Sarah Pearline: Creating Art That Serves The Text And The Space, Part Three

Sarah Pearline designs sets and projections, and sometimes builds and paints them. Read Part One and Part Two of this in-depth designer profile.

At The Hope Rep

When Pearline finished her BFA at NYU, she worked in the business for four years, assisting designers. One of them, Adrian Jones, urged her to study design with Ming Cho Lee at Yale, where Jones had done his MFA. After Yale, Pearline returned to New York and mainly designed new plays downtown, and doing circus shows in the summer.

She and Dambacher came to Michigan in 2011 to teach at Michigan State University. In 2013, she began teaching set and projection design at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Old Man and the Moon
Old Man and the Moon

“Sarah is an absolute gem of a collaborator and artist,” director Katie Campbell says, after directing A Christmas Carol at Wayne State University. “She is conceptually tenacious, committed to excellence in execution, approaches the creative process with generosity and openness, and tackles the challenges of the unknown with humor and enthusiasm. This is evident all throughout the production whether it be the chaotic inner workings of Scrooge's mind made manifest through abstractions or the realism of a blustery winter’s night, to the imposing ghostly presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, she gets it. She’s particularly adept at sensing the spirit or feeling of a moment and translating it into a physical reality through her designs.” 

After guest directing at Wayne State, Lenny Banovez, artistic director of Hope Summer Rep in Michigan and of the Titan Theatre Company in New York, invited Pearline to design Julius Caesar at the Titan. “Our space, like most Off-Broadway spaces, is exceptionally challenging, but she nailed it,” he says. “She designed this glorious sunburst set, and then did a constellation floor treatment.”

When he became AD at the Hope Rep, Banovez called Pearline again. “Sarah immediately become our resident scenic designer,” he says. Early on, Pearline designed Old Man and the Old Moon for Hope Rep. The work was created by the PigPen company, which did a low- tech production of the piece, relying mainly on shadow puppets. Pearline didn’t feel shadow puppets would work on Hope’s thrust stage, and the team wanted to put its own spin on a piece about a man whose job it is to keep the leaky moon filled with light. When his wife leaves home, he chases her on land and sea. In one scene, characters are trapped in the belly of a fish.

Old Man and the Old Moon for Hope Rep 2
Old Man and the Moon

The couple had a place where they resided, which Pearline imagined should open into a bigger world. She created a giant dock that could split apart so props could come on and off, a cottage which could transform into a hot air balloon, and a moon. “The moon had to have a big presence and had to drain and refill with light. The guy who tends to it has to be elevated so he can reach it. What are his tools to collect light? I started sketching, and it became this little platform with a spiral staircase to their living space. It was really all very fantastical and fun.” She built a variety of “quirky props,” including a fish made of plastic visqueen with lights strung through it, which lived in a wall. 

“Sarah created an underwater glowing anglerfish with plastic scales,” costume designer Leslie Vaglica says. “It had to be lightweight to move easily and had to use minimal manpower because the cast was not large. The huge fish creature underwater only had three people operating it.”

After watching Pearline make prototypes and problem solve with her scene shop team, Vaglica was impressed when she saw the completed fish move on stage. “She’s got this wonderful ability to conceptualize something and not just make a drawing and hand it off but to try different prototypes to get the best one. She’s always problem solving, even in her off-time, so when she gets in, she’s able to produce what she imagined. And she’s got this streamlined aesthetic, not simple like boring, but not cluttered or distracting. [Each piece] is exactly what it means to be.” And since Hope Rep works in rep, Pearline had to think about how, for instance, the floor would work for more than one show and find ways to move scenery and off stage. 

Banovez says the set was “detailed and nuanced, imaginative beyond words. We could go from the middle of the ocean, to battling pirates, to a hot air balloon, to the city of light in seconds.”

Old Man and the Old Moon for Hope Rep. 4
Old Man and the Moon

Pearline is a real trooper, Banovez thinks. “When Sarah was designing for Titan in NYC, we made the choice to build the set in Detroit. Then she would truck it to NYC, and we would load in. This was a good plan we thought,” Banovez recalls. “It was cost effective and would allow us more time to do numerous things in the space before tech started. Then the two-day blizzard hit. Sarah was delayed one day, then drove pretty much with the blizzard from Detroit to NYC. Sarah arrived two days later than expected. Her tiny five-foot frame in a 20' truck shows up at the theater, and we have less the 24 hours to install before tech. I believe her first words to me were ‘Don't talk, Lenny. We don't have time for talking right now. Open the truck. Also...I'm freezing.’ We then proceeded to load in.” 

Even tech is fun when Pearline is on the scene. As they added texture and aged pieces through tech for Old Man, Vaglica says she “got to experience real genius. I adore Sarah. I love her sense of humor that she infuses throughout the design process and how functional her designs end up being,”

Pearline says that when given the freedom, she strays from naturalism, even when she’s doing realistic plays. “I feel I go a little more quickly to embracing bold off-the-wall choices: ‘Okay, we’re in a theater, and we’re not trying to fake anyone out. We’re in a place where a show is taking place.’ That freedom allows me to create more compelling visuals that support and heighten the storytelling.” Everything she does, she says, is a response to the text. And the space.