Donald B. Crabs

Donald Crabs was a UCLA professor who specialized in theater and theater design. Crabs was born in 1926 in Puyallup, Washington. He studied scenery and lighting design, receiving his B.A. degree from the University of Puget Sound in 1950 and his M.A. from Northwestern University in 1951. He also completed graduate studies in television and film at the University of Michigan and New York University in 1965 and 1960, respectively. Between 1951 and 1965 Crabs taught at Rutgers University. He moved to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA in 1965.

Crabs specialized in scenic and lighting design, contemporary theater design, historic development of the playhouse, and production management. He served as a professor and later chair of UCLA’s Department of Theater Arts (1965-1991), now known as the School of Theater, Film, and Television. He designed more than 150 productions for UCLA, including No Place to Be Somebody, A Chorus Line, Skin of Our Teeth, Troilus and Cressida, and Baal, among others. Crabs also did theater planning and equipment consultations for a number of facilities such as the Doolittle Theater in Hollywood, CA, and the Olive Grove Dinner Theater in Westlake, CA. He also completed a survey of performance facilities in California, included in his California Theater Index 1971. This index was intended to facilitate the exploration of computer storage and database solutions for theater and architecture data. In 1990 he received a lecture and research grant for the UC Education Abroad Program in China, where he delivered a lecture series at the Shanghai Theater Academy titled Theatrical Lighting Theory and Practice in the United States. Crabs passed away in Los Angeles on January 26, 2012.