Tragic Kingdom

Photo by Evan Hanson

Nine hundred pages, one lighting plot with 600 cues, at least 500 sound cues, 148 costumes, and a five-page prop list. That’s what it takes to do 32 tragedies at once.

All Our Tragic, Sean Graney’s adaptation of all the Greek tragedies, is an eight-act epic, broken into four sections, separated by dinner, if you see them the same day. It runs about ten hours, 12 if you count the intermissions. The Hypocrites in Chicago opened it last year alley-style, and the team remounted it—yes, they’ve done it twice—this summer, reconfigured in proscenium/thrust style. In both arrangements, characters are supposed to be living in an abandoned factory.

Lighting designer Jared Moore says the work opens with far-fetched magical and mythical elements; the second part explores the stories of Oedipus and Antigone, and deals with political relationships; the third focuses on the Trojan War; and the work ends with the revenge stories of Agamemnon, Elektra, and Klytemnestra.

Moore says the idea was to keep things different for each act, even though he was doing four shows on one rep plot. “The challenge was coming up with the thing you know you need that will work for everything and special items for individual pieces,” he says. For the recent production, color was a little more saturated and a little more abstract, particularly in the first act. The theatre is small and doesn’t have the budget for the latest, greatest gear. “We borrowed from friends from Columbia College and theatres we’ve worked with in the past. That’s the nature of Chicago storefront theatre,” the lighting designer adds.

Equipment wasn’t all the team borrowed. The massive work developed out of Graney’s earlier productions of Greek tragedies, including These Seven Sicknesses, his adaptation of the seven surviving plays of Sophocles. “We borrowed design vocabulary from those other productions and morphed it into this show,” says Moore.

Photo by Evan Hanover

For the version of Oedipus that ran less than an hour in that earlier production, he used lime greens and yellows in a plagued world. For All Our Tragic, Moore used a different palette for each act, using harsh sidelight to create long shadows and an operatic feel in scenes when countries are at war. “The fourth act is most intimate,” says Moore, who used more specials and focuses for this, a mix of older Altman fixtures, several Philips Vari-Lite VL2500s, and Harman Martin Professional MAC Auras. “I’m impressed by the size they can get in a small venue with a 13' grid.”

For the earlier, alley configuration, the systems were on either side. “The challenge was taking something very specific and carving it out to this rectangular staging,” says Moore. “We needed longer throw distances to create shadows and scale. Lighting is bigger in the alley. Translating that to a proscenium, I had to take my front lighting system, which was a diagonal, and break those into halves to create angular lighting to get the same feel. It’s not a realistic show, and we wanted to maintain the sculptural nature of angles from the first year. Sean shows how the political, social, and personal problems of the past are the same as today. He used the idea of these characters going to jobs in a factory to help tell these stories.”      

Power was also an issue as, like most Chicago storefronts, the space doesn’t have excessive power for such a production. “Trying to create the environments needed for the length of the show and to keep it from being stale was a real challenge,” says Moore. “Also, we source gear from a ton of different places in the typical community-driven mentality in the Chicago scene.”

One Epic Production

Photo by Tom Burch

Tech rehearsals were…well, you can imagine. “It’s tough to do notes on that many cues,” says Moore. “You want to refine everything in tech. In reality, for this show, we had to plow through. If there was something specific we hadn’t gotten yet, we put in a placeholder.”

Associate LD Mike Durst served as a second pair of eyes during these exhausting techs. The twosome worked on a tight schedule, meeting cue-per-hour quotas they set for themselves. “We teched four plays in the time you’d normally tech one,” says Durst, who did more than take care of paperwork for Moore, and notes that they continued to tweak the show even after it had technically opened. “We had some super late nights of programming. I’d sleep and he’d program, then he’d sleep, and I’d program.”

Sound designer Kevin O’Donnell was grateful that Graney did a lot of the preliminary work. Almost all the paper tech was done when he arrived. “You don’t have to sit down and think, ‘There’s going to be a big shift here,’” says O’Donnell. “Sean tells you that. Some people might think that’s limiting, but it’s really amazing, especially when dealing with something this big.”

O’Donnell says design choices usually weren’t obvious. “There’s no clear period at any point, so nothing could be anachronistic, but they weren’t wacky choices for the sake of being wacky,” he says, noting that a design element can evoke a response the way unexpectedly funny dialogue can. “They were all going for a thought or feeling or reaction.” Sounds were heightened, and sometimes a series of cues had a story arc. An ever-hungry eagle who circles Prometheus dies to a sequence of sounds; Herakles shoots, hits the eagle, and the eagle screams and falls. “That affects speaker placement from the beginning,” O’Donnell adds. “Cues are very involved whenever you have to move through the space in a very specific way.”

Photo by Evan Hanover

Three women were on stage throughout, underscoring the show with their own original music. Adapting the show from an alley was “a strange and long process,” says scenic designer Tom Burch, who created a unit space that would not get in the way of actors and other scenic elements that he depended on to help set scenes. The alley setup had allowed audience members to look across and see each other, reinforcing an idea of community, but the overall stage picture could become diffuse, with some space not being used much. Burch says the new proscenium-thrust mashup allowed for a more precise stage picture without sacrificing a communal feel, and it would be easy to tour the show, something the brave team is considering, but with a simpler set. The new production cut six of the original 19 actors and streamlined story lines.

But the most important elements stayed, adapted to the new space. “We cut them down and made them more succinct,” says Burch. “Typically you do a show, it goes up, and it goes away.” Here, the team could step back and think about new approaches. “It was really exciting,” adds Burch. “What did I mess up, and how can I make this better? I was very pleased about the first production, but I corrected some things. I love alley spaces. I love surprising an audience with an organization of architecture they’re unused to, but the overall product was so much stronger this time.”

Research included looking at old factories and dilapidated buildings to help inspire a setting that would support the work. “Themes of war rage continually through the entire play,” Burch says. “What if we took a World War II ammunitions factory, transported it to the time of the Greeks, and brought it back to modern day? How would it change?” He reused scenic elements throughout the work: A trap door could be Antigone’s grave and a place for the immolation of Herakles. Characters came out of three doors at the start of each act and then opened a sliding door to herald the opening of the act.

The Trojan War Meets WWII

Photo by Evan Hanover

The team had too little time when mounting the first production. The second time, they were able to make adjustments. There was less blood, but that made it more powerful when audiences did see it. Burch usually does his own props on projects he designs, but this one was way too big. Although props designer Danielle Case bought more props than she built, she had to modify most. “Sean has a very specific vision,” she says. “Anything I buy normally gets reinvented in some way. If I buy a book, it will probably get a different cover. If I buy a plate, it’s probably going to get painted.”

Some of Case’s favorites were also some of the hardest props. For instance, she built a club for Herakles from PVC pipe that exploded on stage during a performance in the first run. This time, she modified her original design, using insulation tape, “the kind you use on windows and doors,” instead of relying entirely on PVC insulation foam. And where she did use foam, she sprayed a protective cover on it so it wouldn’t flake or break away when the club is used for stage combat. “It needed to be soft enough, too,” she notes.

Costume designer Alison Siple pulled many garments from stock, shopped for others that she altered, and made some from scratch, even though the theatre doesn’t have a costume shop. “Sean hired me early,” Siple recalls. “We did a ton of research and decided that we wouldn’t let our imagination be constrained by how we were going to do it.” And Siple started sketching. They weren’t trying to realize “some giant concept,” she says, but were drawn to certain images.

Photo by Evan Hanover

The first act was the furthest from contemporary life than the others. “We stole a little from Game Of Thrones,” says Siple of the lush colors and intricate patterns. As the play becomes more political, more citified, men wore suits. For the Trojan War, she opted for jeans—“something cheap to buy and easy to wash”—in green military colors. Women at home were often pink and puffy. “Then we ended in a wild, surreal place, and actors took curtain calls in their own clothes to restore what each actor really looks like.”

Thirteen actors played all the characters, requiring many wigs and complex makeup. Most members of the team had been involved in Graney’s productions of Oedipus and These Seven Sicknesses. “It never really feels like we get it all the way done,” says Siple, who tweaked costumes into the second run. “You can always make those pants a little dirtier.”

And that’s not all: Actors were occasionally called to a rehearsal because Graney continued doing rewrites. Fortunately, the same actors returned for the second run, which relieved Siple; shopping for shoes again would have been a nightmare.

Backstage, “choreographed chaos” reigned, as actors changed clothes, and wardrobe people cleaned blood. Garments fell apart and needed to be replaced from time to time, particularly pieces that required constant washing. “It was a communal effort, and everyone bought into it. That meant rehearsing six hours a night for eight weeks and longer on weekends,” says Burch, echoing what all involved expressed. “But when in my career will I get a chance to design all the Greek plays at once?”

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