Wolf Trap’s Tech Titan

Whether you’re watching Indiana Jones swing through the jungle to his iconic theme played by the National Symphony Orchestra, pop star Meghan Trainor shake her “bass” to her throwback hits or the famous flying feet of “Riverdance’s” Irish dancers this summer at the only national park dedicated to the arts, Kenneth Lewis ’81 (right) is the man behind the scenes ensuring a flawless show.

“I know I’m lucky to go to work each day and look out my window and see all this,” says Lewis, chief of the division of performing arts and production manager at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va. He gestures at the 7,000-seat Filene Center, nestled among 130 acres of grass and trees, a unique combination of indoor and outdoor space where guests can bring their own beer and wine and food and park for free. “You can’t go to Nats Park and see a concert and bring your own dinner!”

With days starting at 7 a.m. and often going until midnight or later—projection-oriented shows like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “Dreamworks Animation in Concert” require overnight set-up, out of the sunlight—Lewis spends the 20-week summer season practically living at Wolf Trap.

Over the last two decades, he’s lent Garrison Keillor red suspenders when he forgot his during a live version of “A Prairie Home Companion;” admired Kenny Rogers’ ability to capture a crowd despite disliking country music; and wrangled 600 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He’s sat at the control panel just steps away from legends like Carol Channing and Aretha Franklin, and even after becoming the production head honcho, he still climbs rafters to troubleshoot a faulty fire curtain or storm-induced power outage.

“I’ve grown old with these artists,” he says, like local blues and roots group the Nighthawks. He first worked with them at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda as a student, when his electronics shop teacher sponsored the tech crew at the school’s field house.

That spurred Lewis to choose engineering when he came to UMD. But the theater at Tawes Hall beckoned, just steps from where he lived in Caroline Hall, and soon, he found himself juggling play productions with engineering exams.

It took a little fairy dust to him to switch his major to theater his sophomore year. An unsympathetic professor remarked, “Who are you, Tinker Bell?” when Lewis asked to take a midterm with a different section so he could attend “Peter Pan” rehearsals.

Turns out, he was: He’d custom-built a contraption that could control a little light that flitted across the stage.

By the time he graduated, he’d worked on shows for Steve Martin and the Grateful Dead and parlayed that experience into jobs at the now-defunct Wax Museum nightclub and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. before going to Yale to earn an M.F.A., studying technical design and production for the stage.

He worked for a decade in Mississippi, New York and North Carolina, including a brief stint at Wolf Trap, before coming home for good. In 1999, Wolf Trap needed his expertise to improve its stage, including designing new rigging and trussing to hang a line array loudspeaker system—at the time, the newest technology.

Getting such upgrades isn’t always easy. While Wolf Trap, which hosts 80 to 120 shows each summer season, competes with venues like Merriweather Post Pavilion and the Kennedy Center for concertgoers, it competes with sites like Yosemite and the White House for funding. Government higher-ups don’t always understand the need for improved stage flooring or energy-efficient lighting, Lewis says.

But despite those challenges, he’s grateful that being a federal employee means he gets plenty of comp time and vacation days to use during the slow winter months with his wife and three kids, when he can be the go-to dad, keeping the planetarium at their elementary school running and coaching them in baseball and soccer (even bringing them to College Park to see the Terps play those sports).

Now, his oldest, a senior at Penn State, looks ready to follow him into stage production—a hard but worthwhile path.

“I’m happiest in the theater,” Lewis says. “I’ve seen the most remarkable things over the years.”