Meet Peter Farr

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Peter Farr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Peter with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

I’ve had the incredible fortune of sharing creative space and work space with some of the most tenacious, considerate, clever, and hard working folks a person could cross paths with. I learned from a young age from a variety of experiences what it truly means to ensure the show goes on, as it must. How to ceaselessly work and leave exhaustion for the wee hours of the morning, and continue building and crafting later the same day. How to try things out for the sake of trying them out, allow failures to happen, and wind up discovering something even better as a result. How to communicate in highly detailed ways, and other times in more efficient and effective ways while more encapsulating than a simple or singular idea. The complexity of live production and art requires both modes of communication. How to take initiative and attempt to learn something daunting or completely unfamiliar, and allow initial and core principles to reveal and inform further applications that strengthen the overall ability. The two places and core experiences that gave me all of the above at the highest level were working with Third Rail Projects in Denver, Colorado as a creative and performer, behind-the-scenes of some of their shows in New York, and working as the production stage manager for Dan White, the creator and star of The Magician, produced by theory11. My greatest teachers through tons of thick and thin experiences were the stage managers, production managers, the artistic directors, and fellow performers – Brittany Crowell, Jack Cummins, Elizabeth Carena, Edward Rice, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, Lia Bonfilio, Zach Morris, Tom Pearson, Jennine Willett-Millman, and Dan White.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I first fell in love with immersive and experiential theatre while finishing out my high school years at Denver School of the Arts. In our junior year, we took a trip to New York City to meet with colleges and preliminarily plan for college auditions – I had heard of a show called Sleep No More and was smitten after attending for the first time in 2014. Then in 2015, in my senior year of high school, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts cast me and my best friend in an immersive and side-show-esque depiction of Hansel and Gretel, surrounding the illusionist and mentalist Professor Phelyx – my best friend and I playing the ghosts of brothers who met their demise with the witch – leading audiences through their own experience of the world while performing duets in aerial dance trapeze. That show then led to joining the extension cast of Sweet & Lucky presented by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts – conceived and created by Zach Morris and the Third Rail Projects NYC team in the summer after my first year studying my BFA in Acting at the Guthrie Theater’s / University of Minnesota program. Upon moving to New York in the summer of 2019, my sole intention was to continue pursuit of experiential performance and production that continues to break down the fourth wall and all pre-conceived and traditional conceptions of theatre, and share stories or experiences in more intimate, immediate, and tangible ways with audiences. I quickly joined Third Rail Projects behind-the-scenes for their A Midsummer Night’s Dream production called “Midsummer: A Banquet” as the go-between stage management and the kitchen that produced and served 138 audience members 3 courses of food, drink, and dessert for each show. In a full circle moment, I then joined the run-crew / stage management team of Sleep No More, right up until the pandemic. Once we began coming out of a tumultuous couple of years, the former Third Rail Projects Production Manager (Brittany Crowell) got me in touch with the theory11 team to join Dan White’s remounting of his incredibly successful magic show “The Magician”, which ran for over 1,000 performances at the NoMad Hotel prior to March, 2020, after which he created and regularly performed an incredible virtual show over Zoom which still ships out boxes worldwide pertinent to the experience to this day. What I thought would be a temporary stage management job has now become a 400+ show run at 281 Park Avenue South (formerly the Fotografiska Museum), of which I am proudly the Production Stage Manager and have had so many learning curves about successful and long-running productions – so many things revealed to me that I was previously highly unqualified for that it leaves me speechless. Now in the latter half of my 20’s, I look to the future with excitement to design, create, and program my own immersive and experiential theatre productions, with the LLC I started back in 2022 shortly before joining The Magician. Keep an eye out for Littlebird Projects productions in the future, and in the meantime you can find me at every single performance of The Magician – tickets to the virtual and live shows may be found at www.themagicianonline.com.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Time management, curiosity or initiative, and compassion. There’s something to be said for the person who steps up, asks, and is willing to do just about anything for a job or area of work they currently find themselves in. From that, remembering that “work begets work”. It is important to balance intentionality with ambition and eagerness to work. Difficult decisions will come to everyone as we can only be in one place at a time. From that, trust that wherever you end up, you were meant to be there. Even while imposter syndrome creeps in, even when it’s very challenging and you have every reason to quit, even as you make mistakes or miss the mark on things that were expected of you. As you hone and develop those qualities for yourself, you open yourself to offering and extending the same to others, and that kind of understanding, appreciation, and safety is deeply needed in our world today.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am looking for people curious and passionate about creating new and alternative forms of theater that get away from traditional audience and performer relationships that offer direct (both scripted and improvised) interactions while maintaining core narrative, plot, and character structures. I’m looking for writers, directors, fellow performers, set designers, audio engineers, and lighting designers. I can be reached at [email protected], or @peter.i.d.farr on Instagram.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @peter.i.d.farr

Image Credits

Claire Talbott, Dan White, Brittany Vicars.