In staging the premiere of Preludes, a new musical written by Dave Malloy and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the creators called upon the same design team they had worked with on Natasha, Pierre And The Great Comet Of 1812. This gave set designer Mimi Lien, lighting designer Bradley King, sound designer Matt Hubbs, and costume designer Paloma Young another chance to visit the Russia of the tsars, but this time, the action is set mostly in the mind of Russian composer/pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, as he is hypnotized in order to help battle the demons of his subconscious after the failure of his first symphony. Designed for the Claire Tow Theatre/LCT3 at Lincoln Center, Preludes premiered there on June 15.
“We had a history of working on Russian themes,” says Lien about the design team. “We followed in the same vein with slightly anachronistic research. Like with Natasha, Pierre And The Great Comet Of 1812, we knew we weren’t strictly bound to a period, so we started with Rachmaninoff in the late 1800s. There is also talk of the subway, so the kitchen is sort of a cross between a Park Slope [Brooklyn] apartment in 2015 and a theatrical green room, but there’s also an old samovar there.”
The main playing area evokes Rachmaninoff’s home with a glossy black floor and black baby grand piano on a turntable center-stage. Lien points out, “We built the turntable for the show, as it was an idea we had from the beginning. The piano on the turntable was like a record spinning or the idea of a spiral in hypnosis.”
What attracts one’s attention first, however, is an amazing assemblage of furniture and objects piled high on a platform upstage. “I see it as the weight of Romanticism bearing down on his mind—a collage of furniture from the late 1800s and more modern pieces, a tidal wave from then until now,” explains Lien, who started with this “attic” and realized it needed a container and a structure.
“Having worked in that space before, I knew that having some height upstage would be helpful, and I wanted to carve out as many levels and varied playing spaces as possible,” she says. “I also wanted the container for the space to be somewhat neutral. I thought it should be black lacquer, like the surface of a piano. That creates the feeling that we are contained within a piano, and the shape of the stage-left platform was derived from the shape of a baby grand piano and echoes the baby grand on stage.”
White Paper Mountain
Another iconic scenic element is a wooden case built to hold an opera costume and later serves as a tsar’s throne in 1800s Russia. “I found this great piece of research,” notes Lien. “It’s very architectural, like a building and a chair in one. We thought this could be the tsar’s throne, and it also has a large pane of glass in the back, so it can be a church window, too. We had also talked about having costume pieces and things in drawers or in the pile of furniture, so Rachel and I had this instinct that the pane of glass could be like a museum display case for the costume, and when the costume gets taken out and put on, it becomes the church window for a meeting with the tsar. This one object serves multiple purposes, from a display case, to a church window for vespers, and a throne.” Oriental rugs are laid on the floor around the piano and moved for the last scene when a white paper mountain rises, transforming the set.
“When watching a run-through of a workshop, during the hypnosis song, I had an idea,” recalls Lien. “What if everything on stage starts levitating and floating up, as if Rachmaninoff’s burden is lifting off his shoulders?” In doing visual research into levitation, Lien came across an image of a floating piece of plastic that looked like a mountain and inspired her. “It seemed unrealistic to float all of the furniture, but I wanted the weight of it to be obscured, so I decided to clear the stage as much as possible, except the mountain, so the rugs are rolled away as the sheet representing the mountain is pulled up on hand-cranked lines. As all the lines need to travel different distances to create the peaks on the mountains, they wind around wheels of different diameters on a single axle.”
These vertical lines also echo the strings of the piano or the staff on music paper, while the sheet itself is made of white Tyvek. Additional vertical lines in cool white electroluminescent wire are static, as they do not help pull the sheet. As Rachmaninoff speaks of a desire to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Lien’s mountain represents that as well, and, as she says, “the metaphor of the mountain is evoked to get him to climb out of his rut and depression. It’s a very symbolic image in the show.”
A period wooden door stands upstage right and is used for people coming in and out of the Rachmaninoff apartment, where the modern kitchen has coffee mugs hanging from the ceiling. “The hypnotherapist is contemporary, so she doesn’t use this door nor do historic characters such as Tolstoy or Chekov, the ones that just slip into his mind,” adds Lien, who uses a lot of white lilacs she calls “a multitude of flowers” that keep appearing from everywhere on the set, in keeping with the second song in the show, “White Lilacs.”
While the set for Preludes is primarily an interior landscape representing the interior of Rachmaninoff’s mind, there are also some exterior touches, including a few typical Russian birch trees, “but these are pine rather than white birch,” notes Lien. “The actors climb over everything, the pile of furniture as well as the sheet, which could also be snow or a three-year build-up of crumpled music paper, before it is raised. The set ultimately provides a sense of Russia, a sense of the clutter in the composer’s mind, and a sweep over time from the 1800s to the present.”
Read about Bradley King's lighting design.
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