Eugene Edward Lee

He liked to say that everything he was doing later, he had already done in the two theaters at Beloit Memorial High School.

Born in Beloit on March 9, 1939, he grew up in a house where his father acted in community plays and his mother worked backstage. His identical twin ran audiovisual at the new Beloit Memorial; Eugene lived in the theaters. He took BFAs from the Goodman School and Carnegie Mellon, left Yale Drama in 1967 without finishing, and that same year became resident designer at Trinity Repertory in Providence—more than a hundred shows until he died. Lorne Michaels hired him for the new NBC sketch show in 1975. Except for seasons six through ten (1980–85), when Michaels himself was gone, Lee designed SNL for decades, collecting six Emmys, building as many as a dozen sets in seven days, commuting from Rhode Island and sleeping at the Yale Club.

Broadway paid in Tonys: Candide (1974), Sweeney Todd (1979), and the green clockwork Oz of Wicked (2004), with its dragon over the proscenium. Yale mailed him the real MFA in 1986, after the first Tony, because a classmate wrote the letter. He died in Providence on February 6, 2023. Studio 8H was the job; the Memorial theaters were the start.