Tom Mardikes and the Sound Design MFA program began an annual association with the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival (HASF) in 1994. This free summer festival was founded by Marilyn Strauss in 1993 and takes place in South Moreland Park in Kansas City, Missouri. Bruce Levitt became Artistic Director in 1997 and increased the number of productions produced each year from one to two. Attendance in 1993 was 12,000 and had grown to 38,000 by 1999.

Tom Mardikes and Greg Mackender have created music and sound for most of the festival's productions. Bob Beck has served as sound engineer since 1994. Each summer two sound design graduate students work on the festival with Mardikes, Mackender and Beck as sound operators and assistant sound designers.

With a cast of up to 15 actors speaking lines in a hostile outdoor environment, a different sound design strategy is required than when doing a Shakespeare in a 600-700 seast enclosed theatre. As many as 3800 people can attend the HASF on any given night.

Our responsibilities include, first and foremost, dialogue reinforcement. Trained professional actors are barely able to project 50 feet off into the audience, and many voices barely make it off of the stage. People may sit as far away as 250'. If the audience hears clearly, they will stay with the production, so voice reinforcement takes precedence over any creative effort with music and sound we might add.

We provide a time-aligned distributed system of about 24 loudspeakers throughout the park. We use primarily stage floor miking techniques with Crown PCC160 microphones. We might use a couple of wireless microphones on principals, but mostly cover all areas of the stage with as many as 13 microphones, each to be used at one time or another. The trick is to mix the show actively, where the mic mixer knows the blocking and the actor lines, and opens only one or two mics at a time. The two person operating crew divides the duties of running mics for one show and running sound cues from minidiscs and samplers for the second show.