Margo says he appreciates the challenge of coordinating so many different aspects of putting a play together, as well as the chance to work and bond with talented people on all levels of a production.

“It’s not as though I’m toiling away unnoticed,” he says. “I’m not the guy who feels underappreciated ever.”

His recent work has gone the experimental route, most recently directing a production of Roberto Zucco in the Loeb Experimental Theatre.

“It’s something where I feel like I can pour a lot of time into it and I can learn so much and get so much out of it,” he says of directing. “In a way you have a really kind of grateful feeling towards the people that you’re working with…You’re so utterly dependent on them to make the thing good that when you’re happy with the work you find that you’ve really bonded with those people.”

In his rise through the ranks, Margo has in many ways blazed his own trail—a trail he says he is happy to see more and more younger students following. He praises Harvard’s theater community not so much for providing members with a set path to follow, but for making resources available to people looking to do “adventurous and entrepreneurial” productions.

A major accomplishment of his HRDC tenure was reinstating the Visiting Director Program, which Margo calls his greatest achievement and hopes will “end a ripple effect of new techniques into the community.”

In addition to his work with the HRDC, he has still found time for less high profile work, including the HSC, which he calls “a nice side thing to do.”

In 2002, on the encouragement of his roommate, he hastily cobbled together a production of a short play he had written, Kiddie Pool, which dealt with two insecure young men and their quest for the attentions of the fairer sex. “It’s just great to have the freedom and environment and a crew of people that you can call up to put up lights and…find a way to bust out a play in a week and a half,” he says.

Margo will return this summer to direct The House of Yes in the Loeb Ex. True to his meandering past, he says he has not decided what he will after he graduates in January. Theater, of course, is not off the table.

—Nathaniel A. Smith

ANTHONY S. CHEUNG ’04

Last weekend found Anthony S. Cheung ’04, this year’s recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, in Minnesota, where the state orchestra performed a piece he has been working on for the past two years. It was the first time he actually heard it played. “It’s the greatest feeling in the world to actually hear your music come to life in such away,” he writes in an e-mail.

The experience is not new for Cheung, who is also a Crimson editor. The Sudler Prize recognizes outstanding artistic talent and achievement in composition or performance, and over the past four years, Cheung has won a slew of awards for his compositions.

Cheung is part of the Harvard-Radcliffe Contemporary Music Ensemble, a group of composers and instrumentalists. “As a composer myself, it’s always a full-time job on top of the academic load,” he says.

Cheung began playing piano at six, and started composing shortly thereafter. He calls his first work “little imitations of the stuff I was learning, like sonatas in the style of Mozart or nocturnes.” When he was 12, he began learning with a composition teacher.