Written and performed by Tracy Weller, Holiday House: Christmas Bends is an immersive tale that was presented by Mason Holdings at the Fourth Street Theatre. The creative team included director Kristjan Thor, set and prop designers Justin and Christopher Swader, lighting designer Zach Blane, costume designer Natalie Loveland, and sound designer/composer Philip Carluzzo. Read all about the lighting and scenic design here.
Space Issues
The Fourth Street Theatre is a very small space. The lobby is not really suitable for an audience holding area for any length of time. Originally, the production was going to have access to a basement. Christopher Swader explains, “We thought there would be a kind of Christmas party of sorts in the basement that would serve as a lobby/holding area. It would be full of vintage Christmas stuff, decorations that bring back a nostalgic feeling, something overly Christmas-y.”
When that basement space became unavailable, the team had to reassess. The lobby/Christmas party had become important to the design, so they improvised. “We removed half of the audience seating and essentially walled off that space,” adds Christopher Swader. “We basically cut the space in half. The back six rows became the ‘lobby,’ which then had all these weird levels that we embraced as more funky architecture. It was decked out with tons of Christmas decorations, pictures with Santa, eggnog, and Christmas cookies. Then the door would open, and the audience was led down a dark, black tunnel right onto the ‘stage’ through a door into the room.”
The black tunnel solved another complication of the production: the walls falling into huge piles of snow, but the space around the tunnel provided the kind of negative space they needed. The smallness of the theatre had led the team to conclude that only one wall of the room would be able to fall. But how would they hide the snow? “During the actual show, the black masking around the tunnel was removed, so when it got to end, Tracy pushed the wall down, and it was like the snow had magically appeared,” says Justin Swader. “We used the existing seating as the skeleton on top of which we built the snow.”
Confined Audio
Sound designer and composer Phil Carluzzo was brought on board by director Kristjan Thor. They had worked together on Astraea, a feature film. Thor’s initial direction to Carluzzo was that the composed score should be drawn from The Nutcracker, but other than that, Thor “gave me the freedom to develop specific ideas regarding the Tchaikovsky as I saw fit, based on the mood of the script,” Carluzzo says.
Being in the space with his collaborators forced Carluzzo to continue to develop his ideas and deepen them in the world of the play. “Because the set was so wonderful and created such a strong mood, I tried my best to adapt all the ideas I brought to tech to the world of that attic bedroom,” he says. “Much of what I had already worked pretty well, but I did have to alter a lot and write a good bit of new music to support the world of the show.”
The immersive aspect of the show didn’t change Carluzzo’s work that much. He had experience with work like HotelMotel, which informed his approach. For him, though, “On a surface level, there were all kinds of new things happening, but the project as a whole, from a sound/music perspective, did not require I do things that I’d never ever tried before either, in film or theatre.” This was primarily because it was a relatively light show, technically. There was a simple setup of a piano, provided by the theatre, four speakers, and an amp through which Carluzzo ran Figure 53 QLab.
Stay tuned for more about the costume design for Holiday House!
Natalie Robin is a NY-based lighting designer and the visiting assistant professor of Performance Design and Technology at Alfred University. She is also the associate producer and a founding company member of Polybe + Seats, an associate artist of Target Margin Theater, and a proud member of USA 829.
For more, read the February 2017 issue of Live Design as an interactive PDF.