Jorge Cousineau, Philadelphia's theater magician

A tall, lanky guy spends long nights, sometimes past dawn, in the half-room he calls his workshop at his Northern Liberties home. He manipulates sound and light, gadgets and images, reality and illusion. Then he brings his effects, his video tricks and electronic magic, into a theater and takes your breath away.

His name is Jorge Cousineau (YORG KOO-zin-oh), and during a typical Philadelphia theater season he might be listed in programs for a dozen shows or more.

Cousineau has filled a set with recorded projections on large screens so that real actors could walk in and out of their virtual selves (New Paradise Laboratories' Fatebook). He has provided a rainy, tearful soundscape to suggest the interior rhythm of an entire play (Theatre Exile's Shining City); created three-screen video and sound design that transformed a live spoof of current events into a mixed-media delight (1812 Productions' This Is the Week That Is); splashed a stage floor with mesmerizing, moving geometrical patterns that set a precise mood between scenes (the Wilma Theater's Language Rooms).

For a family show called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, now at the Arden Theatre, he installed video into a mirror that makes it misbehave to such a degree that one kid in the audience cried out, "That mirror is cwazy!"

All the above is cwazy to anyone who can't figure out how it might be done, let alone conceived. And all the above has appeared here in just this season.

Several Philadelphia theater artists make at least part of their livelihoods creating special effects for the stage, but Cousineau, 39, is inarguably the regional stage's master wizard.

A native of Dresden, Germany, who as an art student rejected set design as uninteresting then later turned to it professionally, Cousineau has taken on so many aspects of stagecraft that he's hard to classify. He works variously as a video designer, sound designer, composer of music, production designer, and a general inventor of effects; for some shows, he is bits and pieces of all of these.

"I don't draw lines," Cousineau says. "I like very much not to live in one category." Pressed, he offers "self-employed freelance theatrical designer," which is far too vague to capture what he actually does.