Vino Veritas At The Purple Rose Theatre Company, Part Two

The Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, MI re-imagined artistic director Guy Sanville's 2008 production of David MacGregor's Vino Veritas, and Rhiannon Ragland made the new play even newer for this 2017 production. Read Part One here.

The Color Of Magic

Lighting designer Dana White says the question each time was whether to create a stable world with the set and introduce chaos into it, or suggest adventure at once. “The director [Ragland, 2017] was really interested in us pursuing the more magical undertones in the play,” says White, recalling when he was an assistant to Richard Nelson, “Richard used to tell me the color of magic is purple, so I wanted to work purple into the play.”

Playwright David MacGregor thinks both productions mixed realistic and fantastic elements somewhat.

The Purple Rose Theatre Company, 2017

“In an early design meeting, we talked about how Lauren asks her husband to dim the lights. We had him turn off the light switches from his phone. The playwright gave us a lot of excuses to do things. This guy is so interested in whatever’s new that he would have some of the most modern technology. What if he could control lights and change colors of the lights with his phone?”

At two moments in the play, the stage is lit by a single candle. The first time, the candle approximates a round-the-campfire storytelling moment, and the second, at the end of the play, the couples “try to find their way back to one another through the figurative darkness of domestic duties and obligations that have descended upon their lives and caused them to lose one another,” MacGregor says.

White supported the candle with unobtrusive light to give the impression light emanates only from it. After a character puts out the candle with his hand—“The point in the play is that there’s pain involved and you have to move past that,” says White—he dimmed the lights as the couple embraces and begins to kiss.

The Purple Rose Theatre Company, 2017

In the first production, a character blows out a candle, then turns on the lights. This time, White kept the lights dim at Ragland’s request. “The moments after that are fraught with more tension, and there’s a little edge to things. At the end of the play, the same character takes out his phone and turns out the lights for the night.

“In a three-quarter space, it’s not easy to isolate actors because the audience is inches away from you,” says White, explaining the candle gave him the chance to focus on the two main characters at a key moment.

In Pearline’s early sketches, the upstage kitchen had a ceiling over it, not the easiest place to hang lights. In the end, “she created a peninsula bar that came with a type of header over the top, with architectural lights that defined the space. It made it feel like a more contemporary open plan,” says White.

In 2017, White brought light straight in from all three scene banks and a lot from on top to give dimension and depth. “Although the play is billed as a comedy, a lot of it is drama,” he says. “I asked the crew to move some pipes to do deeper angles on things and brought things into the space in less symmetrical ways.”

Characters In Costume

The Purple Rose Theatre Company, 2008

“Part of the fun of costuming characters who are wearing costumes is thinking about the way the characters would approach their costumes,” says 2017 costume designer Katherine Nelson. The characters are dressed for a Halloween party they never attend and appear as a witch, a cowboy, and Queen Elizabeth I; the fourth, a doctor by profession, hasn’t bothered to change out of his work clothes and goes as a doctor.  

In 2008, Christianne Myers dressed the cowboy and doctor in a straightforward way. Though the witch had an iconic pointed hat, Myers gave her a “free spirit, hippy flavor.” She modeled the Queen Elizabeth dress on the portrait by Nicholas Hilliard and called on Elizabeth Gunderson to make the fabric and Suzanne Young and Lea Morello to build it. The “feat of engineering” involved a boned bodice, designed so it could be removed quickly onstage to reveal sexy black undergarments. The Rose spent about $5,000 on the dress for materials and labor, not counting lingerie.

Nelson made these costumes a little more contemporary for the 2017 production. She pulled Myers’ Queen Elizabeth dress from stock and studied the photographs of the painting before adding trim and bead work “to bring out some of the colors in the actual painting. The character makes the point of wanting to be accurate,” she says. “I wanted to make it look like the character had time and money to put into finishing touches to get every detail right.” This added about $1,700 to the cost of the garment.

The Purple Rose Theatre Company, 2017

“Kate and I consulted about the reveal. She added magnets, which were a helpful adjustment to facilitate the onstage change,” adds Myers.

Nelson gave the doctor French cuffs and cufflinks, shiny shoes, a fancy watch, and a wedding band with stones in it for the more recent production. “He never takes off his doctor’s coat and is very proud that he’s a doctor,” she says, explaining why she wanted him to be tailored and polished.

“There’s not a whole lot of drastically different things you can do with a cowboy, but throughout the show, it’s obvious that Phil loves all the latest, coolest technology and trivia,” says Nelson. “So, I selected cool, quirky pieces that still fit a classic cowboy, as if Phil found all the cowboy things he liked and just put them together.”

The Theatre B Production

 

Theatre B Production

Between productions at the Rose, the Nebraska Rep, Lansing Civic Players, Erin Theatre in Erie, Ontario, and Theatre B in Fargo, ND, it also is a film. The Queen Elizabeth dress Myers designed is used in that, too. 

Elle Taylor, who designed the play at Theatre B in Fargo, ND, has a background in interior design and thinks that the desire for realism may have been part of why she was asked to design the play. “The thing I love about the play is that everyone can relate to it in some way,” Taylor states. “I wanted it to feel like a middle-class home with kids, messy and eclectic.” Still, she says hallway lights were focused to make the space feel darker and more magical. She angled the sofa and placed stairs to the side. The small Fargo space didn’t allow for a kitchen.

Although Sanville directed the first production, he preferred Ragland’s 2017 one, finding it funnier and more heartbreaking at the same time. “They created a magic little bubble that’s more intimate; the other one felt spread out to me. We’ve grown as a company in these nine years.” 

For MacGregor, the biggest difference between these productions is the kind of space, thrust or proscenium, more than its size or the approach to design. He favors the thrust; his play, he says, lends itself best to a “claustrophobic, intimate, almost snow globe feel.”

For more, read the June 2017 issue of Live Design.