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Flourish Online Magazine | Summer 2007 |
Alumni Spotlight: Chris Kolz
A Good Life Backstage
By Lauren Highfill
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| Chris, sitting on the 14-foot couch he built for the Goodman Theater's production of "King Lear." |
A little over two years ago, Chris Kolz (theatre, 1998) saw a position for props carpenter at the renowned Goodman Theater advertised on a job search website and thought, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if I could work there?” But since he was happy working with the props department at the Mississippi Reparatory Theater in Kansas
City, Kolz didn’t pursue the position. Little did he know that opportunity would knock twice.
A few months later, “Props Carpenter at the Goodman Theater” popped up again in a job search and this time the chance was too good to pass up. “It was around Thanksgiving and I was headed to Chicago anyway because I have family up there. So I set up the interview for that time and a week later I got the job,” Kolz says.
During his first week at the Goodman, Kolz was high in the air welding for an upcoming production. “It was pretty intense from the beginning,” he says.
And that intensity and excitement is exactly what he wants. After graduating from Kennesaw State with a theatre degree in the acting/directing track, Kolz went to work for a telephone company where he felt unchallenged and unhappy. He decided to go back to school and enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Mississippi at Kansas City where he discovered that he “liked to build props, not draw them.” Kolz then left UMKC and began working hands-on with the reparatory theater.
Since he started his career at the Goodman, Kolz has been involved with countless productions, including the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play by Doug Wright “I Am My Own Wife” and the production of Shakespeare’s epic tragedy “King Lear,”
for which Kolz had the difficult task of constructing a fourteen-foot sofa.
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| Chris produced the props for KSU's production of "The Importance of Being Earnest." |
Being the props carpenter varies in intensity, Kolz says, and it really depends on the stage designer of the production. Usually he has one to two months to work on constructions, but for the world premiere production of Richard Nelson’s “Frank’s Home,” Kolz had just a few weeks to build and modify multiple pieces of furniture.
But Kolz believes he has it good at the Goodman Theater and doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon. Plus, his brother and sister-in-law live close by and Kolz just became a first-time uncle. And his mother is planning to relocate to Chicago as well. It all goes to show you that “you have to keep yourself open to new opportunities because you never how things are going to turn out.”