appeals of the show is that it focuses on new people. People, he said, that are “in the theater, but often hidden.”
Similarly, McCarthy and other stage crew are often hidden, but their magic is very much a part of the show.