We all know it: a director’s vision, the venue, the budget—they all largely shape what a designer does. “part of the reason plays get produced over and over and over is that, when you change those things, you have radically different productions of the same text,” says scenic designer Vincent Mountain. “Budget can have a big impact, but it doesn’t make a production better or worse. I’ve done some things for very little money that have been some of my favorite productions.”
Mountain counts his design for Malcolm Tulip’s 2012 University of Michigan production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream among his favorites, for instance. He also favors his design for Gregory Boyd’s 2000 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Alley Theatre in Houston, one of America’s oldest most established not-for-profit theatres.
DREAMING BIG AT THE ALLEY
Comparing the play to nested Chinese boxes—we go from the court to the mechanicals to the forest to the mechanicals to the court—Boyd says he wanted to begin with something tight and proceed to wide-screen Technicolor, with a classical court scene resembling a 19th-century painting. He had seen Peter Stein’s As You Like It in Berlin, which began in indoor spaces, then required spectators to follow actors to an outdoor setting for forest scenes. What if Boyd’s Midsummer opened in the lobby? “While the audience waited to get in, we set the lovers and Helena and her father loose in the crowd,” he recalls. A rock band played while Theseus and Hippolyta announced their wedding from a balcony above the lobby, then led the wedding party and spectators into the theatre.
“Vince’s first set was a wedding reception with the same band playing. You saw something like a hall one would rent for a not very grand wedding reception,” Boyd recalls. This was backed by a red velour theatre curtain. The young lovers entered, not all of them on foot. Hermia, above the stage, grabbed onto overhead strings of colored lights. “She’s running away from Demetrius and swings Tarzan-style onto the stage. She crashed into the drum set and broke up the band,” Mountain recalls.
In the next scene, the mechanicals strike the band equipment and open the curtain to reveal an empty backstage set that Mountain designed, hiding the actual backstage area of the Alley. That’s when the set really surprised. For the transition to the forest, the large concrete back wall of the theatre flipped on its horizontal axis, rotating to reveal a chartreuse-colored steeply raked landscape; Titania entered on the back of the wall, which characters could walk under and slide down.
“From a gray industrial-looking space, it became this poisonous green wall,” says Boyd, recalling that Chris Parry’s lighting transformed the palette from monochromatic to electric. Part of the floor opened to become a pool, with branches and brambles upstage of it—an obstacle course that would have been dangerous for less trained actors to navigate. Puck entered through cutouts in the wall, and the lovers exited through those cutouts when he put them to sleep.
“When they woke up in the morning, the wall restored itself. You found them all back in the theatre, and it made you question, ‘Did I dream this? Did it really happen?’” says Mountain.
’s worked on; she uses it to teach her students at University of California-San Diego (where Mountain also studied) the art of collaboration. “In this production, we had at least three different worlds, and the springboard for me in finding those levels was Vince’s bright chartreuse-green rubberized gym mat, the platform that tilted and floated. We were hardly in a green arbor of trees.” Dolan searched for the brightest chartreuse paper she could find to pick up the edgy world Mountain suggested. She gave each fairy a different personality by collaging crazy contemporary clothes. “These fairies had no idea how to wear clothes they had stolen. They wore them inappropriately, upside down or backward.” Her assistant found one dress at a garage sale for 25 cents that Dolan used on three different fairies in different ways.
Dolan wanted elements of eccentricity in clothes that were otherwise elegant and sophisticated for court characters. For scenes featuring the mechanicals, “Greg and Vince opened up the space, so you had a feeling there was nothing but an empty stage there,” says Dolan, who incorporated that sense of simplicity in clothing for the mechanicals. Although she saw them as clowns, she pulled simple clothes from stock and dressed them as workmen, allowing the clowning to come from the actors. “Everything had a contemporary feeling, so the audience could connect to every world,” she says. Sound design for the production was by Malcolm Nicholls.
Even though Dolan got plenty of mileage from a dress that cost 25 cents, Midsummer dreams like these are made with a seasoned technical crew, and it doesn’t hurt to have the budget of a major regional theatre.
Boyd, who finds Mountain “a great collaborator who soaks up ideas and shares his own,” has worked with the designer on several shows at the Alley. These include Boyd’s production of Sherlock Holmes, which called for five complete locations. Even on the Alley’s budget, he couldn’t have five sets in realistic detail, so Mountain and Boyd opted for more suggestive locales, using some Victorian metalwork and pieces that sometimes doubled in more than one locale. That didn’t bother Mountain, who says the designs he loves most are “a little more abstract, sculptural, and less decorative or realistic…I like darker contemporary plays about serious themes that are theatrically interesting, not a TV script on stage,” he says.
’s Reasons To Be Pretty, a play with five locations and eight scenes, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. He found what he thought was an elegant and theatrical solution for the transitions that the budget didn’t ultimately support. So he and director Maria Mileaf redesigned totally, keeping just a few elements from the original idea. Mountain says they both felt the revised design was better than the first. “Obstacles make you come up with interesting ideas,” he says.
Problematic spaces are fun to tackle, too. The Purple Rose in Michigan, where Mountain often designs for Guy Sanville, has a small thrust. It’s just about impossible to move scenery on and off after the play begins, so simplicity reigns, and it always works. “We don’t get bogged down with a lot of decoration,” Mountain says. “The script may say the character takes brownies out of an oven, but we don’t need the oven. She’ll just walk on stage with brownies...Theatrical solutions allow audiences to engage their imaginations.” In Jeff Daniels’ Best of Friends, a perceptive exploration of the dark side of friendship, scenes occur in several places that include two apartments and a car. “The play has an over-the-top absurd quality to it,” says Mountain, who defined different living rooms by rearranging furniture; for the car scene, two actors sit on a coffee table, “and you totally get it.”
So Mountain had no qualms about taking on a low-budget Midsummer. At their first meeting, Tulip and Mountain agreed they didn’t want a realistic forest in a particular period but “a place of psychological change.” Mountain began to sketch at once. “When we work together, the conversation becomes visual almost immediately, which is very useful to me,” says Tulip.
Mountain knew Tulip wanted an unobstructed theatrical space where actors could engage physically; it would be circular, like the Globe Theatre, like a bear pit, like the moon that’s mentioned throughout the play. Mountain thought about carnival motordromes, curved wooden surfaces that motorcyclists ride vertically, sometimes called “the wall of death.” He researched motordromes around the world. “They all have a balcony above and a doorway into the space below,” he discovered. A wooden half circle, not for vehicles but for actors to climb on and over, with flip doors hidden in the wood, would be easily adaptable, and a curtain in front could hide the drome for court scenes.
Mountain put a black circus pole with strands of small silver lights center stage. As spectators entered, characters dressed in black swept popcorn from the stage to sounds of drums and heavy feet, whistles, and sirens. Above the stage, tiny lights hung.
“Once the initial idea was there, everything flowed easily, and changes came about because of functional needs,” says Tulip. For instance, they added knots to the ropes and holes in the surface to facilitate climbing. As the set came together, Tulip says it helped him direct the play. “The set tells you what to do,” he says, adding that it helped him achieve the physicality he wanted from performers. Doors in the slats created four extra exits.
Costume designer Christianne Myers says it was clear they were creating a dark and gritty world, peopled by gypsies, bikers, and carnies, not glittery fairies with wings. Those fairies did light up, however, with the help of LEDs wired into body suits and fiber optics and tinsel in wigs. Fairies manipulated light and hid in shadows. Myers looked at circus clothes and at bohemian gypsy culture from Eastern Europe for inspiration.
Lighting designer Rob Murphy had to evoke the forest that Mountain didn’t build. “When I looked at the set, I noticed all those vertical planks were spaced half an inch or three quarters of an inch apart, so rather than projecting templates at the stage, I projected straight lines, not like Venetian blinds, but a chaos of straight lines [that evoked trees],” says Murphy, who used the center pole “as kind of a sundial” that created shadows on the floor, texturing scenes with an explosion of simple geometric shapes.
Murphy distinguished between the worlds of the mortals and the fairies and the worlds within each world. “There was Theseus’ world, which I tried to make clean and bright and clear and shiny, and the world of the mechanicals, which still had no color,” he says. He distinguished Titania’s world from Oberon’s, too, with warm colors and soft-edged templates for her and cold colors and prickly templates for him. He found his palette in the set, an acid pink and blue that audiences didn’t see because of the color Murphy threw at it. “You can get away with whatever you want because it’s a poetic space, rather than a literal space,” he says. Since the fairies had lights built into them, he couldn’t light them traditionally without bleaching out their glow; he cut back on heavy blue followspots he tried because they obscured the faces of the fairies.
Shadow puppets, an ass with a human head (Tulip wanted spectators to see her expressions), Philostrate on stilts (Myer worked with Mountain to make sure there was enough head room), and gender-neutral casting also helped define this production. Mechanicals costumes were by Leslie Bates, with original music by Simon Alexander-Adams and Conor Barry, and wigs and makeup by Dawn Rivard.