A Force With Noir Overtones: A School For Wives

Photo by T. Charles Erickson
 
Jean-Luc Godard’s film noir and the street photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson don’t spring to mind when thinking about a 17th-century Molière farce, but when Mark Wing-Davey set his production of A School For Wives in the 1950s and early 1960s, he looked to these mid-century artists for the play about a pompous, older man who attempts to groom his innocent ward into a perfect wife for himself.  
 
Photo by T. Charles Erickson
Scenic designer David Gallo says Wing-Davey, who has a house in Northern France, did a lot of the initial research in his neighborhood, taking photographs of gardens and mansions. A red hotel with two towers near his home influenced what would become the bachelor’s home in the production at Two River Theatre in New Jersey. Gallo and Wing-Davey also looked at many New Wave films and period photographs. One movie that particularly interested Gallo, A Married Woman, takes place as women are transitioning out of sexual repression. Spectators frequently saw the woman through the architecture, “through windows and doors, always framed,” says Gallo, who began thinking about a geometric ground plan with a triangle in the center of a spinning garden.
 
Gallo says Wing-Davy wanted to see the outside of the house and have people pass through the interior into the garden. That necessitated a very small house on a donut turntable that had just an 11'5" area for it. The house with two main levels, three in some places, featured hidden doors for entrances and exits. “There were a lot of conversations about where people had to be when,” says Gallo, noting that the play’s French scene structure helped them track.
 
The script tells us the mansion has a red wall, and Gallo says he struggled to get the exact red, a color loosely based on the actual hotel but theatricalized. He aimed for the right degree of translucency—“not a watercolor look”—avoiding pure red for part of the house and pure green for the garden. “You can go to Christmas very quickly,” he says. The interior of the home is grayish, silvery, like an old photo. The idea was not to make the set resemble a black and white movie but to suggest a gray world.
 
Photo by T. Charles Erickson
 
Trees were also important. For a play about a man who is used to getting his way and has trained his would-be wife to deny her natural desires for more attractive men, the idea of training nature came to the forefront. Espalier trees, which are carefully pruned and bound and forced into a particular space, stood against the garden wall. Gallo created two-dimensional trees with three-dimensional leaves, consistent for a show that mixed theatricality with real elements. Horticultural illustrations appeared on the walls, and in keeping with the situation, some plants had deadly spikes.
 
“The thing that jumped out at me in the research was that it was all single-source white light,” says lighting designer Michael Chybowski, who found it challenging to adapt this to a nearly thrust theatre. “What we wanted to do was use that as the basis for the lighting, but it needed to be filled so everyone could see,” adds Chybowski, who picked moments to highlight the idea without obstructing visibility. “For example, we lit the first scene shift with shin busters only, and it looked very film noir-y. Even though the prior scene felt like a normal morning, we are reminded there’s something else going on here. Also, Mark was really good at picking his spots to remind people of the same thing. When the young girl is confronted by the older suitor, he is really frustrated and throws her luggage into the garden. Mark added some modern security lights inside the garden, and we snapped to those abruptly as the luggage hit the ground. It had the same kind of single-source noir feeling as the research. A non sequitur reminded people how serious this guy’s emotions were at this point.”  
 
Photo by T. Charles Erickson
 
Since the play unravels in one day, Chybowski had to make sure the sun rose from one side of the stage, rotated to the other, and then set. After one night scene, the sun rose once more: morning again. Meanwhile, the donut and its hole revolved. He used an “air shin” sidelight system from each side of the stage, with two units that were higher up on ladders, designed to light only the set and the air as it rotated. “You could pick the most appropriate side and light the set and nothing else,” says Chybowski, who also used scrollers for moonlight and sunsets. Chybowski says the height of the set was a challenge with the existing inventory; he had to convert some units from short throw to longer throw to account for the higher trims.
 

Sound And Costumes

 
Photo by T. Charles Erickson
 
Composer/sound designer Brandon Wolcott says work on the show began with a conversation about the period. “In a similar way to Mad Men, there is a very interesting progression from the ‘50s to ‘60s in terms of women’s rights, sexual freedom, notions of the self, spirituality, changing so rapidly. I think the main character definitely represents the old guard, and because he has money and influence and power, he feels confident in his folly, even though the world around him is changing,” says Wolcott. “The set played against the more contemporary setting,” he adds, explaining that the team sought tension between the set and lights (less noir-y) and music and costumes (more so). “It had to stay in this light, almost fairytale world of farce, but the music and costume and some of the emotional beats could live in this slightly darker, more introspective world. The main character feels the ideology he’s acting from could fall apart at any moment. You attract the laughs, and you also feel for this character and have a deeper sense of meaning.”
 
Photo by T. Charles Erickson
Wolcott strove for a soundtrack that could be light and playful some of the time and grave and dark at others, “more contemporary, but not to the point of feeling jazzy, the way a saxophone might.” He picked several songs from Godard films that spanned the emotional range of the play and started improvising with musicians to build new ideas from these. Wolcott, who had been out of the country through a good deal of the rehearsal period, came into tech with a lot of choices, figuring out what would work when as the show fell into place. “A lot of the music became fully formed during the tech process,” he says. As they elaborated and embellished, the bassoon became the lead voice in a score that included drums, a cello, violin, and trumpet. 
 
During the preshow, “as a kind of red herring,” they played 17th century music. Because of the setting of the turntable, audiences could only see the exterior of the house, something designed to suggest 1660 more than 1960. “It seemed like we were going to do a formal stodgy period version. We wanted to play with those expectations [then bring on a] mysterious cello and bassoon.”
 
Sometimes Wolcott’s soundscape foreshadowed monologues that described past events. Audiences would hear people running up stairs or dogs barking and later be told about an event that included these sounds. Not everyone would connect these separated moments, “but for those who are really paying attention or making the connection subconsciously, it was a nice continuity treat,” Wolcott says.   
Photo by T. Charles Erickson

Costume designer Emily Rebholz turned to the pre-war images of Cartier-Bresson and sought inspiration from French cinema. “I wanted to have a stock of images that put the people into a real time and place, but when it came time for the color palette, I actually looked to the set. All of my research was black and white, and the set has such a controlled color palette,” she says. “The set was also inspired by two-dimensional design and was clearly a set for stage, not an exact diorama.” Still, she says both she and Wing-Davey felt people needed to be rooted in a reality. “We didn’t want to play the comedy or the farce. Of course, it is funny and amusing that Agnes is still dressing as a French [convent] school girl, but it’s also appropriate to the character and her circumstances.” Wig design for the production was by Mary Kay Yezerski-Bondoc. 
 
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