Ronald Thacker at the workshop where he creates set designs for ASU. Photo by Weston Phippen.
When Ronald Thacker gets to work, he sits down at his office desk and checks his e-mails. What he will do in between teaching his classes depends on what’s in his inbox. Some days he drives around in an ASU departmental Chevy truck, scouring junkyards for materials. Other days he spends hours making stuffed seagulls or helps build a nightmarish circus scene — complete with chandeliers and an enormous, purple polyester canopy that looks like a burlesque umbrella.
Thacker is a clinical assistant professor in the School of Theatre and Film. He helps to build, conceptualizes and design play sets for the ASU MainStage theater series. In the five years he has been at ASU, he has helped to build just about every oddity the mind can rattle off.
Most recently, he was working on the set of the play AM:I, a science fiction play that deals with artificial intelligence. For the play he was tasked with creating a large computer similar to the diabolical H.A.L. from “2001: A Space Odyssey.“
At first he tried to build three 12-foot by 12-foot walls made up of 111 individual, Lycra-fabric panels that could break apart and expand.
“We ended up having to scratch that idea,” Thacker says from a chair behind a long work bench in the scene shop. “We tried, I can tell ya. Weekends and evenings I tried to deal with that thing, and it almost drove me crazy.”
The scene shop is nestled right behind Galvin Playhouse, directly backstage. It has large concrete walls and is one story beneath the Nelson Fine Arts Center. The feel of the
Inside the Scene Shop. Photo by Weston Phippen.
subterranean workshop is like being in a monstrous crypt or fall-out shelter. While Thacker works he likes likes to play ’80s pop music, so for those hours the workshop becomes a very upbeat synthesizer-infused fall-out shelter.
The shop is 56 feet by 60 feet, and the only thing that separates it from the stage is a large corrugated metal garage door that runs from floor to ceiling. The floor of the shop is covered with myriad tools and workbenches, saws and unused wood for just about every project imaginable .
In some capacity or another, Thacker says he has tinkered with tools since he was young.
“When I was a kid my dad would build something and, because I was the youngest, he kind of put me off to the side with a block of wood to nail something into,” Thacker says. He also built his own Millennium Falcon out of a shoe-box when he was growing up in Madison Heights, Va., just across the river from Lynchburg and about 75 miles from Roanoke.
Madison Heights was a typical small town, Thacker says. When he was growing up it had one main drag running through the city center with grocery stores and gas stations speckled along the road. His uncle owned one of those gas stations, and his family still owns the farm his great grandparents lived on.
When he was older he became involved in the performing arts with a song and dance group. “In high school it was popular medleys and all that kind of crap,” he says.
While he was in college he joined another singing group called Up With People, a traveling nonprofit tour group that sprouted out of the Vietnam Turbulence.
“Let’s just say it was an experience,” Thacker says. “I got to see the world to some degree.”
His work and passion took him from Virginia to California, where he received his master’s degree from the California Institute of the Arts. He then worked in a metal sculpture shop in Belgium. And after a stint in the Midwest he came to Arizona.
He has crossed America building everything from spaceship rooms to a revolving coffin that doubled as a trap door for actors. He has been in this line of work for a long time. But working with his hands, being a part of the arts and, of course, the lax dress code all make it easy to stick around, he says.
“I usually wear my T-shirt and jeans,” Thacker says. Then he raises the sleeves of his black T-shirt and points to both his armband tattoos. “I’m also grateful that I didn’t get the lecture on no earrings and don’t let your tattoos show.”
More of Thacker's workshop. Photo by Weston Phippen.
His earrings sporadically reflecting the large shop lights, his brown steel-toed boots clacking against the workbench and the ’80s synth still ricocheting off the the cement walls, Thacker looks as content as Buddha.
“A lot of times in life people know exactly what they want to do ,” Thacker says. “Others don’t. And hopefully fortune smiles on them to put them where they’re supposed to be.”
Contact the reporter at wphippen@asu.edu
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