Caring About Characters

One critic wrote of Horton Foote's The Traveling Lady as "old fashioned."  True - compared to Dividing the Estate.  One place this shows is that, while characters in Estate are amusing and life-like, they feel more like performances.  I'm not quibbling actors' technique here (which was excellent) but a presentational quality written into the characters.  Whereas, even with comic exaggeration, characters in Traveling Lady are more life-sized somehow.  Much more sympathetic.  In an age of anti-heroes and cynicism, that makes them very old fashioned indeed!

Proof?  Days after seeing Traveling Lady, my theater companion asked whether, in the 1950s, a respectable lady would go off in a car with a man (the kindly Slim) she'd only known a few days.  We discussed this, deciding that, yes, in Georgette's dire circumstances she would.  Her young daughter would seem a respectable enough chaperon.  We bet Slim would work and save to help pay for Georgette's divorce and they'd marry as soon as the decree arrived.  I think they'll be happy.  Meanwhile, I hope Sitter Mavis doesn't regret not learning to dance too often and that Mr Tillman is speaking to his wife again.

Think anyone left the theater after Estate worrying whether the family's oil well comes in?

First Review Is In

The Traveling Lady opened last night (a good show, I thought, more on that later).  This morning the first review is online, from the Dallas Morning News.  A good one.

As a designer - anyone in theater - you try to develop a thick hide.  You must.  I'm lucky that I've never been afflicted with terrible nerves, so I can usually sit through Opening Night stolidly, only cringing a little when I spot a gap in the masking or whatever.  (My friend Wade paced the lobby.  I do miss Wade.)  But it IS a relief to have a first review positive, some slight shock absorber for whatever jolt comes next.  Best if the good one is from a major source, though I'm glad to have a good opinion from anyone!  Grateful.  But, say, the Tony committee's opinion would count more, in a worldly way, than my Mom's.  (Sorry Mom.)  Still, the insulative qualities of one good review are sometimes insufficient to cushion the next blow... take my word for this.  So I'm still braced.

The sad part about reviews - once you recover from the elation, hurt feelings, outrage, or delight  - is that it colors all the rest of that show.  If you suffered during the process, that is soothed a bit by the flung roses of a triumph; if you're trashed in review, then however proud you feel of the work, it's roses turning brown.

Reviews mess with your head.

Opening!

The Traveling Lady opens tonight at WaterTower Theatre.  Sold out - even I don't have a seat.  Even the director doesn't have a seat!  So buy tickets for later in the run - they're selling fast.  It's a good show.

Set Design Field Trip

My apprentice and I are off in the car today (into the wind, rain, and lightning!) off for adventures... a field trip.

First stop the copy place to reproduce drawings (okay, second stop, I'm sure to be low on gas), then WaterTower Theater to look at the environmental set (whose grass, the performance report says, needs re-stapling) for The Traveling Lady, then to Fort Worth to talk about the next set there, Marvin's Room.  Afterwards Mexican food and some educational bumming around.  Possibly fabric stores.  Fun stuff.

Weeding

I dragged home last night, filthy, tired, scratched, with paint ground into both hands, sore fingers, and faux dirt deep under every fingernail... I had so much fun!

Yesterday was the day I "weeded" my Traveling Lady set at WaterTower.  Being theater, this was not pulling weeds, but adding them.

The carpenters and painters did a beautiful job of building topography.  There are several methods.  Theirs was to construct plywood shelves whose wriggly edge followed topo lines on my drawings (an architect thing, we draw topography, like the US Geologic Survey, as contour lines).  These shelves had chicken wire bent over them to get rid of the cloth-draped-over-a-table phenomenon, then faux grass laid over and stapled in place.  Joy!  The good grass, the expensive grass, the stuff I think of as "Barney Grass" because the first I used (still in my garage) was a discarded scrap from the Barney show.  (They got budgets in TV.)  This looked good except...

Well, the new boughten grass was the bleached tan I'd specified, the wheat-straw color of an early Texas spring.  To cut costs, a 10' x 20' swath was only rented (rental grass? theater's weird), the rest bought so we could cut it.  To further cut costs, we used scrap grass from earlier shows.  This grass was bright bright radioactive green.  So we painted the grass.  (How Alice in Wonderland.)  Tan onto green to tone the green down and merge the pieces until it looked like winter grass greening up at the lower, wetter areas of the landscape - at cemetery and where the stage's "yard" tumbled toward the audience and an imaginary creek.  The painting turned out well except...

There was a shadow line where the "lawn" lay, tablecloth-like, on top of the hillside grass.

So yesterday I planted weeds and ivy and, oh, 50+ daffodils.  These hide seams in the grass, tie house to yard, fill out gardens and hedges, and (minor point) warn actors where it's not safe to step!  Other than the grass and one 10' high fake ficus I'd lugged across the whole theater building days before, every stick and leaf was placed yesterday.  There are real stones, pea gravel, dead leaves from the parking lot, lots of silk foliage, faux dirt (sawdust with stage makeup), and branches from the TD's yard.  Fireflies!  (Ask the lighting guys about them.)

The point?  To set the play's time and place: early spring, 1950s, east Texas.  Daffodils and buds announce spring; period flower pots and tools (and house, oh yeah!) explain '50s; and plant choices, tan grass especially, suggest Texas.  3D foliage creates a fore- and middle-ground garden for the actors in front of stylized cut-out plywood trees and, further back, a cut-out tree-line against the sky.  (Where the lighting designer makes magic sunsets.)

Today I'm a little sore, but pretty happy.

(Oops - photo courtesy of Jeff Camp, TD  at WaterTower Theatre.  Thanks!)