Blase E. Ur '07

When Blase E. Ur ’07 logs into Amazon.com, the Web site’s recommendation feature normally offers him a variety of computer programming books and DVDs about snakes. Why? The former Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) President and life-long techie once synthesized footage from “The Miracle of Life” and snake films for a Harvard production—a female character was giving birth to a reptile, and Ur wanted to shoot for verisimilitude.

During his time at Harvard, Ur has also built a giant pirate ship, an enchanted forest that turns into Hell, an asylum made of glass, and a house on fire. He has worked on the technical aspects of nearly 50 plays, including sets, lights, sound, and video. For his behind-the-scenes artistic contributions, he recently won the Louise Donovan Award, the Office of the Art’s nod to an “unsung hero” of the arts.

Wearing a black Rutgers engineering shirt, the hardest working man in Harvard showbiz explains that if his mother and sister had never dragged him to various theatre productions, HRDC may never have benefited from his work.

“When I was in middle school, my mom and my sister were both involved in plays, and they got tired of me sitting at home, playing on the computer all the time,” Ur recalls. “So they said, ‘No more staying on the computer playing video games. You’re coming and you’re helping out.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to act or sing or dance or anything.’ So they said, ‘Okay, you can go build the set.’”

Ur soon discovered the camaraderie that comes from working backstage with other people on dramatic productions, and especially enjoyed forming relationships with the older, cooler kids, he says. “They used to get paid for doing tech, and when you’re 14, the idea of getting paid for playing with lights is really cool,” he says.

The theatre scene in Ur’s Edison, New Jersey high school was student-driven. “It was just a bunch of 14, 15, 16 year-old kids who’d always try and find a teacher who would be a director of a play, and we’d kind of come in and just play with power tools by ourselves,” says Ur. “Which, in hindsight, was a giant lawsuit waiting to happen.”

At Harvard, Ur was hesitant to involve himself in the theater community, but taking note from his freshman roommate, decided to check things out. “Somehow from kinda not getting involved turned into a zillion plays,” he recalls.

Ur found the same student-driven motivation at the HRDC, but with more self-direction and more funding than his high school. Surrounded by inspiring, like-minded people and given numerous resources, Ur blossomed creatively. He started designing sets himself rather than following directions from others.

“I’ve always been kind of the closet computer hacker, engineer wannabe,” he says. “Being here really encouraged me to get more involved in the artistic side.”

“Rather than like, ‘Hey let me see what someone else wants me to build and go see how to build it,’ here it’s like, ‘Based on this play, we want the audience to feel this.’ And so, bazzaaam!” says Ur, gesturing grandly, before explaining how to spell the final word of the sentence.

Ur’s personal “bazzaaam” has impressed a lot of people, and he was elected as HRDC president during his junior year. Traditionally, actors have served as the presidents, but both Ur’s predecessor and successor are techies.

Ur has a theory about that shift: “We [techies] are so used to thinking of the arts in an infrastructural way, thinking about how to make stuff happen. I guess we make good administrators.”

A computer science concentrator, Ur says that the problem-solving abilities he has gained from his studies and experience have enhanced the productions he’s worked on and made him a better president. “That gave me a real detail-oriented approach to theater,” he says.

“You find a problem—like we need the audience to feel this, or the actors need to be able to go from here to there really fast, or a tree to come flying on stage and not kill anyone,” he says. “It let me think a lot about the details and solve problems that go on a scale outside of tiny electronics.”

Next year, Ur will apply his technical knowledge on an even bigger scale: the real world.

He’ll be working with high schoolers as program coordinator for the Governor’s School of Engineering at Rutgers University. He also plans on starting a band, and helping out with tech on local productions.

But a career in theater is not in the stars for Ur, he says: “My first love really comes down to engineering and solving problems and building things and working with kids.”