How To Pick Stage Furniture

After spending a few hours yesterday debating furniture with a director and prop designer, it occurs to me that it might help to explain what goes into choosing furniture for use onstage.

There are several equally important considerations to juggle:

1)  Sturdiness - A chair or sofa onset has to survive.  Depending on the script and blocking, an actor may jump on that sofa, commit murder in that rocking chair, or dance on that coffee table.  You need good communication between director and designers so everyone knows what this furniture needs to do.

2)  Shape and Size - Maybe an actor needs to hide behind this sofa, so you want a high back.  Or maybe it's imperative the sofa not hide important business behind it, so it needs a low back.  Know which!  Likewise, you may need a round table to allow flexible seating around it or a very small one because space is cramped.  For story-telling reasons you may want an extra big and pompous desk... so big and pompous you need to build it.

3)  Style and Color - The "look" of furniture onstage is important, since it will reinforce (or undermine) the scenic design.  Hard to pretend this palace is in the 18th century if that chair screams 1978's avocado green!  (Did Louis XIV even have an over-stuffed corduroy Lazy-Boy recliner back then?)  One vital question when borrowing is always, "Can I paint or reupholster this?"

4)  Availability - Is-it-possible-ness includes both the ability to borrow and the budget to buy, build, or reupholster.  This is the problem with happily sketching The Perfect Sofa into your scenic design.  The director will love it... but you'll never ever find it.

For this play we looked first through Kitchen Dog's stock of furniture and photos of other pieces from the homes of Dogs, but nothing was quite right as the "hero" rocking chair of The Beauty Queen of Leenane

So yesterday the director, prop designer, and I visited another theater's warehouse to pull furniture.  Among the pickup truck plus one small SUV and a car's worth of stuff we picked, we also debated which of three wood rocking chairs would best suit the show: one was Colonial (of the gracefully curved head and dowel-back type)  in faux mahogany; another was more rustic and straight-lined with a "pickled" finish, but with a too Texas-porch-looking slatted seat; and the third was a classic blond Bentwood rocker.  All were sturdy.

I nixed the Bentwood immediately as too '60s or '70s looking.  The director and I preferred the weathered look of the pickled finish over the gloss of the mahogany, as well as the pickled chair's plainer lines.

But what about the wrong-looking slatted seat?

The Mother-character who sits in it is an invalid...  So I'll pad the seat to fit the character, comfort the actress, and hide those slats.  Multiple cushions maybe?  Going for that layers o' stained fabric cat-bed kind of look?  I was lucky enough to find a sheepskin.  Bed-ridden patients lay on sheepskins to avoid bedsores, so why not sit on one?  Perfect!

That's how furniture is chosen.

Now multiply that same discussion x however many pieces of furniture needed.  With the added consideration (which any interior designer would understand) of calculating how well each piece of furniture chosen will interact design-wise with all the others!

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons

A note on that photo of a rocking chair: I found it illustrating a funny and true rant, "Stuff That Doesn't Completely Suck Part I," that discusses worthless versus sturdy chairs HERE at Gordie's Lounge.

My own rants on furniture?  "Return of the Dreaded Sofa"  HERE.

The Texas State Fair

I recently spent a day at the Fair.  Looking at the photos now, I realize that it was really a day about sculpture...

First, of course, the iconic statue of Big Tex.

BIG TEX at the Texas State Fair - photo gifted to the Public Domain

It just wouldn't be the State Fair of Texas without Big Tex saying in a deep voice: "Weeellcooome tooo thee Staaaate Faaair ooooof Teeeexaaas..."  (B.T. stated his showbiz career, I understand, as a giant Santa Claus beside some West Texas highway.  Miscast there, I think: too skinny and tall!)

Then, nearly-as-iconic comes The Butter Sculpture.  Carved from (you guessed it) real butter.  This year's sculpture was designed to honor of the Girl Scouts' 100th birthday:

Butter sculptures of Girl Scouts and Big Tex - public domain

Those reflections are from the glass sides of the refrigerator case.

That's Big Tex (butter version) they're giving those cookies to, of course.(More on sculptor Sharon BuMann HERE.)

The midway rides have their share of statues.  Here it's a fiberglass mermaid (with light-up under-sea flowers) who sits in the center of a spinning boat ride.

Photo gifted to the public domain 

The animal barns have their own statuary.  This is a reproduction of the famous mix-N-match animal invented for the 1936 fair, which combines attributes of sheep, goats, pigs, cattle.  Nowadays they'd throw in llama too.  I saw a lot of llamas!  This sculpture has a funny name... that I just can't remember...

Photo gifted to the public domain

And, of course, there are the famous Art Deco architectural murals and statues that mark the main buildings along the Esplanade.  This one is called "The Tenor" or similar.  (His female companion is "The Contralto"  I'm pretty sure.)  Behind him you can see a few details of the buildings.  I love this guy's manly chromed hood-ornamentishness.

Photo gifted to the public domain

This sculpture is a reproduction too, as the original was lost, but many original statues remain.  Like this one - my absolute favorite - in front of what was the Women's Museum.

Photo gifted to the public domain

She has an official name, but I call her "The Cactus Lady."  

No trip to the Fair is complete without stopping by to say "Hello" to Big Tex and "Goodbye" to The Cactus Lady.  She stands conveniently close to the exit to the DART trains heading home.  (More on the architecture and statuary of Fair Park HERE.)

This year I enjoyed the llamas and quilts and music and the Girl Scout exhibit and the kids dancing Mexican and Irish dances, but it was the sculptures that turned out to be the highlight for me.

Well... that and the Belgian Waffles with whipped cream and strawberries.  Darn tasty!

Finishing Touches

Part of completing a set is finding (or building) furniture and set dressing.

For a period piece, this can be a real challenge.  Ghost Writer (opening Saturday at Circle Theatre in Fort Worth) is set in 1919.

Almost nothing you can find in Walmart today is going to look like it belongs in 1919.

Especially the books.  And this set is a writer's office with - naturally - books in it.  But where to find books with the right sort of bindings?  Can't afford antiques.  So, you borrow whatever you can find that can sorta pass as the period and you find or make a few "hero" books that look actually correct.

Make?  Go online (the designer's first research source) where you can sometimes find public domain images of books from whatever period your set needs.  Copy, print, blow up to a usable size, and paste onto a dud book.  (By "dud" I mean one of those sad, unloved books, an out-dated technical or law book or a former best-seller or Reader's Digest, that absolutely no one wants to buy or read today.  The kind of book theaters have in the prop room.  It's a sin to mess up a readable book.)

Anyway, I've been 1919-izing a few books.

But the really tricky bit of set dressing turned out to be the wall calendar.

Oddly, there aren't that many 1919 calendars in the stores.  I actually found a few examples on-line... but the illustrations were never of a high enough resolution to be able to print and use at real full scale.  So, for several days now I've been printing and copying and cutting and pasting period images and pages of a disemboweled store-boughten 2013 calendar... basically Frankenstein-ing things together to create a believable wall calendar for July 1919.

Here's the messy process, with everything heavy I own (within reach of my board) piled on to weight down the top of the rip-off (but please don't!) calendar pages.  The antique flat iron is particularly handy.

And here's the final calendar which, believe it or not, is composited of fifteen separate pieces of paper!

Nope.  Sixteen separate pieces of paper.

Gehry in New Orleans

HERE's an interesting article at Archinect on the Make It Right Foundation's housing project - rebuilding the Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Katrina.

(If you have the patience, the comments waaay below discuss some aspects of affordable housing, green-building, and Starchitects that I found fascinating.  Plus more pics.)

To Do

1)   Take a walk
2)   Lay in bed late - just idly thinking
3)   Wash dishes
4)   Go somewhere quiet
5)   Leave town
6)   Play music
7)   Sketch
8)   Daydream
9)   Garden
10) Visit a museum
11) Read something new
12) Eat something different
13) Talk to interesting people
14) Ask questions
15) Play
16) Hang out with a kid
17) Stare at nature
18) Close your eyes and listen
19) Rearrange your desk
20) Make something
21) Use your hands
22) Take a shower
23) Get moving
24) Critique something - how would you improve it?
25) Volunteer
26) Be lazy, lazy, lazy
27) Get bored - then find pencil and paper
28) Do something! Get busy
29) Take photos
30) Write a description
31) Invent a conversation
32) Plan a garden or a vacation or a dream restaurant
33) Ask "What if?"

What prompted this list?  A post at The World's Best Ever of "33 Ways to Stay Creative" HERE.
Earlier posts on creativity: Recharging and Creativity n' Cool.

Book Sale! and Status Update

My printer Lulu.com is having a site-wide sale... Your chance to stock up on my theater set design how-to book Alice Through the Proscenium!  (And a lot of other good books too.)

Got to Lulu.com's main page HERE for the deal and HERE to see more about Alice.

Status?  The Mystery of Irma Vep opened successfully last night - always a relief.  From the set designer's point of view, the last minute addition of a leopard skin rug (beautifully painted on) worked just fine.   Lighting was lovely.  The set looked almost like the model and nothing fell off on an actor or anything, so I was happy.  This was a fiddly carpentry and painterly set and the carpenters and painters worked like fiends to get it finished - thank you!

The only upset was the sudden illness of one of WaterTower Theater's board members.  He was doing better almost immediately and was taken for further care - all good wishes to Buddy today.  After about a fifteen minute break, the actors jumped back into the show very smoothly, very professionally... which is tough to do, actually, since they build up a head of steam in performance and need that momentum.

Funny show!

Today - a meeting with the builder on The Beauty Queen of Leenane.  My own personal theater train just keeps on steaming along...

Simultaneity

In the crunch, in the last days and minutes of finishing a set, many things happen at once...

Carpenters build "finish" details there was no time for earlier, but also repair Really Big Stuff that, for some annoying reason, isn't working properly, and they add missing elements, like masking.  At the same time, painters base-coat the new "finish" stuff as soon as carpenters place it, while continuing to paint everything else.

Ladders clash.

It is a wise theatrical convention to try to paint a set in stages. First a base coat on all raw wood.  (Under stage lights raw wood glows like an Ain't-Finished-Yet sign.)  Next, as time allows, scenic painters make sure every set piece gets a sort of broad-brush version of its final treatment - colors, texture, and some delineation of any image.  In The Mystery of Irma Vep, this would be the outline and base colors of the Sphinx's head on the Egypt wagon.  As soon as possible, this fast version is improved with the final finish - perhaps what was a flat color gets scumbled in several shades or, for the Sphinx's face, careful gradations and shadows would be added.

The Mystery of Irma Vep, WaterTower Theater C

In this photo you see the Egypt wagon getting its finish painting (the Sphinx's eyes will be revised, for instance) with, behind the wagon, tall parts of the main Sinister English Mansion set and its Portrait # 1.  (Those are props and set dressing sitting around, in the way, not the painter drinking lunch.)

But because carpenters are still building, any neat three-step scenic painting process is continually interrupted to hop back to slap paint on sudden new wood or to touch-up a finished surface marred by later work.  Also, special projects are finished, like dashing through, at a single sitting, that second portrait that everyone's been only pretending to use for Act III.

Triage.

Late-stage set building and painting (and dressing! and furnishing!) is all about juggling priorities until - if lucky - the set is perfectly finished or - in the real world - the audience sits down.

The hard deadline of Opening explains the painting strategy: if, at any moment "Places!" is called, no scenery will look raw and it will all be (roughly) at a matching stage of readiness.

The Mystery of Irma Vep - amazingly enough - is going to be about done.

The Mystery of Irma Vep

That should be The Marathon of Irma Vep...