Arts & Culture
In Memoriam: Norvid Jenkins Roos, Professor Emeritus, Theatre Arts
Norvid Roos taught at UCSC from 1975-2003, helping establish the then new Theatre Arts Program which melded dance, drama and design.
Norvid Roos taught at UCSC from 1975-2003, helping establish the then new Theatre Arts Program which melded dance, drama and design.
Norvid Jenkins Roos (1941-2025), Professor Emeritus of Theater Arts (now Performance, Play, and Design), died November 18, 2025. Roos taught at UCSC from 1975-2003, helping establish the then new Theatre Arts Program which melded dance, drama and design. Prior to his arrival in Santa Cruz, he taught at New York University and designed for The Electric Company, a 1970s PBS offering by Children’s Television Workshop. He collaborated with his wife, costume designer and UCSC professor Elaine Yokoyama Roos (1945-2022) to initiate the UCSC design curriculum.
Roos was important in launching Shakespeare Santa Cruz as a center of innovation in American Shakespeare production. He was chief designer as the company was being established on campus under Theater Arts faculty member Professor Audrey Stanley. Roos worked regularly with major directors and choreographers at top companies including Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Tandy Beal & Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, and Empire State Youth Theatre Institute.). Theater critics routinely praised his stunning visual designs for capturing the world of a play.
Writing about a Shakespeare Santa Cruz Hamlet (1985) the director set in the Regan Era’s consumerist excess, theatre critic Judith Dunbar noted: “Designer Norvid Jenkins Roos made the world of Hamlet immediately recognizable through signs of upper-class status, power, prestige-American equivalents of royalty … The stately white mansion … came to seem a whited sepulchre, … a summer country estate for a royal family, the White House, the Kennedy compound.”
Bradford Clark (Cowell, 1977), one of Roos early design students who now teaches design at Bowling Green State University, said of Roos, “He remains my favorite scenic designer. He had the rare ability to elegantly envision spaces while utilizing the sensibilities of both a painter and a sculptor. And his incredible curiosity . . . led to some of my very favorite designs. A Twelfth Night based upon Japanese puzzle box parquet work! A charred Globe Theatre with an actual freaking helicopter (sans motor) crashed into it!”
That crashed helicopter confronted audiences in the UCSC Shakespeare glen for Henry IV, I (1984) which transposed Shakespeare’s English civil war tale to the Vietnam War era: a hippie Prince Hal (played by Paul Whitworth) was rebelling against the Military-Industrialist mindset of his king-father. Roos’ set visualized the clash of destructive and constructive forces in late twentieth century American culture.
Tony nominated designer Constanza Romero (Porter, 1985) who created designs for many of her Pulitzer-prize winning husband August Wilson’s plays, remembered studying with both Norvid and Elain Roos in the 1980s: “What I found at UC Santa Cruz was a place where I could be myself and expand my wings and learn from scratch” (quoted by Peggy Townsend, UC Santa Cruz Magazine, Oct. 2021).
Nationally recognized choreographer and longtime UCSC Dance lecturer Tandy Beal remembers one of many collaborations on a professional productions: “When I was commissioned to make a work for Oakland Ballet, I called Norvid and Elaine right away so we could dream together. … I felt the time crunch, the pressure of it being The National Choreography Project. … At a certain moment, Norvid started cracking silly jokes.” When she reprimanded, he remined her “the only way your creativity blooms is if you have a light heart, … then you have fluidity,” Beal noted, adding “I never forgot this revelation.”