Sarah Pearline designs sets and projections, and sometimes builds and paints them. She also directs plays, in a sense. “A set designer has to direct the play a little bit,” Pearline says. “That’s not to say I’m creating the blocking, but I’m thinking through potential movements in scenes and making sure that the space I’m going to provide can accommodate that.” Design, she says, involves thinking outside the box while being sensitive to the tone of the play and how the director sees it.
Directors also affect the way she designs. She loves working with those who appreciate her expertise and let her run with her own ideas of how to achieve the world they want. She has come across those who “tell me where the windows should be and where the doors should be before I even know if there should be windows and doors.” But she feels lucky to enjoy creative collaborations with several directors.
Guy Sanville, the artistic director of the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, Michigan, has asked Pearline to design often. “She’s a dream to work with. She’s an artist. Not all designers are,” Sanville reflects, explaining that sometimes when, for instance, a color doesn’t seem right, he’ll ask a designer to try another. But he doesn’t do that with Pearline.
“What I’ve learned with Sarah, is that I’m better off trusting her. If something bothers me, I let it play out. I have a lot of faith in her,” Sanville says. Her sets, he has found are always right for the play, and actors learn to work on an art installation. “There are designers who do good work, but art gets in the way of the world of the play. Sarah treads carefully between creating something beautiful and revealing something about the play.”
At the Purple Rose of Chelsea
Pearline enjoys designing for the Purple Rose, the theater Jeff Daniels founded in his hometown. She’s come to know the ins and outs of its thrust well. “I love putting something above the thrust,” she says, noting that sometimes the rest of the artistic team resists that since it can, for instance, interfere with light angles.
In Sanville’s recent production of Roadsigns, a play by Daniels based loosely on a poem by the actor’s mentor, Lanford Wilson, stories unravel on a bus where people are trapped together; a guitarist/poet sings occasionally from a club stage or sometimes while wandering through the bus. When Pearline read the play, she imagined a bar with an open mike, with a guitarist talking to a handful of patrons. Then she decided it was as important to capture the bus as the bar, “the skeletal feel of the memory of the bus, when you’re riding on the highway at night and you see headlights and taillights, a streak of red on one side and white on the other, the scenery outside the bus, not necessarily at night, the shape of a bus with luggage rails overhead.”
Would the driver be upstage or down? Does he have a steering wheel or not? What about headlights? The team played around with various approaches. Pearline wondered how she could create a textured set, where people were lost in their memories yet sharing an experience on the bus.
When she decided she wanted a ceiling installation, lighting designer Noele Stollmack was the first person she contacted. “I sent her a sketch before I showed it to anyone. She was game to model the whole thing and figure out angles to deal with that ceiling piece and get that imagery.”
Plexiglass roads hung, creating a sense of motion above the stage as well as on it. The team routed groves in the stage deck to allow strips of curved plexiglass to suggest a road. The upstage wall was several pieces of wall, broken by hanging pictures that showed scenery people might see on the road. “We went back and forth about the placement of the pieces of wall and the gaps between them in an effort to find the best composition that would work for the action of the play and allow for the most dynamic lighting,” Pearline says.
Stollmack says Pearline is a true collaborator. “I’m able to more effectively support both the visual message that all of the designers are trying to achieve on stage and able to light her scenery more effectively because she’s included me in her process. It’s crazy, but that kind of collaboration is the exception, not the rule. I’m really happy she’s teaching because that means her process is ideally going to be passed along to her students.”
“We just closed a show at Purple Rose and that involved two strips of plexiglass that looked like the highway floated in the air. The sense that I had from the Purple Rose was that those elements were mine to cut, if they stood in the way of light reaching the stage. But I thought they were mostly beautiful elements,” says Stollmack. “There were adjustments that needed to be made based on 3D modeling and photometric calculations that I did.” There were also changes to the upstage walls to take advantage of lighting equipment. When she asked Pearline for them, the scenic designer was on board at once. “I look forward to every project I do with her, and I’m not inclined to be overly generous. She has an interesting point of view and lighting her stuff is far from easy, but she’s a pleasure to work with,” adds Stollmack.
Michelle Mountain, an actor and director at the Rose, enjoys working on Pearline’s sets. “You never have to fight anything on them,” notes Mountain.
She also enjoys working with Pearline when directing. In an early conversation about Mountain’s Purple Rose production of Morning’s at Seven, they talked about two radically different approaches the design might take. “Sarah said we can be hyper-real or just have a stump and a swing,” Mountain recalls. Taking inspiration from Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, they settled on something in between. “The play requires two porches and a tree. We wound up with suspended windows, no walls.”
“I absolutely loved working on this show,” Pearline says. “Everything about the Wyeth painting felt so true to the world of this play that I ended up designing a set that was, as much as possible, a three-dimensional recreation of the painting. We painted something close to the original on the back wall of the set and then extended the colors and textures from the painting consistently through the whole space. The goal was to make it feel as if the characters were walking around in the world of the painting.”
“I love working with her,” Mountain says. “She’s funny and fun to talk to. We’re both a little loopy. We think in curves, rather than straight lines. She thinks out of the box, but she doesn’t do that for effect. She asks what the play is actually about. She’s never wedded to a concept. It’s never about her art. It’s what do we have to do to tell this story.”
Read Part Two and Part Three!