Some people in the theater are born to it, while others end up there almost accidentally. Lance Brett Hall parlayed an interest in the stage into a full-time passion and creative outlet at Cornell.

Robert Barker/University Photography

Lance Brett Hall in the Kiplinger Theatre of Cornell's Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

Hall graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 2001, went to school in Germany for a year on a U.S. Congress-German Bundestag Scholarship, and came to Cornell as a College Scholar, beginning a self-designed course of study. By the end of his junior year, after various acting, directing and box office jobs, he had decided to pursue a theater arts degree.

"I always had an interest in theater, and I had almost all the requirements for the major," he says. "The scales tipped once I did the assistant stage management requirement" -- with "Five Women Wearing the Same Dress," in February 2005, which he followed with the role of Claudius in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead."

During his freshman year, Hall had a small part in Bertolt Brecht's "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui," directed by his mentor, Schwartz Center artistic director and professor David Feldshuh. Hall acted in summer stock in 2004 in his hometown of Princeton, Ill., and was assistant box office manager at the Schwartz Center in 2004-05.

He directed his first play, the early Chekhov comedy "The Bear," in October 2004 in the Schwartz Center's Black Box Theatre.

He also worked on the main stage as assistant director and acting coach on Brecht's "The Good Person of Setzuan" and on the 1930s musical "The Cradle Will Rock."

"The facilities here are really top-notch," he says. "You can use a lot of the resources, and the staff will advise you if they have the time. And the Black Box is really flexible -- you can be as conservative or as wild as you want."

In March, he directed actress Barrie Kreinik '07 in Risley Theatre, in "Ithaca, When Physics Changed My Life," an original monologue by Cornell alumna Victoria Wolfe '81.

"In Risley it was really just me and a couple of students willing to help me, which mimics the real world of theater right out of school," Hall says. "You're the lighting designer, the stage manager; you do everything."

"The Impossible Concert," staged in the Black Box in November 2005, is "the work I'm most proud of," Hall says. "It was improvised in rehearsal. The actors set down dialogue, and I brought in short stories and myths, and we worked on these based on puppets and masks I had made. It was a lot of fun to see what the actors could come up with and what I could come up with."

After commencement, Hall will work as children's theater director and assistant director at the Millbrook Playhouse in Mill Hall, Pa., and he is looking at offers of box office work in Chicago theaters.

"It seems like everyone else is going to New York," Hall says. "I'm going in the other direction."

Chicago also puts him closer to home and another ongoing interest -- traditional woodworking.

"That's one thing I couldn't get squeezed in around classes," he says. "During the summer my dad and I always have one project or another. As wonderful as acting and theater work is, it's so ethereal. It's always good to work with your hands and have something you can touch."