Catch Up Post

It's been a very busy spring and summer - and I did not keep up with it at all in blogging! - so here's a grab bag of what-I-did-this-summer-ness:

And Wow! did I not blog a lot!  

1)  Let's start with listing the shows I worked on after Murrow:  Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper for Echo Theatre at Dallas' Bath House Cultural Center, Herbitts, Wizards, and Borks! Oh My! at Pocket Sandwich Theatre, the musical Matilda for KWC, and Sherlock Holmes and the Elusive Ear at Stage West Theatre.  I also acted as a mentor for their Design Apprenticeship Program, which involved three student designed in-house shows.  So... lots.

2)  Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper -

This is the kind of biographical play that required a simple, adaptable set that could frame many locations and times.  Our solution was a series of simple stretched fabric panels (very similar to Murrow's).  The big scenic moment was the "wallpaper" scene, when the troubled protagonist struggles with her perception of a sinister figure behind the pattern of the wallpaper.

The only scenic trickery in this show was the hidden wallpaper pattern - strands of leafy ribbon under the stretched fabric, seen only when that panel was backlit - and the real paper the actress could tear - an unnoticed top layer of stretched over the fabric.

3)  Sherlock Holmes and the Elusive Ear -

What a terrific assignment, to design Sherlock Holmes' legendary 221B Baker Street apartment!  The script described red wallpaper... my version of his apartment played up red to the hilt.

Normally I'd have wanted more rugs, but because of the sword fight! an open floor was needed.  The wallpaper is created using three shades of red paint and custom stencils.  My scenic painter did beautiful wallpaper and even more beautiful wood grain.

One important note:  this set will reappear for the next two years for sequels to the entertaining play so the design had to work for being struck and stored.  One consequence is that, in the red wallpaper, a darker vertical stripe was added to help downplay vertical joints between flats, which we couldn't tape over or float out with drywall mud.  

3)  Matilda -

A big fun musical!  With a big fun mostly-kid cast!  

This is the only photo I have, mostly because I had to miss the final-final set dressing and the performances... because some one of those big fun mostly-kid cast (or crew or designers or...) shared their covid with me!  

(A "light" case thank goodness, of the did I-swallow-broken-glass? variation of covid.)

Here are a few paint elevations:

Phew!  I'll talk about Herbitts in the next post.

Too Cool for This World

 A fun new You Tube video from my buddy AstrophagyMC  HERE

While coviding here at home for the last couple weeks (yeesh) I've been playing a lot of Minecraft.  This vid doesn't show much of my work, but it does show the fun of the world our team has been working on, most lately on a city named Ptolith.  And this particular build in the vid is the city's crown, the Time Temple.  (The Biiiig circle at bottom left on this map.)

The city of Ptolith - in the world of Aenoriia

imagined by AstrophagyMC and his team

Huge fun... and something like Folk-Terraforming?  Outsider-City-Planning?  Amateur (mostly) Architecture?  I think we're edging into Art territory now...

Story Telling

From my first show this spring, finally a photo showing the projections.

 An earlier post on building this show HERE.

It's Been THAT Long?

I've been... busy?

Building the Tower of Babel 

Sorry.  It really has been  a crazy busy year so far - 5 shows of my own (the last one opening next week) and 3 shows and apprentices to cheer on.  Plus, y'know, life stuff.

But I break my radio silence to share this very good video on Environmental Design.   A phrase developed in game and theme park design, but very much what good theater set design and film production design also do.  Enjoy!  (And more posts more often coming soon.)

Trope Talk: Environmental Design

 

 

Volume of Internet Stuff

 In aid of getting out the word about my new second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium I ended up just, y'know, ego-surfing... to see what pops on the internet when I type in my name or catchy phrases like "Clare DeVries theater book" and like that.

As one does.

In that surfing I found (like notes in a bottle) photos I'd never seen of a show I designed last spring for Tarrant College SE, The Volume of Smoke:

Photos I believe are by its multi-talented director Brad McEntire

Alice Through the Proscenium - Second Edition is OUT!

 

Toot-toot-toot!

Finally!  My second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium is for sale.  (I'm still wrestling with distribution through Amazon etc. but the publisher is now, um, publishing.)

Alice Through the Proscenium - Second Edition Clare Floyd DeVries

This updated and expanded edition adds a new Case Study, following the full process of Kitchen Dog Theater's production of Alabaster by Audrey Cefaly.  I've also added information on topics I knew little about when writing the first edition, like all the various proscenium stage drapes or working with projections.  This new version includes color photos so is a bit more expensive (sorry), but I'm keeping the older, skinnier, cheaper version alive for the desperately budget-pinched.  

(One nice side effect of including a few color photos though is that now the hand-drawn color wheel illustration is in color!  Woah!)

You can buy Alice 2 at the Lulu Publishing bookstore HERE.

Side note: On Monday I was very excited to receive from The Live Theatre League of Tarrant County an award for Design and Technical Excellence!  Really pleased!

But, in introducing me, my introducer (another thrill, because it was the very distinguished Harry Parker, who said nice things) also told the world that Alice's second edition is OUT! 

Addendum: In his introduction he urged the audience to buy it, saying, "It's funny and I learned things."  Which, frankly, should be on the book's dust jacket... if it had a dust jacket... 

Eclipse Load-In

 

The load-in for Murrow into the Dallas Opera's Hamon Hall was also the day of the total solar eclipse in Dallas.  

Inside, we worked on unloading set materials, assembling the TD's cleverly pre-cut and labeled parts for the fabric frames and stretching muslin over them, trimming, touchup painting, and hanging the fabric panels.

Just after one o'clock we broke to go out and join the sun watchers outside.  

The Arts District was interesting during the eclipse: there was a band and a small crowd of people on the lawn of the park.  (I got the impression that most locals had been discouraged from gathering by all the warnings about terrible traffic etc.)  But this was a happy, chattery small crowd.  Little kids ran through the splash fountain.  A trailer sold hamburgers (and a bar sold "Tequilla Sunrises" ha!).  

Luckily the clouds broke for the totality which was breathtakingly strange.  Once I looked away from that black disc moon with white WHITE light ring around it, I could see all the little lighting usually washed out by daylight... the hamburger truck was a beacon - a lighthouse! - and all the lights inside lobbies or offices glowed amazingly ... then quickly faded from view as the sun uncovered.  Strange and beautiful.

Then we went back in to work. 

This is just after the Eclipse Break (every show should have one!), when we were starting to hang the first panel.  The Hall has a beautiful and super fancy fly-in lighting grid... though we ended up using a lift as well.

And here's the almost final result (under work lights), just before we added the black skirts to the platforms:

Set for Murrow - design & photos by Clare Floyd DeVries

(Mind you, I kinda dislike skirts on platforms because they evoke convention booths, but they are fast, effective, and free so I'll live with them.)

"Know Thyself"... If You Can

I found this musing on Socrates' old advice today... It's surprisingly hard to "know thyself."  

From an article by Maria Popova at The Marginalian HERE :

“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” 

The article goes on to say:

"Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons."

As often, thanks to artist/writer Austin Kleon for bringing this to my attention!

(Following the chain of references starting from Kleon, through E. E. Cummings, led me eventually to this quote from Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney: “being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”

"Know Thyself" but in Latin 

What's been going on?  Well, I've been crazy busy designing and drawing several shows and mentoring a talented group of early-career scenic designers.  I don't feel free to post those designs yet (I like audiences to be surprised), but two of them are seemingly very simple, mostly screens to play on with light and images, but one is Sherlock Holmes' famous 221B Baker Street apartment, and another is the musical Matilda.

Links to earlier blog posts on Matilda HERE and HERE from when I visited NYC, saw the show on Broadway, and was lucky enough to hear its Tony-winning set designer, Rob Howell, talk about it.