When a scenic designer approaches a play, what defines his or her process? The style and substance of the play? His or her own style? How about the director? Does the vision or approach of a director affect a designer’s process or the kind of work he or she’s likely to accomplish? Christopher Barreca, Julian Crouch, and Alexander Dodge—Barreca and Crouch also direct—talk about the way they work with directors.
Alexander Dodge: Collaborating With Actor-Directors And Acrobat-Directors
Some directors pay close attention to every detail; others don’t sweat the small stuff. Some know much of what they want and others are hands off. Alexander Dodge, who has worked Off-Broadway and on, in opera houses and in the West End, and in regional theatres across the continent, has worked with them all.
The late Nicolas Martin, for instance, cared about the minutia. “Where the furniture was placed was very important to Nicky,” Dodge says, recalling the time he built stairs for Present Laughter that Martin thought should be half an inch lower to ensure that the performer who entered in high heels and a long skirt wouldn’t have to pause at the steps. “Nicky wanted things to be graceful.” They did many living room dramas, and Martin would know where each chair should go and whether the arm should be on the upstage or downstage side.
For Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of the few plays Dodge designed for Martin that required outdoor scenery, Martin wanted the play to take place under a giant tree that actors could hide in and climb. Dodge also created a little toy stage that flew in, foreshadowing his later work on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, as well as a painted blue sea and a sky cyc behind everything.
“Nicky usually gave me something at the beginning, whatever he was inspired by—a piece of music, a painting, or an object, something to get me going,” says Dodge. “Sometimes things take an unexpected turn and you do something completely different. It was wonderful working with him.” Dodge and Martin, who worked together on some 40 shows, developed a shorthand.
Directors have varying roots, too. Some, like Martin, were actors before they directed. Dodge says for Denis Jones, who choreographs as well as directs, “bodies are part of the scenery.” In Piece of My Heart for Jones, set pieces included cubes that lit from within and could be danced on and moved about. Set in an abandoned music studio, the production about creating music featured a visible band.
Dodge says Darko Tresnjak is acrobatic and visual, and he begins with in-depth conversations about the look and the concept. “It’s really fun to work with someone really involved in the whole piece. Darko is able to visualize; many directors can’t until they get into the space,” says Dodge, explaining how these early discussions and understandings make it possible to take more risks. For Twelfth Night last spring, Dodge designed a hedge maze, sunken into the floor of Hartford Stage. Characters moved between the hedges, and audiences could see from above. In The Tempest, actors were part of the scenery; as the storm approached, actors formed the silhouette of the ship.
Dodge says Tresnjak and the team for Gentleman’s Guide began conceiving the show six years ago, when a rights-issue prevented doing it at the La Jolla Playhouse. By the time they began working on it, they had talked about the irony of staging a madcap murder with a hero killer in front of a children’s toy theatre and about how to make the many locations work like a trick box. When they did the play at Hartford Stage, they had to convert Hartford’s thrust to something like a proscenium space and find ways to keep the show very precise and the sight lines clear. “The Old Globe was more like a Broadway house, and it transferred really nicely,” Dodge says.
Dodge, who hasn’t acted, choreographed, or done acrobatics, approaches design from an architectural and sculptural viewpoint. He grew up at Taliesin West, surrounded by architects. He says he’s happiest working with directors who come with strong ideas but allow him freedom, too. “You feel they’re adding something, and you’re adding something. I find that the most rewarding, and usually it gets the most interesting design results.”
Julian Crouch: The Narrative's The Thing
Julian Crouch created masks, puppets, and body extensions before he designed sets, and he sees scenery as only part of a design that’s largely driven by bodies. Most of his work has been musical theatre or opera, non-naturalistic works with large ensembles that he can use to help create images.
Crouch says the design process is something like dreaming. What interests him most when he designs is the visual narrative, and a lot of his work involves devising without a script. He didn’t train as a designer but worked as a visual artist, illustrator, and musician, and he sometimes co-directs the plays he designs. “My path is rambling,” he says.
He collaborated with Phelim McDermott for about 15 years, designing and often co-directing, as he did for The Addams Family on Broadway. He finds his relationship with McDermott, “in some ways a kind of a marriage” and “difficult to simplify.” Their process changes from show to show, depending on the material.
Crouch, who has designed Off-Broadway, at the Metropolitan Opera, and in the West End, is a relative newcomer to Broadway, with three design credits on the Rialto. “Susan Stroman leads,” he says of his experience designing Big Fish, “so in a sense, you’re slotting into her vision.”
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, on the other hand, wasn’t Broadway as usual. “I came into something that existed,” he says, explaining that doing a show with a strong history and a cult following is not the same as doing a new play for Broadway. “There were potential pitfalls putting it up on a Broadway stage and many ways we could have fallen into a hole.” He credits director Michael Mayer with making the process easy. “Michael is able to be vulnerable and is happy to listen to the team and also strong enough to pull it back when he’s certain. It was one of the most satisfying jobs I’ve done, and in some ways, a very easy job. It fell together, I think also because that piece of work was not created for Broadway but out of love by people; it was their life. Michael and I were trying to find our own things but honor the fantastic thing it had been in the first place. If I did a different job with Michael Mayer on something he was creating from scratch, it would be different.”
Christopher Barreca: Free Associating To A Play And To A Director's Idea
“Working with a director is like jazz,” says Christopher Barreca. “You’re taking somebody’s idea and riffing on it. I write down everything a director, writer, or other designer says because in that is probably something that I won’t hear the first time.” Barreca also documents his own process, so he can look at it from a distance and figure out what’s most important.
Barreca notes that French scenes and transitions are always important to him. “What is changing when actors leave or enter is an important part of the action,” he says, adding that director Alex Timbers shares this view. For Rocky, for instance, in addition to building a three-dimensional model, Barreca and his assistants pre-visualized the whole show using Adobe After Effects with performers and objects that moved through the moveable city in time to the music, creating an animated narrative that the entire creative team could fine-tune. He appreciates Timbers’ involvement. “I’m often left to work out the transitions by myself.”
“When Alex casts,” Barreca adds, “he looks for people who are fearless, who are excited to try new things. He is a big believer in workshops. In the workshops, we discovered many of the things you see in the final show,” for instance, the moment the ring pivots down. Barreca says it was important that the audience didn’t doubt what they were about to see because it was organic, not layered on. A moving projector was the light for that, “the most exciting and frightening element in the show. I’m very proud of that moment.”
Travis Preston, Barreca’s colleague at CalArts, may have had the greatest influence on him. “Travis taught me a way of working early on, the tools of free association. When you read a play, you go off on a thought, without looking for meaning. If a mirror is broken, you might think, ‘ice, ice cold feet, broken.’ When you read the play, you often have the most literal ideas. But a space is like an instrument. Sometimes, you sing the same vocal line as the actors and sometimes counterpoints. Finding those counterpoints can be difficult. Travis tells me to free my mind. What I love about Travis is he’s always trying to look at the play from a different point of view. He wants me in the room with the actors from the beginning.”
Working with writer-directors poses different challenges. “Writers have images in their minds and can’t always exactly articulate what that is in absolute physical terms,” says Barreca, who designed two plays by Athol Fugard that the writer directed at the Signature Theatre. “We would sit and talk for many hours just about the play,” he says, adding that these discussions stimulated ideas. Signature was opening its new space when work started on Blood Knot, a play Fugard hadn’t revisited in decades. “We walked into what was going to be a brand new space, a very polished space when finished. They hadn’t put the stage floor in yet, and the first thing out of Athol’s mouth was, ‘Maybe we should not let them finish it.’ Athol and I felt instinctually that everything had to be authentic, even the way it’s constructed. Everything on the set had to be a found object.” So the play went up in the unfinished theatre. “In the middle of the piece, the actor has to clear the stage for a play within the play. In the rehearsal process, we discovered the actor really had to destroy the space…I try with new plays to make a set that’s flexible. When you design something with a lot of fixed scenery, you get trapped by the scenery.”
Barreca also does devised work, directing as well as designing. In Russia, he worked with two other directors, co-creating a series of pieces for a theatre in St. Petersburg. Their third collaboration was an uncut adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Summer People, an existential play about revolution. It ran seven hours and was presented in five parts. “With this theatre,” Barreca says, “we tend to discover everything through improvisation, which in this case, happened in and around an abandoned dacha on the Gulf of Finland.” Actors would improvise a series of solutions to a problem; in one rehearsal, the co-directors told some actors to rearrange everything for the communal dinner audience and performers had each night. “They began moving the audience’s and other actors’ chairs into a new configuration without the other actors knowing what the new architecture would be. In performance, we started with 300 blue plastic beer garden chairs on a one meter grid in a huge warehouse space, and as the play began, one by one, the audience with their chairs were turned.” Soon, a new architecture became clear. “We weren’t thinking about scenery,” says Barreca. “It grew out of the actors’ work.”
When Barreca reads a play, he tries to think like a performer, visualizing himself in the scene and the space. “The creative process is the most private and mysterious thing that we do,” he muses. “That word collaboration is hardly adequate to describe the relationships one has to have to do good work, not just between the director and designer but with other designers and actors and the writer, the director being the filter into which everyone’s input is poured and out of which comes a cohesive whole.”
Read and see more in the July issue of Live Design, now available for free download for iPad or iPhone at the Apple App Store.