Drivin'

If theater set design requires a lot of driving, sometimes architectural design requires even more.

Off into the Scenic Ride for far, faaaar N. Texas!

Scale of Landscape

First thing to strike me as I drove around Dallas (two weeks in Europe, never drove - one day in Dallas, hafta drive!)... was how different the scales of Texas and the Netherlands are.

Both are horizontal landscapes (though not even Kansas is as flat as the Netherlands), but even large fields in Holland are defined by lines of tall, graceful, evenly spaced  trees that announce the landscape as human-made, while Texas' fields and range-land are vaster, the thirsty trees naturally scrubbier and lower, seeming more human-hacked-from-the-scrub than the garden of the Netherlands.  It feels like a long time since their land was wild... Texas could revert in a week.  (Dikes, however, suggest that Holland could be underwater any minute.)

Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland seem designed around walking distances, while Texas is designed around the car... more between-things distance and wide, wide streets.  Heck!  In front of my neighborhood is six lanes - I never even saw a Dutch highway that wide - most streets are one narrow lane plus a bike path each side that serves, when you meet another car, as an impromptu and exciting two lanes... add a couple bikes, a parked truck, and a nice brick wall, tree, or steel bollard...!

Amazing to see Dutch villages like Workum where brick house fronts sit on the street, but the rear walls - one room away - sit in pure country.  Corn at the window.  Our towns... straggle... tool-shedding themselves messily into a countryside of out-lying gas stations, wrecking yards, and billboards that straggle on for miles.  The Dutch civic crispness (I'd say European, except Paris definitely straggled) of city/country edge was sometimes breathtaking.

So was the tidiness and up-keep of a whole country.  If I were an antique building, I'd want to be Dutch.  If I lived in a Modern multifamily building I'd want it to be in Holland...  Our highrises could use a few petunias, I tell you.  I lost my heart to the hollyhocks that spring up out of tiny urban 2" plots to stand, floral sentries 6' tall, at doorways of quaint 17th century Zeeland cottages and brand-spanking-modern wharf-side Amsterdam townhouses.

Hollyhock image courtesy of vintageprintable.com

I wish hollyhocks grew here, but there's not enough water to make that work - it was 104 F yesterday.

I Love Theater People - They're Handy

A Set Designer kinda day.  More driving, this time I visited the stage and shop at TCU where my As You Like It set is being built.  The raked, twisted platform is built (looks and feels great!).  The stage right and stage left legs with their portals are built and up, making big upside down U shapes.  Trees are coming: I saw sono-tube trunks and cut foam branches.  I was very encouraged at the progress.

Then I walked to my car.  Dead.

Battery okay.  Gas okay.  No start, no sound, no click even.

Walked back to the theater for succor (in the form of internet searches for tow trucks etc.).  Instead I got a helpful and handy lighting designer who whacked my car with a hammer until it started.

Tomorrow I'll be visiting a different kind of "shop."  What a day.

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.