Huessy, 'Human Xerox Machine,' Duplicates the World for the Stage

Lifting two cats to kitty heaven on a flying tire is hard enough on a multimillion dollar Broadway stage.

But doing it in some of the smallest theaters in the world is even harder.

Raymond G. Huessy '74 does it for a living.

A set designer, Huessy has adapted some of Broadway's most spectacular sets to the spaces of smaller theaters for touring productions.

"I'm sort of a human Xerox machine," Huessy says of working with elements of the set. "The same pictures, the same amount of feeling, without the same amount of space, bulk and time."

He often faces some interesting artistic challenges. Besides the flying tire in the finale of "Cats," Huessy had to land a helicopter onstage in "Miss Saigon" and lower a fully furnished mansion to the stage in "Sunset Boulevard."

The sets he constructs have to be simple enough to load into a theater in a matter of hours and sturdy enough to travel cross-country in the back of a truck.

"What I do really is sleight of hand," he says. "Making it look like you've got 10 pounds in a five-pound bag."

Huessey learned the tricks of the trade during his years at Harvard, where he worked on numerous theater projects, including Leverett House musicals and the Gilbert and Sullivan Company.

He was also the first non-professional set designer for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals show in six years.

Besides a set designer, Huessy was a graphic designer, a director and an actor ("In retrospect, I guess not a very good one," he jokes) at Harvard. He often assumed numerous roles at the same time--he was an designer, director and actor in a Leverett House production of "Patience."

Huessy also wanted to be a writer, but changed his mind "somewhere along the line," he says.

"There were too many other people writing the great American novel," he says.

During his undergraduate years, Huessy lived in cooperative housing on Sacramento Street and was affiliated with Dudley House.

He described the living conditions as modest, at best.

"My freshman roommate used to say that the only thing holding the building up was the cockroaches holding hands," he says.

In keeping with Harvard tradition, the students in the co-op named the buildings after past Harvard presidents. The building where they ate was named Eaton House. For sleep, they turned to Hoar House.

"Sophomoric humor is often generated by sophomore students," Huessy says.

Some of his fondest Harvard memories come from cooking for over 80 people at the annual Dudley House banquets.

His culinary ambitions were not too lofty, though--he donned the chef's hat at Dudley because "I'd much rather cook than clean up."

One year, Huessy and the other chefs came running out of the kitchen during the meal, shouting the Burger King theme song: "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us!"

And a food fight with "particularly unappetizing cheesecake" broke out during a speech by Loeb University Professor Emeritus Archibald Cox '34, who was discussing his involvement with the Watergate saga.

Though he cherishes his days of launching cheesecake, Huessy says he regrets some academic choices he made at Harvard.

Most of all, he says he regrets that he never took a course with a "Harvard luminary."

"I don't think in many ways I took advantage of being at Harvard at all," he says.

In his biography which appeared in the program for the 1974 Pudding show, "Keep Your Pantheon," Huessy joked that his academic difficulties were all part of a larger design.

"Only after his arrival at Harvard could he hope to fulfill his lifelong ambition--the complete subjugation of his academic career to that least proper of all muses," he wrote in the biography.

And he still remembers Harvard best for some of his less academic pursuits.

"My real major was extracurricular activities," he says.

"I could tell you every detail of all the shows I worked on, but I'm not sure of all the classes I took," he adds.

After Harvard, Huessy traveled for a year in Berlin before attending graduate school in theater design at New York University.

"I spent the year trying to talk myself out of going into the theater and I lost," he says.

He says his friends and classmates won't be surprised to hear that his career has kept him near the stage.

"They'd probably be a lot less surprised than I was when it finally happened," he says.