Great Balls Of Cotton: An Octoroon Part Two

This is a continuation of "An Octoroon Part One," which discusses the lighting and scenic design of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon which was a sensation last season at Soho Rep, and was revisited and restaged for a run at Theatre For A New Audience (TFANA) Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, opening in February and extended through March 29. The play is based on The Octoroon, Irish author Dion Boucicault’s 1859 antebellum melodrama, yet by bridging the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Jacobs-Jenkins has created an interesting conversation about race, confronting such haunting demons as slavery and lynching as facets of American history. Directed by Sarah Benson, An Octoroon has sets by Mimi Lien, lighting by Matt Frey, sound by Matt Tierney, and projection by Jeff Sugg.

“I just had to expand the main frame for a bigger house and with balconies,” explains Tierney about his sound rig for the Brooklyn version of An Octoroon. “I was also tethered to TFANA’s house inventory. My rental budget was $0, so…” That meant using TFANA’s house console, a Yamaha LS9-32, along with a main system comprising four EAW NT29s, an EAW NTL720 line array, two EAW NTS250 subs, and 12 EAW UB12 for surrounds. This was supplemented with a pair of EAW JF50s for upstage speakers.

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

Tierney’s biggest challenge was finding appropriate locations for speakers. “It was a problem during Midsummer as well,” he notes, referring to the opening production in the theatre last year. “Finding positions there is hard. An Octoroon was the first piece in TFANA’s new space that used the stage configured that way. All of the previous shows maintained the thrust,” he adds.

Tierney says he’s been in many venues where the acoustics weren’t very good, but that’s not the case at TFANA. “In our configuration, there’s an odd slap on the stage, a small concern for the performers, but it doesn’t register in the house,” says Tierney. “What are lacking are available rigging points for speakers. I originally had the lower main left/right speakers on a trapeze dropped from an added electric. Unfortunately, they were too ‘in the picture,’ creating sightline issues, and when the wall falls, the wind would sway the speakers and thus the electric. So we had to do some crafty rigging to put them where they are now—all good.”

Actors wearing wireless mics are “strictly taboo with TFANA,” says Tierney. “Seriously, four-letter word—I was allowed a handheld Shure SM58 for one moment.” There is a cellist on stage that plays mostly acoustically, but Tierney needs to boost him/her at times, using a DPA 4099 instrument mic. Playback for the one sound effect of crickets, as well as for some musical cues, is via Figure 53 QLab version 3.

A Powerful Projection

There is just one projection in An Octoroon, but it certainly packs a punch. The sassy chatter and melodramatic plot comes to a full stop as the famous image of a double lynching in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930 fills the stage in a scene suggesting the lynching of one of the characters. “The image is not narrative and takes us out of the plot and firmly into the 20th century,” says Sugg. “Based on a play written in 19th century, this new play is quoting that play and creates a situation that is anachronistic.”

At Soho Rep, in a very tight room, the goal was to create a mysterious image so the audience couldn’t really tell how all the moving parts worked. “The inspiration in the gag is that we wanted it to look like a photo developing in a dark room, so we used a long fade of something coming into focus, with the photo projected onto a scrim. Then behind the two figures were black sculpted replicas of their images in Styrofoam, which had slight movement to them, creating double-edge images,” explains Sugg. “Sixty percent of the image passed through the scrim and hit the sculptures, which were being moved slightly by a stagehand, the reflected image shimmered.” Playback at Soho Rep was via Dataton Watchout and a Panasonic PT-D5700-U projector, with a hard border behind the scrim. In Brooklyn, the projector is a Christie Roadster M-Series 10K from WorldStage.

Photo by Gerry Goodstein

“For the move to Brooklyn, and a much bigger room, we realized that our goal of creating a baffling image would be created in a different way, not a soft intangible image but more about scale,” says Sugg. “This time we introduced computer animation into the image and projected it onto the hard wall of the set and made it huge, four times larger than it was at Soho Rep.” Sugg animated the figures so they sway a bit in the image, which does not appear via a slow fade in Brooklyn, but a single bump, a sharp revelation.

“The audience gasps as a response to the image,” Sugg points out. “It’s a much more jarring experience than at Soho Rep. It’s an immediate experience, the gasp of the revelation and the discomfort of sitting in that image. I think it’s effective for that room and more effective for that audience, who have different expectations than at Soho Rep, where the audience expects something experimental and maybe even inflammatory, but in Brooklyn, that’s not the case, for their subscription base.”

Not afraid to confront difficult subjects, An Octoroon won the Obie for best new American play last year. The critical and audience response to the play indicates that the playwright has hit a nerve and maybe opened a few doors to allow people to discuss topics that are not easy to confront, perhaps diffusing a bit of racial tension through well-designed storytelling.

For more, download the March issue of Live Design for free onto your iPad or iPhone from the Apple App Store, and onto your Android smartphone and tablet from Google Play.