Full Frontal: Storefront Theatre

When Keith Paul Medelis founded The New Theatre Project (TNTP),he was apprenticing at the Performance Network Theatre (PNT), an Equity house in Ann Arbor with a rehearsal room about 20'x35' that PNT let him use for his first production. He wanted to do Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening because the themes resonated but incidents in the script seemed dated. Adolescent sexuality is always complicated, but masturbation, for instance, no longer shocks many of us. Were there other issues that would be more contemporary? What if actors his age shared memories of problems associated with their own emerging sexuality?

Soon actors were writing journal entries, responding to his prompts. The first was, “When did you realize you were no longer a child?” Playwright Jason Sebacher meshed their stories with Wedekind’s play in a new work exploring fractured childhood and the lies children learn; Santa and the Tooth Fairy appeared. Janine Woods Thoma, then PNT’s tech director, designed sets and lights with a $100 budget, building trees of paper-mache around dryer hose and covering the barks and branches with pieces of journal pages.

For Cloud Tectonics, limitations to the set meant using lighting to communicate certain moods (photo Amanda Lyn Jungquist).

Medelis found a space in a nearby garden store to extend The Spring Awakening Project’s run. Only 20 spectators could fit in the room, and they had to cross the stage to reach the bathroom. The room was triangular and white, and Thoma found that every light source she used washed over the whole room, making it difficult to maintain focus. None of this bothered Medelis. “That room was beautiful, with strange angles and high windows,” he says, noting that he didn’t cover the walls with black drapes, preferring to “honor the space” and let it inspire them. “It’s harder for me to design in an actual theatre,” he says. “The things you can do there are too expected.”

Next up was Ben Stange’s production of Cloud Tectonics, which featured Medelis’s all-white set, colored with lighting, mostly in blues and purples. The play, Medelis acknowledges, was written to be performed in a theatre. “We couldn’t make a bed rise,” he says, “but we could create the precariousness of time with lighting.”

After three more productions, TNTP moved to a rectangular room in the same building. It seated 50, if only there were chairs. Medelis asked friends to donate these, making for varied and interesting seating. He liked the exposed brick and old windows, and vowed not to hide the tile floor.

In The Mix

While producing in Ann Arbor, Medelis directed play readings at Mix, a store in Ypsilanti, MI, that pushed clothing racks aside to make room for opera recitals, poetry, and play readings. When TNTP was forced out of the Ann Arbor space—turned out, the building wasn’t zoned for public performances—Mix offered Medelis a 600sq-ft. storage room for $500 a month, more than he could afford. Meanwhile, Sarah Lucas, a stage manager and director, searched for a venue for her new theatre, Threefold Productions. They agreed Lucas would renovate the space and share the rent.

Sarah Lucas' production of A Body Of Water (Photo Janine Woods Thoma).

Lucas panicked when she saw the space. How would she get the actors onto the stage and off? (For Medelis, a space with two usable entrances—one from the store, another from the street—was an improvement.) Would they blow circuits when they tried to light a show? How would they hang lights from a low ceiling? “It was never meant to be a theatre, but someone had offered us a space!” Lucas says. With her tech director, Dustin Miller, and others, she cleaned out the space and tore a wall down; they took out tile and replaced a sink to create a bathroom for patrons. Medelis brought platforms, lighting pipes, and equipment from Ann Arbor.

Lucas, who likes to do large shows in small spaces, embraced the venue. “It would be easier to do a show like The Pillowman in a proscenium with a lot of money, but you lose some of the emotional impact by having that fourth wall,” she says. Threefold opened with Lucas’s production of A Body of Water, which required a one-room unit set with windows. Lynch Travis’s production of the one-person show, Pretty Fire, needed only a bench, so repainting brown platforms with some green gave the sense of a backyard.   

Lucas’s production of The Pillowman, designed by Edward Weingart, PNT’s technical director, was trickier. Lucas and Weingart wanted to create a wall that wouldn’t always be a wall so storybook characters could pass through it. Scrim wouldn’t allow free passage. Weingart built a frame to be placed on one end of the space and hung inexpensive baler twine on it. “Sarah wanted it to look and feel like a prison, so we hung it up and down, like bars,” Weingart says, but when they decided it looked boring, Weingart tied knots in the rope and angled corners to give it more character.  

Luna Alexander’s production of Fugue (photo Janine Woods Thoma).

Before and between these productions, TNTP worked in Mix Studio Theatre. If You Start a Fire, an original play billed as an internet sex comedy, took place in two rooms; characters had to interact on laptops, while audiences saw live streams of them. “There was a lot of furniture in the show,” says Thoma, who designed the set and video for Medelis. “It was cramped, but that’s perfect for an apartment like that. The hardest part was the technology. We had to find cheap computer monitors and wire them,” says Thoma, who set up Skype conversations between onstage and backstage computers, taking live webcam views from the actors’ laptops and displaying them on 18 screens around the room.

Janine Woods Thoma used a projector to supplement what little lighting instruments she had for The American Crowbar Case (photo Janine Woods Thoma). .

Luna Alexander’s production of Fugue, an original play set in a hospital, required a cold institutional feel. Visqueen curtains and overhead factory fixtures outfitted with LEDs supplemented a ground row of shop lights that flickered and hummed to create an unsettling feel. Thoma let red light glow under spectators’ feet during disturbing dream sequences. “They’re sitting six inches from the stage, and you can take advantage of that intimacy,” she says. “But you have to be so careful not to get lights in the audience’s eyes.”  

Inadequate electricity compounded problems at all venues. “For Spring Awakening, at any time, we could only turn on half of the lights we had in the sky,” says Thoma. “You have to be really careful and good at math to figure out what lights you need and distribute them across the electrical sources you have. In school [Thoma designs at the University of Michigan, where she studied, as well as at professional regional theatres], sources are almost limitless, and you don’t learn that. It’s a different way of thinking.”

Thoma did lights and projections for Medelis’s production of The American Crowbar Case, a new musical. “When you’re short on lighting instruments and have a projector, use the projector,” she advises. She focused images on the screen and sometimes projected light onto actors. “The natural blue projector color is incredibly saturated and strong.”

No Limitations

Limitations aren’t always problems. Thoma says audiences love unique practicals that dress the set as well as light it; actors can turn them on and off, a plus for crew-challenged theatres. She would rather have manual control than hit a cue on a board. “You can be right there on top of it and do a seven-second fade instead of a five-second fade, timing it to the pace of the show. Subtle differences can be huge,” she says. But borrowing is essential for a theatre with just eight dimmers and little by way of costume or prop inventory. “It’s important to build good relationships with other theatres and colleges,” Thoma advises. “Take care of equipment, and return it in a timely manner.”

Double duty: A platform built for The Pillowman held the bathtub in Woyzeck (pictured).

Repurposing helps, too. A platform built for The Pillowman held a bathtub in Woyzeck. And for a new play that occurs outdoors, Medelis covered the same platform with sod, over a sheet of plastic and dirt. Scavenging is also essential. “Think about who interacts with the objects you need and might have broken versions lying around they’d be happy to get rid of for a program mention and free tickets,” suggests Thoma, who once borrowed a fire hydrant from the city. For The Everyman Project, another journal-based work, Medelis listed everything mentioned in the script, and the cast went on a scavenger hunt; the set was a ceiling collage made from items they collected.

The basement at Mix was a treasure trove. Medelis approached Brian Carbine, a Michigan-based choreographer, director, and performance artist, with the idea of using it for an environmental production of Woyzeck. “We took a tour of the basement, and it was a little terrifying, filled with garbage and junk dating back to the ‘30s and ‘40s,” Carbine recalls. “The fact that we had to clean it out gave us a sense of ownership over the space, and we found a lot of things we could repurpose and use.” A tavern scene, for instance, made use of Christmas lights, a punch bowl, and a sign that said “Dining Room.” Safety was also an issue. They yanked nails out of wood and wrapped foam around whatever they couldn’t remove; the foam came from the basement, too.

This time, the audience saw a scene in the theatre, and then followed actors down the stairs and between two basement rooms, standing throughout the intermission-less show. “Every time they went around a corner, it was a little different, and that made them a little uneasy,” says Carbine, who didn’t have to think about sight lines or volume but about how to move audiences through the space. Medelis did lights and costumes, Carbine the sets, but both had a hand in everything. “The space was the design,” says Medelis.

Throughout rehearsals, Carbine could only guess where people would stand. “The sightlines and viewpoints are infinite,” he says. “It felt more like I was directing a movie.” Carbine’s Brendalinda Performance Collaborative performs in unconventional spaces, including an art gallery, and Carbine hasn’t seated an audience yet. “How do you encourage spectators, who are used to sitting quietly in the dark at performances, to become part of the performance?” asks Carbine, who hopes to change perceptions about what performance can be.

Medelis also invited Fratellanza, a new company that surprises audiences with its physical rigor and imaginative perspective, to devise and design a work at Mix. In a wildly original farce by Fratellanza directors Jim and Paul Manganello, actors, clowns, and printers collide in a print shop to publish the plays of the recently deceased Shakespeare. The brothers set out to stretch the space the same way they stretched the story and their characters in The Mute Quire. Initially, they had wanted a “mock 17th-century feel, with a proscenium on one end” but found in-the-round seating opened the space up and gave the show a communal aesthetic. “Once you’re in-the-round, everywhere is fair game: in front of, behind, over, on, and under the audience. So we staged certain things in the lighting booth, the hallway through which the audience enters, outside the theatre. Once you’ve exhausted every corner like that, it feels huge,” says Jim. “We created our deconstructed printing press and our ship with some ropes and hooks attached to the ceiling. We found that, when we angled our projectors up, slightly over the heads of the audience, it relieved the tension of just looking straightforward, like putting yeast in the bread.”

They bought hooks, ropes, blank canvases, and two Kodak Ektagraphic slide projectors, “like the ones university lectures used to be given on, the ones with real, honest-to-goodness slides,” says Paul. They tested placements and angles, noting throw distances and trying not to blind the audience. Because these projectors produced images that were vivid but small, they purchased a third to create a massive image.

A rope used to string up canvases and sheets had to be tossed up into a hook, slide easily back and forth through that hook, be hauled up and down by actors, and be visually interesting. So, they required a heavy rope, with a smooth shiny finish of medium girth. They found one with a striped pattern that cost $80. “That rope really made the show move,” says Paul. “We didn’t want to be a cooking show, where you introduce the ingredients and then pull out a finished cake. The beauty is in the doing.”   

Davi Napoleon is author of Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theatre about a theatre that started out in non-theatrical spaces, then took up residence in the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She is a frequent contributor to Live Design.