One-man show Ethan Shaw
Ethan Shaw grew up in the small town of Kimberly, Idaho listening to talk radio and planning a future in science, technology, engineering and math. Now, he’s graduating from Utah State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting and a one-man show he wrote, produced and directed under his belt.
“My first year here, I was double majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology,” Shaw said. “I just remember feeling this intense happiness with what I had done in the STEM field but this simultaneous feeling of a lack of satisfaction.”
Shaw had been involved in theater on and off since sixth grade, but it wasn’t until college he realized his passion for the stage burned brighter than his love for science. The turning point came in the form of a serendipitous email Shaw received a day after sitting down and reflecting on his first year as a STEM major.
“The next day, one of the professors in the theater department responded to an email I had sent a year prior,” Shaw said. “He said, ‘Hey, I saw you emailed about how to be involved in theater as a non-major – I’m so sorry I never responded. How would you feel about just becoming a major and auditioning for the program?’ It was literally less than 24 hours after I had been thinking those thoughts.”
After receiving the email, Shaw auditioned for the theater program just three days before the semester started and was quickly accepted. “I truly believe that I stumbled into the best acting program Utah has to offer,” Shaw said. “We eat, breathe and sleep theater.”
Shaw’s initiative didn’t go unnoticed by faculty. According to Richie Call, head of the USU Department of Theatre Arts, Shaw quickly threw himself into his work and consistently looked for chances to develop as an actor.
“He’s really scrappy, and he has sought out opportunities when he wasn’t needed for shows here in our main stage season,” Call said. “Some community theaters, some professional theaters during the summer – he just loves doing the work and so he goes out to find it.”
While his main emphasis is in acting, Shaw decided to try his hand at some other disciplines for his Honors Capstone project. This long-form project is a requirement for students wanting to graduate with university honors.
“For my Honors Capstone I wrote, marketed, produced, directed and performed in a one-man show of my own creation,” Shaw said. “That was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done as far as theater goes.”
Shaw was inspired to produce a one-man show after a professor asked his Theatre History and Literature II class what they think theater should be.
“I think theater should move in a direction where we are utilizing multiple styles within a single play or a single script,” Shaw said. “I think typically in film, theater and TV, we stick to one style, and most of the time, that style is realism, but I’ve always been drawn to the anti-realistic styles and the ways that they pose realistic themes in non-realistic styles.”
Instead of incorporating the typical one or two artistic styles into his show, Shaw wondered if he could pull off incorporating nine: expressionism, realism, absurdism, surrealism, naturalism, futurism, dada, theatre of cruelty and epic theatre. This decision marked the start of a long 13-month process for Shaw.
“As an actor, I’ve spent so many years learning how to act and the technique and how to be believable and experience honestly and truthfully given an imaginary circumstance,” Shaw said. “In order to produce this play, I had to do a lot of things that I didn’t have experience with, like playwriting and directing and producing and marketing. Learning how to do all of those new things was really tough.”
Shaw created a story following a man experiencing homelessness who attempts to take shelter in a bar for the night. After being chased by angry bartenders up the stairs and through the roof of the building, the man falls onto the stage. The show officially begins as he spirals into existential questioning and exhaustion.
“He is grappling with all these societal expectations and his personal expectations and the expectations of his friends and family,” Shaw said. “He is trying to figure out which expectations are reasonable and which are not and dealing with how some societal expectations are unrealistic. The longer the night travels on, the more anti-realistic it becomes as he becomes more sleep deprived and hungry.”
Shaw wanted his show to explore and normalize the not-so-glamorous parts of being alive.
“To be human is to be messy, and society, I think, urges us to turn the light off or sweep it under the rug or brush aside those certain aspects of the human experience,” Shaw said. “It’s nice to look nice and competent and put together in front of people, but when it comes down to it, the way to make theater impactful and meaningful is to talk about the less glorious parts of being a human.”
While Shaw worked loosely with theater faculty at USU to ask questions and gain insight into the show-making process, he did most everything himself.
“I was working on a one-man show at the same time, but I was working with a director, a playwright, the writer of the original source material, a lighting designer, a sound designer, a set designer,” Call said. “That’s already more people than I can count on one hand, and we were all collaborating to do this thing together. Ethan was doing most of those things on his own, and so that’s what stood out to me the most — is just how much he was tackling.”
Shaw said what kept him going throughout this process and helped him reach the finish line was a deep-rooted feeling of honor and respect for the art of theater. “There’s only a certain amount of professionalism you can have when you’re ignorant, and now that I have less ignorance, I can have more professionalism. Once you put in a certain amount of hours and tears and sweat and work into the art, you can now have this not-ignorant respect for it,” Shaw said. “That is what Utah State’s given to me, and it’s made me a professional competitor in the professional world.”