Production Meeting Weirdness

Last night's meeting was mostly about vomit.

Seriously.

Producing the play The God of Carnage means dealing with the special effect of one actress becoming ill... aaaallll over the set and costumes.  Which means inventing and making fake sick which both looks realistic yet won't cause the entire audience to turn green.  And then cleaning that up.  Twice on Saturdays.  Lots of laundry and clean-up!

I know one local theater (cough-cough) that didn't quite get the clean-up right for the first few performances leading to a Plague of Gnats! in the theater.  The solution required both professional pest control and then steam cleaning every night.

Ick.

All this is mainly a technical problem for props and stage management - plus an acting challenge - but this special effect also effects the set (carpet? No thanks!) and the costumes (dry cleaning?  Please no!).  Disguising the mechanism for spewing the ick requires collaboration between sets and props and possibly costumes in its camouflage.

So we had a loooong discussion.  Recipes for fake-sick were handed around.  Really.  Kinda the New Year's rebuttal to all those Christmas cookie recipe swaps, huh?

Actually, we laughed quite a lot.

That's us... when we're NOT laughing.  A ridiculously solemn moment... 

as  I suck on my pen thoughtfully, apparently.  Sigh.  Photo courtesy of Circle Theatre

Could be worse: I once worked on a production of Blasted.  (That play, as far as I'm concerned is a sorta dare-ya for how-much-theatrical-ick-can-you-take?)  That production meeting involved a lot of technical discussion about dead babies.  (Fake ones obviously!)  Not ONE joke was cracked.

If you read my how-to set design book Alice Through the Proscenium there's a funny version of me watching the designer run for Blasted while peeking through my fingers.

Not a Review: God of Carnage

I saw the Dallas Theater Center's latest show, God of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza.

God of Carnage poster from the Dallas Theater Center

A good production, as you'd expect, with good performances by four actors (three with strong ties to my home theater Kitchen Dog).

The play itself?  Not a big fan.

I mean it was OKAY.  Held my interest and was intermittently funny.

But the idea of two well-off couples meeting in a drawing room - until  politeness descends to mankind's innate savagery and that drawing room is trashed - is not exactly a new idea.  In fact, I'm sick of it.  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or The Goat (which I got to design) have the same veneer-of-civilization-cracking, but dialogue is sharper, emotions more visceral and savage, and there's a specificity and point to the conflict that God of Carnage's scuffling school boy story just doesn't generate.

About those school boys.  I understand the playwright's point is that we're all selfish creatures at heart - making even mother-love a shallow thing - but I don't buy that either mother could be so unfocused on her kid.  Despite the actresses' best efforts, the script doesn't allow much depth of feeling or motherly defensiveness.  The fathers are worse.  Now, if the playwright wanted to prove parental selfishness, what I would believe is the classic version, where the parent is protective in a tribal rather than affection-for-that-individual-kid way and narcissism shows in the self-congratulatory martyrdom many mothers are famous for.  That I'd believe.  This?  No.

It's an awful fast decent into savagery too.

And really?  Must one actress vomit on stage?  We live in a crude age (just look at popular comedy movies) and the vomit scene does make a huge impact onstage... but it's a cheap thrill.  So is coarse language.  Writers who want to be seen as "edgy" seem to feel it's obligatory.  But no one is shocked anymore.  Really.  The laughs coarse language gets are cheap laughs.  (Just as the garter belt in my own Boeing, Boeing gets cheap laughs.  Have playwrights, directors, and producers so little pride?  Silly question.)

So.  Not a big fan of the play.

The set?  The set showcases the obligatory African art - Africa is mentioned in the text and it underlines the primitive emotions.  I'm not sure about the color scheme: bright reds and sky blues, plus earthy browns and oranges.  An early set sketch of John Arnone's was printed in the program (great idea!  thanks).  I preferred that version, where the reds and oranges were more integrated, rather than contrasted as in the finished set.  I'm not sure if this was a deliberate change in focus - to emphasize conflict - or an unfortunate change made for pragmatic reasons, since the revised version is a simpler and thus a cheaper build.  For me, the bright red commanding fireplace - crowned by African art and ivory tusks - is another stage-y cheap thrill.  Which makes me wonder whether Mr. Arnone wasn't sending-up his own show a bit, creating a satirically cartoonish setting for this cartoonish story.

I'd have been tempted.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment, after hearing that this was a Tony-winning play by a "hot" playwright etc., was that I didn't hear any memorable, quotable, or clever lines.  The hamster story is worth repeating, but otherwise, zip.

Lady Bracknell (who knew her way around a drawing room) would have had something politely savage to say about that lack.  Since I can't remember a line from God of Carnage, here's one from The Importance of Being Earnest:

"To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?" 


Behind the Scenes Note: The unfortunate digestive movement onstage has led, I'm told, to a plague of gnats in the theater.  Attracted by the moisture and... well, by whatever the heck else was "vomited" and not well enough cleaned up.

The exterminator had to be called in.

Living Playwrights

As a theater set designer I've been lucky enough to get to work on several plays-in-progress with several actual breathing playwrights.

Strangely enough, they don't usually say much more to me about sets for their shows than the dead ones do.

This is partly because the playwright writes into their script whatever they feel strongly about as a scenic element - and then whatever doors or furniture the writer envisions are required or implied by the play's action.  The "look" and the details for any particular production are then left to the director's and designer's discretion.

Even when a living playwright is in rehearsals and actively rewriting the play, they seldom make much comment on the proposed set as it's being designed and discussed.  The set is still in the director's purview.  The etiquette, I suppose, is that if the playwright really hates something scenic, they'll have a quiet word with the director, who might pass on the criticism to the designer.

Generally the only opinion I hear from the playwright is praise at the Opening...  Mostly this has sounded sincere, I think.  Once in a while it's clear that the playwright is genuinely thrilled by a production and maybe the set too: that's wonderful.

Kitchen Dog Theater - where I'm a company member - specializes in new works, so I've been especially fortunate to work on world premiers, to sit in on read-throughs and rehearsals, and to talk with several real live playwrights!  Right now I'm working on the new play Ruth, whose playwright is also a company member.  It's fascinating to hear back-story and author's reasoning or intent for things in the script.

The occasionally difficult part of having a living playwright - from the designer's point of view - can be that sometimes, in modifying this work-in-progress-play, the writer will change or add locations.

Savvy playwrights have a good notion of what's feasible to put on stage (at the likely budget) and they'd never add a new, scenicly demanding location late in the process, but I was once startled by one who told the theater company the script had changed (they didn't realize it was being revised!) and a big scene had been added: a character spontaneously combusting in a brand-new-to-us outhouse!

My whole set (a complete house with swamp) had to shift stage left in a hurry to make room for this exploding outhouse.

It was a cool effect though.

Color sketch for the set at WaterTower Theater

See the stand of reeds on the far left of the drawing? (Stage right.) That's where the outhouse ended up.

The actress (the "bad" sister) went into the rustic outhouse; spontaneously combusted, with flame-colored light and smoke leaking from the plank door; came out again, now looking ashy and wearing a singed feather boa; met the Devil (in a nice suit) on a little bridge over the swamp, whose water lit redly and bubbled as if boiling (a very cool effect); and was led away, protesting comically.  

Funny stuff. I didn't mind moving the set for it.

(How'd we "boil" the swamp?  Easy.  Red pool lights and a garden soaker hose - the kind with tiny holes in it - through which air was pumped.)