If you’ve ever come across Montana Hamel ’26, you’d know that spotting them is easy. From their red, layered hair to their instinctively composed aesthetic, Montana is gloriously distinctive. That same aesthetic isn’t just stitched into their everyday clothes; it mirrors how she makes art: intuitively, instinctively, expressively.
Before joining community theatre in high school, Montana trained in ballet for years — the “typical route,” as she calls it. With that experience, she danced in “West Side Story,” rediscovering a thrill for acting within them since kindergarten, when she played a munchkin in “The Wizard of Oz.” Over time, their creative practice widened. Now she performs, stage manages, directs, paints, and plays guitar. “Everything that I do informs something else creative that I also do,” she told me.
Yet no one would have guessed that when she arrived at Swarthmore, she would step away from theatre entirely. The pandemic halted productions, and she hadn’t planned to return — until she found herself backstage in the Spring 2024 production “At the Wedding.” There, Jules Kyung-Lee Zacheis ’24, the show’s stage manager, saw what Montana couldn’t yet articulate.
“Montana, you need to be a stage manager,” Jules told them.
Montana laughed as she recalled it. “I’d only done one [assistant stage manager] job in high school … I hadn’t thought about it again until she encouraged me.”
With that spark, her theatre journey at Swarthmore officially began. Stage management taught them how to track a room. “I’m just a constant observer,” she said, noting how actors respond to different notes, how directors shape energy, and how a rehearsal breathes. Their habit of watching closely became the quiet foundation of her artistry.
Directing came later, almost inevitably. After serving as an outside eye, she wondered what it would mean to create, rather than simply document rehearsals. “I wanted to be involved in the more artistic aspect of theatre,” she said. “Being on stage just wasn’t where my interests were anymore.” Directing offered the exact blend she’d been orbiting: combining stage management with the imaginative world-building she craved.
That fusion is obvious in their process. Montana’s detail-oriented eye guides how she tracks scenes to how she builds documents and conceives space. You’d be surprised, as I was, to hear them admit, “I’ve probably read [the script for her recent project] upward of twenty times.” She doesn’t just read: Montana annotates, mapping each character’s path and their shifting relationships.
The meticulous labor of doing script analysis may sound technical. But for Montana, directing begins with intuition: a feeling, a pulse, and a sense of where the story wants to go, long before she can articulate it.
“There’s usually something I feel before I understand it,” she said. “A song, or a feeling, something tenuous I can’t really grasp until I put it into a physical form.” That inspiration shifts with their instincts on every project. While devising a piece last semester, she began pulling from Butoh and Laban analysis; both are dance movements that “really exaggerate the human form.” For other works, she thinks more visually. “I’ve been inspired by Impressionism lately — capturing the vibe or feeling of a moment,” she said. Sometimes the origin is something she can’t name until she paints it, writes it, or places it in the rehearsal room. She guides her work less by rules and more by sparks of abstract interests she follows until they become real.
“Everything that I do informs something else creative that I also do.”
That same openness guides Montana when choosing their next projects. She described the play she’s directing next spring, “Pomona” by Alistair McDowall, as “gross, gritty, dark, confronting traumatic things, but also beautiful and about connection.” For Montana, the play stirred thoughts about “the transactional nature of living in a capitalist society” and how modern life strips away autonomy. “I didn’t go looking for a script about those things,” she said, “but it awoke something I didn’t know I was thinking about.”
From these realizations, both past and present, Montana’s thematic interests emerge. Calmly, she admitted their inspiration comes from “darkness,” just as casually as she’d get a morning coffee. Montana’s drawn to what many avoid: the unsettling, the grotesque, the intimate, and the uncomfortable. “There’s so much desensitization now,” she said. “Theatre forces you to witness things you’d normally look away from.” She’s fascinated by how theatre holds audiences inside those confrontations. “If you take a traumatic experience and make something out of it, even if it’s ugly, you’ve given it a life separate from you,” she said. “That can be healing.” She paused. “I don’t know if it resolves anything. I think it heals more than it resolves.”
As she looks ahead to its challenges and discoveries, Montana offered reflective advice: “Just create. There’s no such thing as bad art. If you have an idea, if something compels you, you’re an artist.”
Readers remember: the play’s world is constantly forming. In a subtle turn, the room fills with an energy that moves it from rehearsal to life.
