Lifting two cats to kitty heaven on a flying tire is hard enough on a multimillion dollar Broadway stage.

But doing it in some of the smallest theaters in the world is even harder.

Raymond G. Huessy '74 does it for a living.

A set designer, Huessy has adapted some of Broadway's most spectacular sets to the spaces of smaller theaters for touring productions.

"I'm sort of a human Xerox machine," Huessy says of working with elements of the set. "The same pictures, the same amount of feeling, without the same amount of space, bulk and time."

He often faces some interesting artistic challenges. Besides the flying tire in the finale of "Cats," Huessy had to land a helicopter onstage in "Miss Saigon" and lower a fully furnished mansion to the stage in "Sunset Boulevard."

The sets he constructs have to be simple enough to load into a theater in a matter of hours and sturdy enough to travel cross-country in the back of a truck.

"What I do really is sleight of hand," he says. "Making it look like you've got 10 pounds in a five-pound bag."

Huessey learned the tricks of the trade during his years at Harvard, where he worked on numerous theater projects, including Leverett House musicals and the Gilbert and Sullivan Company.

He was also the first non-professional set designer for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals show in six years.

Besides a set designer, Huessy was a graphic designer, a director and an actor ("In retrospect, I guess not a very good one," he jokes) at Harvard. He often assumed numerous roles at the same time--he was an designer, director and actor in a Leverett House production of "Patience."

Huessy also wanted to be a writer, but changed his mind "somewhere along the line," he says.

"There were too many other people writing the great American novel," he says.

During his undergraduate years, Huessy lived in cooperative housing on Sacramento Street and was affiliated with Dudley House.

He described the living conditions as modest, at best.