Chris Raintree
BFA in Theatre with a concentration in Scene Design/technical production, 2012
raintreecj@vcu.edu
Chris was discouraged from acting after an audition for a teenage-aged part in Arcadia. He’s very tall—6’8” to be exact—and when he walked into the room, the director took one look at him and let out a very disappointed, discouraging “oh.” That made him realize that acting might be an unrealistic career path, since his height would dictate which roles he might be considered for. His favorite role remains being Hero in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Hero’s costume is typically “short and leggy,” but when the director saw Chris in costume, they said “we don’t need it to be that leggy.” Chris jokes, “secretly I was able to talk with the costume designer and we got real leggy.”
Chris started acting at his Bedford, Virginia high school since his “super cool” older brother was doing it. He did a little bit of everything during community college and at the local theatre Little Town Players including acting, set building, painting, stage managing and “they actually let me direct a couple shows.” Chris credits his time there for showing him that scene design could be a career.
Chris acknowledges his siblings again for bringing him to VCU. His sister, Leah, was a painting and printmaking major and his brother, Charley, studied performance at VCU. Chris chose scene design and his first job was Circle Mirror Transformation for Virginia Repertory Theatre at the Barksdale location at Willow Lawn. He also designed Elephant Man for the VCU mainstage. (Casey Biggs, best known for his role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, was a guest director.)
After VCU graduation, Chris went to Carnegie Mellon where he earned his MFA in 2015. He and his wife Erika ended up back in town, “stuck in the Richmond vortex.” Chris freelanced, designing shows in the area and working for Barker Designs, a multidisciplinary design/build firm owned by another theatre alum, Brian Barker (BFA ’03). With Barker Designs, Chris worked on a variety of fun projects including creating bounce houses for Nickelodeon. Chris started teaching here at VCU in 2017, and he’s been Head of Scene Design since Fall 2020.
On teaching college students, Chris says “it’s a huge transition in their life and to be a part of that is really profound.” Some of his favorite, most fulfilling moments working with design students are “when they see their drafting package printed for the first time. They usually, hopefully, are super proud of this sort of tangibility.”
Header image: Chris and students at the 2023 SETC Conference in Lexington, KY
Compiled by Liz Hopper (professor emeritus), Jerry Williams (BFA ’71), and VCUarts Theatre for the August 2023 Theatre Alumni newsletter