Important artists take risks, and Peter Smeal is always willing to chance a needle piercing his lower lip or a matte-cutting blade slicing his fingers.

“There’s not a single show I’ve done here where I haven’t left a bit of my blood onstage,” he says of his work at Children’s Theatre of Charlotte. “I’ve burned myself on so many glue guns that I’m immune to heat. like a cook, I can grab something hot and flip it over and hardly notice the pain.”

He greets you from a bench in his workroom at ImaginOn with a question: “Mind if I work while we talk?” Then, with a needle dangling from his mouth like one of Humphrey Bogart’s cigarettes in “The big Sleep,” he lays broad-fingered hands on a lump of cloth and begins to sew.

I found him making pieces for “The Borrowers,” which opens Friday. He won’t be onstage for that show, in which a group of tiny people living below the floorboards of a house have to enter the vast human world above them. But his oversized props will shine.

Smeal could be Charlotte’s best-kept theatrical secret, outside his small circle of peers.

He earned the William E. Rackley Award for Technical Excellence at the 2009 Metrolina Theatre Awards. He won best director of a comedy (for Collaborative Arts’ “Incorruptible”) last year at MTA and has frequently been nominated as an actor or a technician.

Yet for all the acclaim, he hesitates when you ask what he’s proudest of in his career.

“I look at my work and see the details, the grit in it,” he replies. “I see the hundred mistakes I’ve made, and it always amazes me when people say they like it. (Artistic director) Alan Poindexter has been a champion of the props department, and I credit a lot of our success to the costumers and designers. I’m sort of the middle ground between them.

“I’m less of an originator than an expander: I have creative ideas, but I do best when I can take someone else’s vision and help them expand on it.”

Perfectionist at work

Smeal (rhymes with “teal”) has achieved the kind of professional security at 37 that few local theater people find: He has worked full time since 2004 for the company with Charlotte’s largest theater budget.

But he’s so busy at CTC that he remains creatively lopsided: He acts roughly once a year, usually in the summer – most recently in “August: Osage County” at Carolina Actors Studio Theatre – and has directed just two full-length plays in a decade in Charlotte.

Ask about personal relationships, and he sighs, “No time for those. I do have two cats, an older one named Gus and a little kitten, Peanuts. I love dogs, but I don’t have the space for them right now – or the time.”

Elise Wilkinson, Collaborative Arts’ co-founder, has worked with Smeal on six plays since 2007, five of them by Shakespeare. she says he’s “a perfectionist with a strong work ethic: Children’s Theatre made a commitment to him, and he’s made one back. He’s in such demand there that it’s difficult to get access to him when they’re in season. And he wants to do everything at a high level of quality, so he won’t take on a project unless he can give it 110 percent.

“He has some of the best skills in town for interpreting Shakespeare. He puts so much time and thought into roles that it can frustrate him if he feels he’s missing something (in his portrayal). He’s incredibly smart, and the challenge for smart people is that they keep pushing themselves.”

Like a lot of theatrical folks, Smeal knew as far back as college how he wanted to earn a living. Family moves bounced him from bayou Louisiana to Rock Hill to Pascagoula, Miss., as a boy, and he ended up at tiny William Carey College in Hattiesburg, Miss.

“The theater department was so small – nine majors, when I started there – that I got an amazing comprehensive education,” he says. “You were in the shows, designed, directed, hung lights and sold tickets.

“Obra Quave ran the department and steeped us in the traditional approach: lots of Stanislavsky and Stella Adler. His big thing was that there was no star system. you didn’t matter; the ensemble did. Billing was alphabetical. Nobody took solo bows; there was a tableau at the end. I didn’t realize other people didn’t get this training, so I was always amazed when I saw other types of behavior later.”

And, like many theatrical folks, he stumbled in and out of other jobs. His low points? Selling posters of Michael Jordan door-to-door and working at a pharmaceutical plant, compounding generic drugs: “I put on this yellow-orange jumpsuit, a hairnet and booties to go into a sealed room in this gray cinderblock building. when I came home, I’d dig acetaminophen out of my pockets and get pill dust out of my hair.”

A man of many parts

Smeal followed two theatrical friends to Charlotte, working with cutting-edge groups that are now extinct: Barebones, Chickspeare and others. He started at Children’s Theatre in September 2001 and has never left that company.

He went through “a big burnout last summer, where I didn’t want to do anything. I was really sour about theater. But I took time off to work on personal projects, including a book that’s a collection of pieces – postcards, stories, letters I’ve never sent, pop-up elements – created with one person in mind, a pen pal I’ve had for 20 years. I’ve never told her about it, and I’ve worked on this for a long time.” He smiles. “Maybe she’ll see it someday.”

That book typifies the man who created it: diverse, private, full of unexpected traits. a conversation with him can range from mathematics and physics – he has a tattoo of phi, symbol of the Golden Ratio used in designs, on his right bicep – to the guitar he never learned to play. (“I have music in my soul. I just don’t have it in my fingers.”)

Curiosity moves him in all directions. Perhaps that’s why his creations for kids succeed.

“For children, reality is very fluid,” he says. “It changes constantly. And for the artist, that same ability – to look at things as they could be, rather than as they are – is important. The world is what we make it.”

He gives props to Children’s Theatre

Tags: borrowers, fingered hands, imaginon, peers, sleep

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