Maranda DeBusk
@maranda.debusk with Copper Dog
-Theatre-
Maranda is the most talented lighting designer I know. She is one of the kindest people I know. Her creative mind is something I envy and admire, and I don’t just say that about anyone. According to multiple tests, my strongest skill is “appreciation of beauty and excellence” so I can say with certainty all I’ve said about her is true. It is no wonder she teaches and wins awards all over the planet. Photographing her designs for K2 was a highlight of my own career.
She lent us her porch for our Memorial Day distanced celebration where we had a couple familiar faces and voices around to pitch in comments here and there. It felt very normal. It felt like a conversation we would have had before all this happened. Which I hope was as refreshing for her as it was for me.
Interviewed 5.16.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: So how are you?
Maranda: I'm good.
Casey: You don't have to be good.
Maranda: Today I'm good.
Casey: How are you generally?
Maranda: It varies. Right? It's a process. There are those mornings where you wake up and you're really excited, right? You wake up and you had a good night's sleep and you woke up before noon and things can happen and you can clean your house and you start thinking about all of the things you could do to further yourself or your career, right? I could learn guitar today. I could actually practice drawing. I could sit at my piano. I could fix my website. I could send all of those emails, checking in on people. And you start going and you get one of those things done. And then by noon, you're like, oh, yeah, no, none of those things. Now I just want to sit on my couch and binge watch Charmed for the third time. And then, you know, by dinner you're back around and you're like, well, I guess I could probably play Kingdom Hearts or I could do something that comes to an outcome that isn't just vegetating. Yeah. So it's up and down. But today? Today I'm good.
Casey: Why do you think you're good today?
Maranda: Because today was a good day. Today we had a meeting. Today we talked about what happens when we get out. And I like days like that and days when it doesn't feel superfluous, right? Things that it doesn't feel like we're talking about when we get out, but it feels sad and hopeless. When it's like we're making a plan, we're making calendars, or we're having production meetings where we're talking about this thing that we really want to do, and it feels like it might happen.
Casey: How is your family doing?
Maranda: They're doing all right. Yeah, my mom works for TSA, so she's been working, but they've shifted over partly for employee safety and partly because of less demand at airports, they've shifted over to four days working, 16 days off, which is a fascinating sort of turn of events. You're quarantined for 14 and then you have your typical two days off and then you go back to work, which is a fascinating system. And it's both good and bad, right? Like you're home, but also that starting up and coming back and starting up and coming back is hard.
And my brother has autism, and so it's really fascinating to see. I finally got a chance to visit them this past week. And it's interesting because I know that he knows what's happening, but his life hasn't changed a lot, right? He did school from home to begin with. And he didn't go out a lot because that's not part of his routine, and so his routine hasn't shifted a lot. But you can tell that he knows that something is wrong because he outwardly feels the way that I think the rest of us internally feel or a lot of us internally feel. And that was interesting to see, trying to talk to him last week.
Casey: How was talking to him last week?
Maranda: He's frenetic, right? There's an amount of frenetic energy that comes out, and it just feels like I'm busting out of my skin, right? It feels like I don't know what to do. It feels uncertain. It feels strange and discordant and all of those things, and he just lets that out sort of in the way that he holds his hands and the way that he enters a room and things like that. And I wish that I could make it better, but I can't. There's actually nothing we can do to make that part better other than to keep going, but we're doing all right.
Casey: So what do you miss? It doesn't have to be work-related it can just be something.
Maranda: I miss a lot of things. I miss dive bars. I miss having a place to go that feels comfortable and homey and unassuming. Coffee shops are similar.
Casey: Dive bars feels a little bit more homey.
Maranda: It's a little more homey and that just sense of being out and people watching and being in a room full of people who are doing things, who are also comfortable and just being. And I miss live music a lot. You know, when I'm in tech every other weekend, I don't see a lot of shows, but I find myself sitting here going, I have all of this time, what are the things that I've always wanted to do more of and half of those things don't happen. I miss those things. I miss coffee shops. I miss feeling finished, right? Like, I miss having things to do so that I feel like I'm going to lots of places or doing lots of things so that at the end of the day, I feel like it's the end of my day, whereas now it sort of feels like a continuous span of time.
Casey: Are you creating at all? Why or why not?
Maranda: It comes in waves. I am a person who's particularly driven by deadlines and purpose, right? Making things for the sake of making things doesn't come natively anymore, and that's probably because I haven't sat down and put the effort into it. And now is not the time to put the effort into it. We're going through a collective trauma.
Casey: Exactly.
Maranda: Because I used to, right? I used to write poetry and I never drew, that was never my thing. But I wrote a lot of poetry and a lot of stories when I was a kid, and that was how I processed the world. It never had a purpose other than to process the emotions, but I feel like now as an adult, I process my emotions differently. But when I can put a reason to it, it's great. Like I re-did my whole website. I was like, I need to do this because I will eventually need to get more jobs. So sitting down and reformatting my website was easy to make myself do.
You know, working with my hands comes naturally. I've made some splash boards of pictures from theatres that I have an intention of posting a series of. These are the places that I didn't get to go to, who I love, and who I need, especially my home theatres. I have the Warehouse Theatre in Greenville was where I interned as a 16-year-old. So I spent an entire afternoon just going through photos and making collages of photos of times that I loved being there.
Casey: You probably knew on a certain level that you were purpose-driven, right? That you like timelines and you find purpose in getting things done. Do you ever wish that you were just satisfied? That you could use this time to do something else?
Maranda: Oh, yeah. I wish that I could focus on things like learning a new language. Or like I said, I have a pile of books underneath my desk that started this. You know, I pulled out The Artist's Way and I was like I'm gonna finally do this. I pulled out Drawing for the Left Brained Mind and like, I'm going to do that. I pulled out 362 Writing Prompts and I'm like three hundred and sixty two things to write about. And it's like a little writing prompt every day. I did that for a day. I pulled out everything that goes because I just want to just to be a generative artist for the sake of being a generative artist.
So, absolutely I wish that I was one of those people, but I've been running for years, right? That's sort of what really tipped me off is that I've been running for years. I've trained for half marathons. I've always injured myself before I've made it that far. But I've started a thousand training programs and I've made it until I injure myself in all of them. And I tried running in week one, week two of quarantine. And the first week was like, "Oh, you're just out of practice because you've been in tech." Second and third week I was like, "My times are getting slower and I'm getting less far less quickly." And finally, I was just like, "This obviously isn't your time. Even your body is telling you this is not your time to push. This is your time to be."
Casey: And you're honoring that?
Maranda: I'm trying to honor that. You know, when I have the urge to do, I do. . . Eventually, we're all going to get the phone call that says we're back in whatever capacity "back" is. It will not look the same. It will not be the same. But we are going to get the call to action, whatever the call to action is. And at that point, we're going to need to turn into hyperdrive. . . That sense of service and apprenticeship and volunteering who you are, your time, your energy and yourself into a project because you loved it so much. That is the way that we will start to solve the problem. We'll start to come up with a creative solution—it's not even a problem—the creative solutions to who we are and how we tell our stories later. And I want to be entirely ready to lace up my shoes and go.
Casey: Is there a balance somewhere in your world where you can still spend 16 hours at the theatre, but you find time to balance it?
Maranda: I think so. I think it comes in using your time more wisely. It's not entirely just a, "and now we're waiting until we aren't people again,” and go back to not being people for the sake of somebody else. But it's saying things like, "No, sometimes I don't want to hang out with everybody." Sometimes I do just want to go home and sort of quarantine myself in a social sense. I need me time . . . You should wake up every morning and do your yoga and your meditation because it does make you feel better. And yeah, it is hard. It's going to be a hard balance.
Casey: Is there anything else you want to share about your experience?
Maranda: I feel like I've been really fortunate. I don't know if that's really a thing to share, but I feel like I've been really fortunate that I know that I am safe, right? I'm safe and quarantine is hard. But at the end of the day, the group of people that I surround myself with digitally or physically in my own house or wherever have all been so very supportive, and supportive of each other, and supportive of other people and understanding. And, you know, I feel very fortunate. I feel very fortunate. And I know that it feels very hard and I recognize that it's hard for everybody in different ways. I'm in many ways thankful for this time to take stock of myself and this time to take stock of my relationships, and my relationship with my work, and my relationship with my art. It's been eye-opening. You take a workaholic and all of a sudden you take the work away.
Casey: Yeah. See what's left.
