Set Designer's Life - First Read Through

This is a milestone in the actors' rehearsal process - the first time the cast reads the script together.  Everyone sits around a big table (or three pushed together, actually), so there's no movement really, no blocking or props or set, just words and voices.  Still, I'm always surprised by how much funnier or more touching a script becomes when it's spoken aloud.  In the Other Room: or the Vibrator Play is going to be much funnier than I expected.

Mostly I just listened - and made a few notes along the lines of, "Don't forget sink! Ask about candles - real or electric?" and "Hides behind piano - how?"  (My best such note ever, from a Designer Run rather than a Reading was: "Can't watch eyeball eating!!!"  No kidding.)

Image courtesy of http://www.wpclipart.com

Sometimes designers are invited to the First Read, sometimes not - most directors are glad to have designers visit anytime.  Last night, not only were designers there, there were both of the artistic directors and a few board members, which is a little unusual (Kitchen Dog often is).  We were celebrating: First Read Through of the first play of the new season!

Designer's Life - First Drafts

When the audience sees the sleekly finished design - of a set, building, pastry, or sneaker design - they never realize just how horrid the very first version was.  The awful early scribble.

Well, just to give you an idea, here are a couple nasty first drafts of a plan for The Vibrator Play... which will look nothing like this!

My first(ish) idea: well, that didn't work.  See the stair at center stage?  Doesn't fit.  Can't get up or down fast enough to get out of the way of, among other things, actor entrances or an existing building stair and ramp.  Plus lots of other problems.

Second(ish) try... fumbling attempts to move that stair.

The biggest difficulty for me yesterday in getting a working plan was the stage's exit ramp, which obtrudes deep into stage left.  With its necessary landing/entry area, it eats up a chunk of prime space in Kitchen Dog's black box theater.  That big arrow on the left?  The audience entrance - right through the set!  This is a tricky - though exciting - space.  And I think I've now got it licked.  Come to the show to see my sleight-of-hand plan solution!

A Better Example - Mark Twain's House

Less Gothic, more Stick Style, kinda Queen Anne... this looser style might suit the show.  Love the porch and gable end "sticks."  Mark Twain House and Museum

Designer's Life - Research

Research is one of the great joys.

I'm working on first sketches for In the Next Room: the Vibrator Play, by Sarah Ruhl, which starts Kitchen Dog Theater's new season.  It opens September 9th, so I better hurry!

But this morning I'm going back through my research for 1880.  The director and I are tempted by Craftsman Style, but that's a bit late, especially since a character would rarely live in a house built at their play's period; most of us live in houses a few or many years old.  So I'm leafing through a foot-high stack of architecture, interior design, and building detail books...

I refuse to design generic stage Victorian. (If I see another corner block...!)

But maybe Gothic Revival?  The sorta pick-up-stick Carpenter Gothic version?

image borrowed from Art History Housewife

Considered a very "moral" style in its day, it might set up a nice flutter of symbols with "modern" technology... and our contemporary attitudes.  We marvel at the characters' ignorance, but they saw this situation as a medical condition, not sex-life.  Sex, as we think of it, was not something... nice women thought about then, or admitted to thinking about anyway, or something.  Ignorance is very muddling.

The prop designer is finding fascinating early vibrators as part of her research.  Research is fun!  But not getting me closer to solving my technical problem at the end of the show...
Research?  Procrastination?