Jeffrey Dennstaedt, the technical director of Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, helped bring magic to the design of the theater's new home, as well as to its plays.
Dennstaedt, who began working at the Guthrie in 2001, died on Feb. 5 at his Minneapolis home of an undetermined illness. He was 47.
"The smoothness of how the new building works is largely due to his tireless efforts," said his supervisor, production director Frank Butler.
Butler said Dennstaedt was consulted in the design of the new Guthrie so that all the technical needs for play production could be met on three stages. As technical director, Dennstaedt would coordinate with backstage and onstage crew, and have budget and set-construction responsibilities.
Dennstaedt played key roles in building the undulating stage floor that represents the waves of the ocean in the current production of "Peer Gynt", and the dense forest in the play, "The Home Place," earlier this season.
"We made ourselves a dense forest, a really intense, a fight-your-way-through-the-jungle forest," said Butler. "He gave us the tools to meet a higher level of excellence," said Adriane Heflin, an assistant technical director who reported to Dennstaedt. "No matter how wild the request was, he found a way to meet it."
In the early 1980s, he graduated from Baltimore's Towson State University and became a freelance set designer. By the mid-1980s, he had earned his master of fine arts degree at Yale University. Next came a stint at the University of Virginia's theater arts program in Charlottesville. After serving as a technical director for the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N. J., he joined the Guthrie.
He was an animal lover, scuba diver and avid bicyclist, said his mother, Marlene Dennstaedt of Baltimore.
