As 1999 became 2000, Russians were less preoccupied with Y2K worries than the rest of the world. They were riveted on a televised address: President Boris Yeltsin announced he was stepping down and passing the torch to a KGB operative.
RELATED: Plot Luck: Japhy Weideman Lights Vladimir
Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir centers on an independent print journalist who is covering Putin’s first term. By 2024, she has uncovered an explosive story about the recent wars in Chechnya that will be dangerous to print in this censored society. She imagines conversations with a Chechnyan woman “who serves as a mirror to her, who questions if what she is doing as a journalist really makes a difference,’ says lighting designer Japhy Weideman, noting that In Russia, Putin will quash it. If it gets to the United States, what can we do about it? Is it worth the risk?
It opens on that New Year’s Eve in a television studio in Moscow. “Before they start shooting, Yeltsin has got to pee so bad and they don’t have time for him to go to the bathroom, so they get a vase off the table, and he pees into it. It’s a funny way to start the show,” says Weideman, “and something unique and historic.”
Projection designer Lucy Mackinnon says at the top of the show, before the resignation, people scurry about setting up for a live broadcast. She projected color bars, test patterns, the sort of thing those in the studio might see before a broadcast goes live.
She says director Dan Sullivan “got interested in the idea using imagery that made propaganda and television an illustrative tool.”
“The basic set is the sound stage of a TV studio with video cameras and four screens that surround an all-black set with a black glossy floor. When the play starts, when you come into the room, compact fluorescent work lights and old Fresnels are lit up so it has the feeling of a sound stage in action,” says Weideman, adding that the lighting makes spectators feel they aren’t in a typical theater house, sitting comfortably and waiting for a show to start. “It’s essentially like raw space. Then you see these camera crews come in and begin setting up for the filming.” The lights go on as they activate cameras. Screens light up. “You see color bars, they are ready to go live.”
“Yeltzin’s speech sets up the audience for what the tone of the piece will be, not only a condemnation of the Russian state but a kind of satire of the Russian state,” says scenic designer Mark Wendland. “The backdrop, a Christmas tree, Russian military flags, and columns uses the vocabulary of the falsity of that speech for the vocabulary of our play.”
“Mark Wendland’s set is very mysterious. There’s a lot of black in a black void, says costume designer Jess Goldstein. “Since the set is stylized, the costumes need to be super real, so it feels like a newsreel, not a dreamscape.” He had to dress a character as Yeltzin, then change him into other, younger characters.
The play also takes place in a kitchen, two bars, and other locations. Most scenes take place in Moscow, one in Chechnya. Wendland thought about how he could create these spaces for the Manhattan Theater Club at New York City Center Stage, a small theater with a low grid and no fly space or wings. Setting each scene in a realistic space would not be possible.
But should a story mired in falseness be anchored to realistic spaces? The solution he came to with Sullivan was to create a single set and let Mackinnon’s projections, Weidman’s lights, Dan Moses Schreier’s music, and actors in Goldstein’s costumes change the scenes. The set not only solved a practical problem, it reinforced the production concept, that everything in this world is fake.
The studio morphs into the journalist’s apartment, with projected windows. “We see other windows each time we go into a new place. The furniture hasn’t been moved at all. It feels very fake, and at the same time, it all is very beautiful,” says Mackinnon, noting that an audience can know the set is a city or an apartment or a bar, but not because her distorted projections literally reflect them. “There is a lot of darkness in the imagery. It’s very muted in terms of brightness and color images, layered on top of windows on top of windows,” she says, comparing seeing the images to being in a hall of mirrors or viewing a scene through a kaleidoscope.
“The script in many ways is like Shakespeare, in that it’s not asking for the location to provide the [story],” Wendland says, explaining that it doesn’t call for a lot of physical action–people talk to one another–but it was essential to let audiences know they were in a new place when locations changed. He did about 15 pencil sketches and a storyboard to suggest how the other designers might amplify the changes.
Weideman says Wendland’s “detailed renderings, pencil sketches, are light oriented. Mark and I have collaborated numerous times previously- he thinks a lot about light when he is conceiving what each of the scenes will look like. I try to carefully place lighting fixtures in positions that will create shafts and spaces that he has rendered in his drawings.”
Since none of the set pieces move, everything that might be needed is already onstage at the top of the show–chairs, tables, a bar. Actors would find what they needed as scenes shift.
Four rear projection screens, 20x10 feet each, and two small screens about half that size, are the primary sources for scenic information. “We also have two LED screens and a long strip of LEDS, a banner in front of the stage for titles. A small LED screen is inset in a glass cabinet that hangs about the kitchen island,” says Mackinnon. The island serves as an office desk, table and other objects in different scenes.
Mackinnon says this “magic box” allows her to project props and plates that change in different apartments or when the journalist rearranges her cabinet, all rendered in 3D. “When we’re in an office, that surface becomes a cabinet for files and papers. In a bar, it’s a place for whiskey bottles.” A crow flies into the cabinet and interacts with a scene. Mackinnon says this trick element reinforces the idea that everything is artificial, crafted around characters.”
Mackinnon researched the architecture of Moscow, what it looks like now and in 2000, and control centers in television studies. “We were originally thinking we would use a lot of footage of Putin, but we haven’t included much of that. A lot of archival research supported that early design idea.” She created most of the images for the show and pulled some from archival sources in the public domain, taken in Russia.
“Mark originally thought we might want to use older CRT monitors on stage to have an array of monitors for titles and presentation of footage. Instead, we worked with LED…to keep the surfaces we had to work with clean and bright and technically efficient. We wanted to put a lot of technology in terms of screens into a small space,” she says, noting that LEDs allowed her to do more in less space. “We needed to be smart about how to deliver a lot of imagery. The entire stage is wide open. You can see lights backstage. You can see people moving around back there.”
“Most scenes are at night,” says Weideman who tried to stylize realistic light coming from the windows into the kitchen and from inside the halogen lights under the kitchen cabinets.
“Sometimes we simply contain the characters downstage, and don't light the rest of the stage….[But] even when you turn one light on, you can see studio lights hanging in the air, big Fresnels with barndoors,” Weideman says. We implement a light layer of haze to create a sense of dimensionality and direction of source.”
Since the play takes place only 20 years ago, clothes are contemporary and Goldstein shopped most of it, only building a dress and a deacon’s outfit for a Russian Orthodox wedding scene.
He brought more clothes than needed because he enjoys collaborating with actors. He brings them “into fittings to look at an array of choices that support an overall concept of the character.” From those choices, a look for each scene emerges as the actor begins seeing the character in the mirror.
Goldstein researched online, looking at photos of contemporary Russian bureaucrats and journalists. “People are not terribly well dressed,” he says, explaining that while clothes are inexpensive, they are functional and not out of style.
“The lead character, a well-educated journalist, has a daughter in her young 20s, a university student in St. Petersburg,” he says, adding that he dressed them as you might expect women of those generations to dress. Bureaucrats and media people working for the government wore suits.
He dressed a Chechnyan woman who appears to the journalist as she tries to write “not like a victim. She’s very spunky. I want her anger to come through in the clothes. She wears a punky wig and severe lines.” For most clothes, he used neutrals with a pop of color at times.
“When I do a play like this, I read the script a few times and do a costume plot that helps me to remember scene by scene,” says Goldstein. “Each time I read it, I got more out of it.” Goldstein had stopped designing costumes about five years ago and when offered jobs, he insisted he was retired. Then came an offer from Vladimir, and he couldn’t refuse.
Sound
Schrier, composer as well as sound designer, wanted the score to sound “Russian, with a kind of melancholy, strangeness and beauty.” To this end, he decided on the orchestration of oboe d’amore, English horn, cello, mandolin, keyboard and soprano voice floating on top of the ensemble. “This dark hued and ethereal instrumentation works to get to the Russian character of the play,” he says.
As the sound designer, Schreier wanted his music to mesh with one of the images that appears in the play, crows with flapping wings. “This combination of music and sounds plays an important part of many of the transitions. Another example of this sound/music combination” is at the top of part two, where the theme is sung by a solo voice deep in reverb and played against the tolling bell of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square.”
For Exit Music, Schreier composed a march evoking the world of Kurt Weill as if it were played by Josef Stalin.
Says Weideman, "The style of the play is a mix of domestic realistic scenes with moments of heightened reality.”