Towards Opening...

At Uptown Players (in that famous Frank Lloyd Wright theater the Kalita Humphries), the set for the Divine Sister is inching closer to completion.

It takes a Ton of Work by many, many people to get it there.

Oh, and at the same time - and often on the same square foot of stage with the clashing of ladders, lifts, buckets and whatnot - the actors, director, producers, light and sound and costume and prop designers, techs and stage hands, stage manager, interns, and volunteers are all equally busy.  Not on the set alone, but on the Whole Show.

Tons o' Work!  By Tons o' People!

The Crowd- believed public domain photo

I've working in and out of the theater every day for a week and will be there for the next several days too.

Nudges from the Future

Emails arrive reminding me of deadlines for Circle's next show.  (Secrets of a Soccer Mom just opened!  Go See!)  And of WaterTower Theatre's next show.  Time to reread, sketch, and meet with directors.

Set Designer's Day - Catch-Up!

Freshly back in town after a family-medical month away, today is filled with meetings.  If cloning were practical, three of me could be going to three different meetings tonight!

Instead, the lone single one of me will be in Addison this morning (after a trip to the copy place) to talk about The Diary of Anne Frank at WaterTower Theatre, then to Dallas at a production meeting for the B&W The Frequency of Death! for Pegasus tonight.  In between, I'll be reading and rereading Collapse and Ruth for Kitchen Dog Theater.  This week will include several more meetings and trying to sneak into some of this week's rehearsals for Ruth, as well as the usual-after-a-trip errands and Laundry Fest.

I've had able assistants while I was gone and did a lot of business remotely - thanks to email, scanning, and FedEx - but, inevitably, things do pile up while you're away.

Believed public domain image, messed with.

Set Designer's Day - Meetings

Funny how meetings seem to flock together.  Yesterday turned into a meeting day - and pretty much the whole day once I reread both scripts (Seven with One Blow or the Brave Little Kid  and The Diary of Anne Frank); added notes and questions to both scripts; doodled; and then actually, you know, met.

Public domain image

Fun meetings with both directors to talk through the plays, the acting space, and what the set needed to accomplish.  Now I'm full of bubbling ideas.

Which is a good thing, because I need to have sketches for Seven by Tuesday!

Set Designer's Day - Visit From the Future

Now and then you get a little nudge from the future - in the form of a call or email from a director or producer asking, "How's that design coming along?"

The play's opening may not be for months...  But the design is suddenly NOW!  It's that Time Shortage again.

The vintage blackboard calendar (public domain), courtesy of Happy Hearts at Home 

Set Designer's Day - Reading Scripts

An important - Critical! - part of a set designer's work is Reading the Script.

It's the basis for the entire production.

At the moment I have several scripts for future shows backlogged on the corner of my board (The Official READ THIS! Pile).  Eventually I get to feeling guilty enough and do, in fact, read them.

A designer reads a text in a strange way.  I like to read the play the first time as if reading a novel just for fun: following the plot, enjoying the talk, feeling the mood.  The second reading is for practicalities: doors, windows, intently looking for requirements (and problems) I'll need to meet with my set on this particular stage.

Then I like to let it rest at the back of my mind for a while - percolating - until it's time to design.

On top of my READ THIS! pile (printed out specially for this weekend when I intend to READ THESE!) is Seven in One Blow, an English style panto for Circle Theatre and Christmas.  I'm a little late starting this.  Just under that is Anne Frank for WaterTower Theatre.

Two scripts a little different in... um, every possible way.

Set Designer's Day - Full Time

Yesterday was a full day.

Most of the day was at Kitchen Dog finishing up In the Next Room: painting "snow"; stenciling around the doctor's exam room (a Frank Lloyd Wright stencil - uber cool); hanging portraits of famous doctors in the same room; and watching the rest of the team struggle with snow machines.  (Special effects = tricky.)

The evening was in Fort Worth at Circle Theatre at a production meeting and a run-through of The Fantasticks.  (Which will be charming.)  I missed lunch but got a 15 minute dinner.

On the long, late, dark drive home there were two big construction detours that got me lost and the car's CD player ate my parking lot ticket...

Today?  Drive that loop again for final-finishing at KD and meet-the-painter and furniture pull in FW.

Set Designer's (Endless) Day

Some days are looooooooong days.

Punch List

The run went well last night - ending at 10:00.  So this morning (a day off wahoo!) started with composing a loooong email punch-list of all the set items that still need doing.

Set Designer's Day - Paintin' the Stage

Today - in a couple minutes actually - I dash off to start painting the stage floor for In The Next Room.

The Doctor's office will be wood planks (ably played by slices of plywood), but the rest of the 200 acres or so of stage will be its own warped self with stage makeup by me, painting faux stone slabs.  Ever noticed how huuuuuge a stage is?  Get a bucket of paint and a roller on a pole and I promise you'll notice!

This painting-a-floor pic is borrowed from "How to Paint a Floor" at Young House Love

Set Designer's Day

This is a period of overlap.  Yesterday I was supposed to be painting on In the Next Room, but got hijacked by The Fantasticks with side swipes from The Frequency of Death.  Today will be much the same.  There's going to be a documentary made about the making of Frequency, the black & white mystery that opens on New Year's, and I'm supposed to have coffee with the filmmaker this morning... but I'm itching to paint on a different show... sigh.  Still, amid the clutter of Fantasticks' builder's and production meetings yesterday, at least I found a rug to borrow for In the Next Room!

Keeping shows straight in your head can get confusing, but luckily these productions are quite distinct in character and their sets are too, so that's not a problem.  But once I had two kitchen-sink style sets building simultaneously - with two kitchen sinks - and when questions came up then...!  Keeping these Victorian,  Minimal, and Black & White Deco designs straight is a piece o' cake!

public domain image - by Scheinwerferman

Set Designer's Day

The second day... of carving foam brick.

Of course, theoretically, a set designer just sketches a set wall and labels it "brick" and, voila! some handy craftsman in the scene shop creates brick.  Which assumes a scene shop and enough craftsmen with time to spare.

At a wealthy theater this might be vacu-form brick; at a less wealthy one, because vacu-form plastic brick is pricey, it'd be brick board from Home Depot.  Except (here comes The Designer's Curse!) I want more and different brick detail than I can get using brick board.  I want longer "Roman" bricks, special brick coursing other than the usual running bond, and I want brick soldier courses over the window and as an arch over the fireplace...

So I've spent a chunk of the last two days carving brick.

Fun.  But my feet and Xacto TM arm are tired.

Set Designer's Day - The Hunt

A big part of some shows is The Hunt - the search for the right furniture or architectural details.  If the play is set in a historic period, ordinary contemporary doors or furniture just won't work - not as-is - so you have to find real or seeming antique styles for... everything.  This hunt is complicated by the limits of a theatrical budget.

For In the Other Room, we need to suggest the late 1800s.  So the whole design team is huntin'; yesterday the builders and I went to the local Habitat for Humanity resale shop, the Restore - a fantastic resource! - where new and used building supplies are sold for less than retail prices.

Middling success.  We found great new, but old-fashioned, doors - but they still cost too much, so we decided on plain flat-slab doors for only $5 each, to which we'll add molding to suggest two-panel doors.  We found inexpensive brass and china handles to use in building the machine.  But no luck on a period light fixture.  (I'll go back to see if anything new comes in next week.)

Afterwards I hit thrift shops and found 2/3 of the weather vane I'm going to cobble together; I still need a metal bird.  More thrift stores today!  When possible, it's good to shop first at thrift stores that support non-profit charities: for one thing, they have the odd, used, random things a theater set needs, for another, your theater's money is used to support another non-profit and a worthy cause.

Oh!  And shop with a car or truck that can carry your finds.  We almost had to strap those doors on a car roof, but managed to cram them (mostly) into another vehicle, tied in place with computer cable!

Set Designer's Day - Research

I'm just starting on The Fantasticks for Circle Theater (if one show opens, the next starts).  I've read and noted the script - which I love - now I'm researching...

I don't usually look at earlier productions before I design - in case it over-influences me - but in this case the director wants to stay pretty close to the original production, so I've been looking at that.  I've also looked at  the touring productions.  Over-produced, I think.  Mind you, I understand exactly the problem the designers of those touring shows had: how to make this intimate show fill the usual huge venues on the road.  Fortunately, Circle's small space doesn't present that problem.  (Ha!  Circle's ceiling is only this high.)

Now I'm doing a little research on Commedia dell'Arte, the renaissance era Italian comedy troupes which much influenced this show.

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?

Collaboration

I had a really productive, collaborative meeting with a director the other day... working out the design for Circle Theatre's production of Becky's New Car.  Rare.  Really rare.  Here's a link to an earlier post on what (I think) is needed to achieve it.

This fun meeting was held at my house, because my ride refused to start.  Again!  (Link to that saga, for those interested.)  But boy did my Firestone dealer - which installed the faulty starter - respond well!  I was very impressed.  I mean, I had three guys from the shop on my driveway almost instantly and a fixed-for-free car back on my drive same day.  Amazing.

This vehicular hitch delayed me visiting Tech on As You Like It until the next day: the production is going to be beautiful I think (acting and design "beautiful").

It also delayed my shopping for fabrics for Five Woman Wearing the Same Dress.  For that we email-ordered an actual Laura Ashley bedspread.  Now that that's arrived I'm trying to find a coordinating striped fabric for "wallpaper"... but these late '80s early '90s colors are out of style, so I'm having a hard time.  Today's blues are tinged with green, while this is a pretty pure blue-blue.  And the director and producers prefer a buttery yellow to an egg-yolk-y one, also an unfashionable choice.  The two colors together?   Aaaargh!

I've worked through all my favorite fabric shops - more fabric shopping today.

Today's Lesson Children?

Don't step off the ladder into the paint bucket.

Ha!

You always think you'll be all visiting-designer-y, standing back, directing, clean... but then you grab a screw gun and... by the end of the evening I was cutting Styrafoam with a jigsaw (fun) and had polystyrene-bead snow in my hair.  (And in my ears and down my... everywhere!)

Set Design Day

The last few days have been full of hands-on set design stuff.

Wednesday I was at Broadway Our Way's theater, painting giant circles on a curved wall, using the old trick of chalk tied on a string taped to the wall: pivot that chalk and - voila! - perfect(ish) circle.  I pogo-ed up and down with the lift to reach the tops of the circles.  Painting them took time as did setting locations for hanging a few more cut-out versions, which meant sitting way back in the auditorium shouting, "Six inches toward centerstage!" to the poor guy then in the lift, as he tied knots.

Yesterday my Apprentice came over.  We looked over his latest project and upholstered a bench seat for Marvin's Room and traced out flamingos on bright pink felt.  (I love the weird jobs theater hands out.)  We also made an emergency bead-curtain-run.  After Broadway's TD searched much of town, the beads came from a funny Mom-n-Pop dollar store near me.  I had to take what they had in stock, rather than my first choice color, but we'll spray paint 'em, so that's okay.

flamingo image by Audubon, public domain I believe