Meet the Fool for Love team: Julie Haber

We sat down with Julie Haber after rehearsal and she told us about her favorite Sam Shepard lines and seeing with the artistic eye of a stage manager.

How did you get into stage managing?

I started out taking photographs of productions in college, and then I thought I’d like to be around the whole process but didn’t know what I might do. A director suggested I try stage managing, and it seemed a great fit for my skill-set.

Your skill-set?

I love being organized. And I love being around creative people but I don't want to be one. I'm not trying to be something else. I have an artistic eye, which is helpful for understanding what artists are saying.

If you could do something completely different for a career, what would it be? 

I really can’t think of anything else I’d have wanted to do! But I always enjoyed photography and thought I might pursue it as a career.

Have you worked on other Shepard plays? Which ones? 

I’ve worked on Curse of the Starving Class [Yale Repertory Theatre 1980]. and Buried Child [South Coast Repertory 1986]. Curse of the Starving Class has one of my favorite Shepard lines of all time:

 Do you remember your first experience at the theater? What was the show?

I am pretty sure it was a national tour of My Fair Lady at a theatre in downtown Los Angeles in the late fifties. I was probably about 7 years old. It's one of my earliest and most vivid memories.

Anything can happen with live performance, do you have a funny moment/embarrassing memory to share where something when wrong with your work? 

Too many to enumerate, actually, both funny and embarrassing. One that sticks in my memory as a real embarrassment occurred during a production of A Lesson From Aloes at Yale Repertory Theatre. I became distracted and wasn’t watching when an actor put his hand on a light switch to turn on the porch light, and it took a moment for me to notice him flipping the switch on and off and looking at the porch light in puzzlement before I realized my error and called the light cue. I apologized for days to the poor actor.

(Header image: Sonia Fernandez.)