Quick! One More Show!

I'm late getting this word out, but here it is:

By popular demand Fun House Theatre and Film has added one last show TONIGHT for A School Bus Named Desire.  Get yer ticket HERE.

And here's the thing (this question came up while talking up the show yesterday to adult actors), don't be fooled by the kids' theatre thing.  This is not a Shirley Temple experience, where the point is the cuteness of the children who act - this is acting, that necessarily is done by children.  The translation of the classic play A Streetcar Named Desire into its School Bus alter ego is clever - brilliant even and terrifically funny.  Translation makes the material suitable for children... but never cute-ifies it.  

 Why so late on the blogging?

Well, I was schlepping at Kitchen Dog at the Dumb Waiter build, then watching my Circle show, Lovers & Executioners open last night.  Another show well worth seeing! Plus, you know, sleeping, eating, car repair and stuff.  

But here it is children, your last chance to see the remarkable A School Bus Named Desire.

"They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, 

and transfer to one called Cemeteries,

and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!"

Tennessee Williams

A French Trend

It's been busy here at Scenic Central:

Fun House Theatre and Film opens their School Bus Named Desire tonight.

This clever reimagining stars the younger members of the kids-troupe.  Always interesting to work with these guys; Bren and Jeff are brilliant and the youngsters amazing.  Bonus of Dave Tenney as TD.  This design, for me, was an interesting mix of kindergarten classroom and the New Orleans of Blanche Dubois.  There's crayon work by cast members (Aa is for Alligator, Bb is for Beignet etc.), a playhouse modeled on French Quarter buildings overlooking Jackson Square (plus a slide), and a lotta midnight painting (because summer camp and rehearsals mean carpentry and painting only happen after 9:00 p.m.).  Well worth seeing.

Color study for A School Bus Named Desire at Fun House Theatre and Film

There's a definite French theme to my design lately.

Circle Theatre just Teched their production of Lovers & Executioners which is going to be wonderful.  Gorgeous costumes by director/designer Robin Armstrong, terrific cast, and a nice (I think) set of an 18th C town outside of Paris.  With working fountain.

Half finished carving for the fountain of Lovers & Executioners

Here's the fountain carving before it was painted - or mounted.  Homework for me and my snap-blade Olfa knife - that and the serrated bread knife from my kitchen.  The foam was leftover from an earlier show (hence the blue paint).  It's several hunks held together with wood skewers and white glue.

Fountain under construction, Lovers & Executioners

And here it is, primed and standing where it was intended to go.

Mostly built 17th C French Town set for Lovers & Executioners, Circle Theatre

This is the context photo: the rest of the town set when construction is nearly finished, but before scenic painting has advanced.  Great work by TD Rick Morrison and his team!

Actually, as I type, the carving's fate is a bit up in the air.  Seeing the Designer Run last night, I realized that action at the fountain means nothing as large (or fragile) as this carving can go in that location... Actors and scenery would obliterate each other.  

So I'm proposing the dolphino be raised to the top of the fountain - under the triangular pediment and above the tile - ornamental but out of the way, with only a soft, minimalist spout for water.  (Tile decoration will jazz that up.)  

But at this moment All is In Flux.

While that suspense (and the rest of the set) builds, here's a sketch of the finished set to hang on to:

Schematic design sketch for Lovers & Executioners, Circle Theatre - by Clare Floyd DeVries

ADDENDUM:  Want to see how it turned out?  Look HERE.

Creating the Romeo and Juliet Set

Not that I'm behind on progress pics or anything... but the Romeo and Juliet set has now been struck and I'm just now blogging the "Finished!" photos.  Sigh.  It's been busy here at Set Design Central.

What's been going on?

Well, reading new scripts - I and You to be produced at Circle Theatre in Fort Worth and The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas.  Starting to think through them and to sketch.  Building a white model for The Farnsworth Invention and presenting it to the Board of ICT for it's Main Stage production at the Irving Art Center.  Approved!  Now I need to start construction drawings.  Talking through lighting / possible-projection issues for WaterTower Theater's up-coming All My Sons - debating whether and what kind of model might help assess those.  (A SketchUp model may be coming.)  Projections will be part of Farnsworth too.  Need to start those construction drawings.  Oh!  And getting paid.  Always important.   And getting that pay to the bank and running model-material-gettin' errands... complicated by Dallas' current weird and icy weather.

(You Northerners shouldn't laugh too hard - remember, we don't have much in the way of salt trucks or plows in the usually-balmy South.)

Also starting the yearly struggle with Taxes.  Yeesh.

Busy.

But here are some R&J pics:

Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet - photo (and set) by Clare Floyd DeVries

Here you can see the full stage: Montague's tower on the left (SR), Capulet's tower on the right (SL).   Far left is the proscenium edge fountain, at center, an existing doorway dressed for the occasion plus a colonnade suggesting more town, gardens etc.

Following are (much better) pro photos by Chuck Marcelo (thank you!) showing how all this stage-set urbanism works as a background to the action.

Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet - photo by Chuck Marcelo

Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet - photo by Chuck Marcelo

Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet - photo by Chuck Marcelo

Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet - photo by Chuck Marcelo

Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet - photo by Chuck Marcelo

A really good show and a set I'm pretty happy with.  Thanks again to everyone who helped create it - and to Fun House for letting me play too.

There's one more blog post coming on this production - to show you shop in-process photos... as soon as the weather and my schedule allows me to go pick those up from the TD.  Meanwhile, here's a list of previous posts:

1)  "A Set Design from Scratch" - first post, with schematic design drawings and inspirational photo  HERE.
2)  The post that should have been first "First Steps" HERE with initial sketchbook doodles.
3) "R&J Construction Drawings" HERE, containing... guess!
4)  "A Valentine's Present" HERE, about finishing and opening.
5)  "Process Pics" HERE, with my photos from the theater.

Process Pics

As promised, a few progress pictures for Fun House Theatre and Film's production of Romeo and Juliet:

Here's my drafting board when just getting into construction documents.  Note the old-school actual hand-drawing tools.  At the top of the board is the schematic design sketch, below is the half finished construction plan being drawn on white tracing paper laid over the yellow trace of the schematic design plan.

I find it helpful to do early sketches on yellow trace.  For one thing, the blank paper doesn't look as blank so it's less intimidating to start thinking (and so I have to color in less), but there's also some evidence that the color yellow helps creative thinking... who knows why?  That, supposedly, is the reason sticky notes are yellow.  That or because yellow is easier to notice?

Below are photos from two stages of construction.  The top photo shows both towers mostly built, but incomplete around their bases.  In the second photo the angled "skirt" of the Capulet's tower has been added at the right.  On the left, the rest of the stones at the base of the Montague's tower are still in progress.  Please forgive the hideous work lights!

Set construction actually started in a remote shop - those photos to come - while in the theater space my kind helper and I started painting the upstage yellow "stucco" wall even before the previous set had been removed!  Though you can hardly see it in this view, I left some painted sky from that show in place... peeking over the top of a garden wall.

Below is the finished fountain at the stage right proscenium.  The rim/bench and sorta headstone pieces were built for this show, but the waterlilies came from a production of Madame Butterfly that never happened (in my garage for years!) and the decorative fountain head is leftover from another show (a keystone cobbled together from a Halloween mask and foam... but I forget for which show).  Notice the elaborate outer rim/bench then darker inner moldings, then inner rim, then small pool design?  

This developed because February is not yet kiddie-paddle-pool season.  No one could find the 36" diameter bucket I wanted.  A 22" diameter bucket we could find.  Yeesh.  As the carpenter had run out of time, this was a last minute scramble on my part, using an old circular "Texaco" sign from a show about Hank Williams (in my garage) cut into a donut using my tired scroll saw, plus $5 worth of fat pipe insulation, and all the greenery (in my garage) I hadn't already used elsewhere...

In the background you get a better view of the rocks at the base of the M's tower.  

A Valentines Present

It's wonderful when a show turns out as well as you hoped...

Fun House Theatre and Film's production of Romeo & Juliet is exactly that!

Buy tickets immediately.

Fun House Theatre and Film's production of Romeo and Juliet

photo Chuck Marcelo

My part, the set, turned out well.  But the kids'!  This is a lovely version of Shakespeare's classic romantic tragedy... particularly poignant because, for once, the leads are nearly the age of the characters.

This is not a review (how could I write one?  I'm head over heels into this production and this group of kids and adults) but I can say that all the actors did well, with several performances I think that could step onstage among any troupe of adults and hold their own, that the physicals like the sword fights are unexpectedly exciting and real-looking and the balcony climb touchingly youthfully exuberant.

On top of that, the production elements like the costumes were very effective.  I can't tell you how often a relatively rich theater has told me that they can't afford to do the Bard in period... yet this underfunded kids' troupe managed it beautifully.  (So there!)  These aren't accurate Elizabethan clothes, but rather suggestive ones.  Except for maybe one hat, they work great.  Color-coding the two rival houses works well at clarifying the action both for the children in the audience and for the adults.  I liked the live classical-music underscoring.

And speaking of effective on a low budget...  Our set, I just realized,  cost about 1/100th of the set presently onstage at the Dallas Theater Center.  Okay, that stage is twice as big and that musical has, I don't know, 20? times the number of settings...  Still a pretty good bang-for-buck bonus for this R&J.

A snapshot of Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet

Photo by... Alexandra Bonifield maybe?

In getting this show up and finished I've gotten behind in my blogging, but I promise to post construction photos and better "finished" photos in the next few days.

Thanks! to all my helpers - carpenters, painters, and faithful drudges - who make things possible.

First Steps...

But if I'm going to show the development of Fun House's Romeo and Juliet set I really need to show the rough sketches that come before the "pretty" drawing (that drawing a designer uses to persuade the director and producers that This Is The Set They Want!).  HERE is that "pretty" sketch.

Here are some of those rough sketches.

These particular doodles were done in the near dark of another theater - Stage West - during an interval in the Tech rehearsal for The Explorers Club.  (Now onstage in Addison at WaterTower Theater - get yer tickets!)

Designers often do overlap shows - have to really - there being not enough weekends in the year or dollars in the fees not to.  Besides, by the time Tech arrives the set designer's job ought to be largely done - now you're mostly checking for goofs, omissions, and minor issues like light leaks or ragged hems on sofas - so that, if things are going smoothly, you have some extra headroom to think about the next show.

So this pic?

Documents me thinkin' about the next show.  In these sketches I was trying to work out the texture of the two towers and whether a flare to the base of the Capulet's would look right... and how to support that balcony anyway...?

Preliminary sketches for Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet- 

by Clare Floyd DeVries in the theater of Stage West during Tech for The Explorers Club.

A Set Design From Scratch

I thought it might be interesting (or educational or something) to show the progress of one show's set design through all its phases, from beginning to end.

A while back I got hired by Fun House Theatre and Film to design their up-coming Romeo and Juliet.

This is a show I've long wanted to design.  I once came close: but was foiled when that other theater company changed to a different show.  Rats!  I had such a good idea too, I thought.  Now - finally! - this chance.  Happily for me, the nice folks at Fun House liked this long-frustrated idea...

I once visited the Italian town of San Gimignano, a medieval town so neighborly that pretty well every household built their own defensive tower.  Perfect! for the Montagues and Capulets.

San Gimignano - courtesy of Wikimedia HERE

I want to stage the play with each family both alike in the dignity of their own tower.  Today I showed Fun House these sketches:

A schematic design elevation for Fun House Theatre and Film's production of Romeo and Juliet - by Shakespeare, of course.

A schematic plan for Fun House Theatre and Film's Romeo and Juliet.

The towers are color coded - reddish colors for the Capulets, blueish for the Montagues, which is inspired by the costumes planned for this production.  The towers are meant to be very textural - built of rough stone, brick, shingles, sheet metal, scraps and scrounged materials, nothing highly anachronistic, but suggestive of the period rather than utterly correct.  (This is good from a budget and gettin'-it-done standpoint.  A "correct" production is difficult and expensive.)  An important detail will be the violets that I saw growing in the chinks of the real town's towers.

Reaction?

Approved to proceed!

The next step is to send copies of these loosey-goosey sketches on to the excellent scenic builder for him to consider while I whip up some fast construction drawings.

The show opens Valentines Day.  So get yer tickets!

I'll keep y'all in the loop. 

(BTW I reserve the copyright to this design of course.)

ADDENDUM:  HERE is a link to some of the rougher sketches that preceeded this "pretty" one.

ADDENDUM #2:  HERE is a later post that links to all the posts about creating this R&J set.

The Muse

I just found a funny - and quite true - video riff by Anna Akana on The Muses's role in your creativity:

"Your Inner Muse"

Oh, that Muse...  never around when you want her.  HERE's a Squidoo page I put together on creativity - it goes with the illustration below.

What else is going on?

I've read my next Circle Theatre script: Stella and Lou and am meeting the director soon to discuss the set design.  I've recently met with the folks at Fun House Theatre and Film about that next show, Stiff, which the amazing Jeff Swearingen is writing.

And I'm finishing up the first draft of my next theater book, The Green eBook of Sustainable Theater.  There will (eventually) be a paperback edition too... which I guess I'll have to title The Green Recycled-Paper-Book of Sustainable Theater?  I tell ya, the research for this is teaching me waaaaay more than I thought I knew about the topic.

Get Yer Tickets!

I've got four (count 'em 4!) shows worth seeing right now or very soon:

At Kitchen Dog Theater, Gidion's Knot, which has been getting really good reviews, running just through the 26th.  (Get tickets fast.)  This script raises some fascinating questions.

At Fun House Theatre and Film, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, opening tonight!  With only a short run also through the 26th.  It's going to be terrific, I think.  The kids (who are 99% of the cast) are amazing!  An Escher-ish set that I'm proud of.  (Still digging gray paint out from under my fingernails.)

Escher arches - believed public domain image

Opening soon at WaterTower Theater, the Dallas restaging of Circle Theatre's steamy-good Venus in Fur.  Opens the 27th and runs through May 18th.

And opening May 1st at Circle Theatre, The Other Place, which runs through the 24th.  An intriguing how-much-is-in-her-head? kind of piece.

Tickets! Tickets!  Get yer Tickets!