Striking

Yesterday was strike for two of my shows The Frequency of Death and The Diary of Anne Frank.

For the set designer this mostly means collecting your junk off the sets... before some eager stage hand tosses it in the dumpster.  (This has happened.)  So I drove first to Lewisville to collect picture frames, flowers, assorted black & white tchotchkes, and two borrowed chairs, drove those chairs back to their owner-theater in Addison, and there picked up my few bits of set dressing from that show.  Then drove to Dallas to paint on the rapidly-up-coming Collapse.

Lotso drivin'.

Here are a few pics of the Frequency strike:

The Frequency of Death strike, Pegasus Theatre at the Lewisville Grand

Stage left, starting to disassemble wall flats - See the bucket?  Roof leak!

The sad shambles... See the once elegant chandelier, grounded.

Art Break

One of the great advantages of designing a show for Kitchen Dog at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary is that you can take Art Breaks in the galleries.

There's a wonderful show right now with an installation by Eric Eley.  The artist's information talks about camouflage - which I understand - but I think his sculpture would make a wonderful set for The Tempest!  It's as if Prospero laid all his salvaged ship's rigging, and fishing nets perhaps, out to dry on those old fashioned umbrella-style laundry lines...  Fantastic!  Beautiful.  Casting fascinating shadows.

Photo borrowed from Eric Eley's website  

Come see this intriguing art show at the MAC and see Collapse too - opens Friday.

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.

Ladder Work

Collapse is getting ready for Tech - in fact today is Dry Tech, when the director and lighting and sound designers talk through things.  So today I'm scenic painting fast-fast-fast.  The big item?

The big highway bridge.  There's an important scene on the bridge... so we've built one leg of it and hope to suggest the rest.

Which means that today I get to paint the 15' high bridge leg: some from on top, leaning over and down; some from the theater's lift (if I can get it over there); some from a tall ladder (if I can get help moving it); some from the ground using a roller and the longest pole; some while sitting on the ground.

Naturally this is not simple flat-color-painting like your living room wall - it needs to be rich and varied in color, attempting to suggest concrete.  So I'll be mostly scumbling, which is where you slap several shades of paint together to blend and modify them.  (More on scumbling HERE.)  Gotta run!

Homework

On many shows there are little jobs that the set designer may bring home to work on.

For the up-coming Collapse, it's been painting: a coffee shop sign, a condo sign, and now a coffee table top.

When hunting for furniture on a low budget, you're very much at the mercy of what you can find.  This time it appears that the sofa we'll end up borrowing is more of a love seat, which means all the other furniture will need to be a bit reduced in scale too.  So our coffee table will be a smallish Danish modern piece.  It's a nice little table... with the totally wrong top.  (Red.  Floral.  Wrong.)  So I'm repainting it to look like that '50s - '70s tile medley of white and Scandinavian blues and greens that was so popular.  It's looking good so far.  The finishing touch (when my typing and its drying are done) will be to put gloss medium (a sort of varnish) just on the tiles.  Under stage lights the painted "tile" will glisten but the "grout" will not - totally selling this illusion!

Believed public domain photo

Squidoo Up-Date

Just added a lot of new information to my Squidoo page Theater Set Questions Answered, so I thought I'd spread the word.  Don't forget to visit my other set pages: 3 Ways to Improve Your Theater Set and, 3 More Ways to... um, you guess.

A photo from the Frequency of Death build given TaDa! to public domain

Chihuly Exhibit Coming

...To the Dallas Arboretum!

I'm a big fan of Dale Chihuly's colorful glass sculptures.

Years ago he exhibited his glass at the Venice Biennial and I would have loved to have seen his twisting, sea-weedy glass tendrils suspended and reflected in Venice's canals...  So I'll try to be first at the garden gate to see his work hung among the trees of Dallas' most beautiful park.

Image of Chihuly chandelier borrowed from Current.org

Weather

A set designer spends so much time driving and hauling junk around that a pour-down-rainy day like today can be a real inconvenience.

Multiple public domain images, messed with

I'm scheduled to pull furniture from a theater warehouse.  I'll go, but now it'll only be to look.  Because a sofa just will not fit into my car and the guy-with-the-pickup-truck (everyone should know one of these useful folk!)... Well, a sofa in a pickup in the rain?  Not good.