This is a continuation of "Shipwrecked Magic Show: Part Two." A reimagined version of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest had an acclaimed world premiere at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas this past winter. Produced by the American Repertory Theater and The Smith Center, the show is currently in the midst of a second run through June in Cambridge, MA at A.R.T. The highly creative piece was adapted and directed by Aaron Posner and Teller (of Penn and Teller fame), who also provided the magic. The production features music by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and movement by Pilobolus. The design team includes scenic designer Dan Conway, lighting designer Christopher Akerlind, sound designer Darron L. West, and costume designer Paloma Young.
For his audio design, West embraced the play’s dust bowl, circus tent framework. “We wanted our microphones not to be prominent, much like what Charles [Coes, associate sound designer] and I did for Peter and the Starcatcher. We didn’t want to call attention to the sound here but just have it emanating from the story. There are no electronic sound effects in the show, nothing that’s being triggered or sampled in the show. Everything is real, except there was an instance where we really wanted to have a wind machine but didn’t actually have the people to run it. So we went out and sampled a wind machine and put that into a cue. It was just basic storytelling of the piece and accenting the magic beats of the show and then putting in a system that would work in a tent.”
West describes his work “as very much a problem-solving kind of design. We had a lot of issues to solve: doing it in a tent, issues with magic, issues with a live band. We knew we were going into a tent, and it’s The Tempest, so we knew we were going to need some volume and some massive amount of coverage. When we first got the plan of the tent, both Charles and I were amazed at the size of it. We had to go back and add speakers to the cluster. We were as prepared for the situation as we possibly could have been in advance. Plus, we shopped it out of Masque Sound, rather than doing it out of a rental shop in Vegas. We wanted to have the control of putting the system together, and we trust the guys at Masque. We had a pretty good plan. It loaded in faster than we expected, and we had a great house crew. Our mix engineer went out with it to administer the load-in.”
Like with the other disciplines, the tent posed a number of audio challenges for West, but in the end, he is pleased with the results. “I think that we were all pleasantly surprised,” he says. “We did a lot of work on the tent when we got in there, especially putting black drapes up and insulating as much as we possibly could. We still fought the HVAC system. The practical reality is that we are in a tent, and it’s part of the show. There are certain things that you cannot govern because you’ve made that artistic choice. You do the best you can; you turn the mics up a little louder when the AC comes on; you turn them down when the AC goes off. You have to groove with it. There’s nothing to be done.”
The weight limits of the tent came to visit the audio department as well. “We did have an issue when we first started hanging speakers,” says West. “The tent was set for a specific weight load, and when we got there, we found that Chris Akerlind had to strip some lights out of the plot. We didn’t get to put in our rear fill system that we had designed because, after the tent went up, we were told that it couldn’t support that weight.” Being in a tent added some other basic maintenance issues you normally don’t have to deal with in a theatre. “You have to cover your computer because it gets dusty; we were in a desert after all,” West says. “The one thing that I kept asking Charles was, ‘We do have a maintenance routine for the microphones, right? Stuff is getting dirty.’ The trumpeter needed to clean the dirt out of his valves. All those simple things to consider because we were in a tent.”
A Stormy Night
West had similar challenges as the other designers, noting that they really couldn’t pre-plan the magic cues in advance and knew they would have to be dealt with during the tech process. “You can’t really conceive how a magic trick is going to represent itself to the audience,” explains West. “Only when you tech it, put it together, and put the lights on it, then you go, ‘Oh, we might need an accent here.’ There was a lot of shooting from the hip, looking at little magic moments and either working with the band or manufacturing something and popping it in. There was a lot of stacking on duties as we teched, a lot of stuff that we had to deal with all at once simultaneously. There was no sitting in a nice, quiet rehearsal hall inventing all of the sound effects.”
The Tempest requires a variety of sound levels, from the storm to quieter book scenes, as well as music and a four-piece band. “The show itself exists in many, many frames,” West says. “We have a very presentational frame of an opening piece of music that feels like a concert. The next scene is a gigantic tempest storm that is partly created in a very old-fashioned way with wind machines, a small band, and thunder sheets. We still had to fill up the tent and feel—for the lack of a better word—cinematically large in that room just to push the story of this ship drowning. The very next scene is a very, very intimate scene between Prospero and his daughter. Dynamics was the thing that took us a while to find and took a little bit to master. Because it really goes from a whisper to a scream and back to a whisper, it was interesting to negotiate that. One performance frame meant the full band and the vocals were in the full system, and you would go to a scene where just the text was coming from the cluster, balancing how the audience’s ears were going to adjust from scene to scene. We would have a big, gigantic storm sequence, for instance, that we purposely buttoned and reverbed the end of it out, so it had a decay to bring the audiences ears back down to be able to listen to the talky Prospero/Miranda scene that’s pure text. It was a lot about trying to figure out the dynamics because it has a pretty huge dynamic. It was like doing many, many different shows inside of one gigantic framework.”
In the end, West is proud of the subtleties of how the design works. He explains that it “really is driven by the plot of the piece; it’s driven by the band and that music. For a show being about a tempest, even the opening sequence with the storm feels really organic. To some degree, with doing it in a tent, and all of the given circumstances, the show is much louder than I would have ever imagined we would have wanted it to run, but we needed to do that. You still get a sense of the dynamics of the piece; you can really hear the play. Despite the fact that everyone is miked, and there’s a full band, it doesn’t feel overblown. It still feels simple and classic; it’s reverent to the theatre and reverent to Shakespeare. I think that’s the thing that I am most proud of.”
Stay tuned for the continuation of this article. Read and see more in the latest issue of Live Design which can be downloaded for free for iPad or iPhone at the Apple App Store.