Dan Walker took home a piece of the set he designed for Vino Veritas. The year was 2008, the theatre, The Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, MI, and experiences Walker was having away from the theatre made him feel a connection to the characters. Sarah Pearline, who designed the 2017 Rose production, says her personal aesthetic affected the set. “You go through research and collect all this stuff,” she says. “I’m in my late 30s, and I connect with these people, so things that speak to my taste won out.”
Playwright David MacGregor describes his play as a “dark comedy about truth.” It’s serious and comic, realistic and a little fantastical. A couple, both photographers, have returned from travels to Peru with a bottle of ceremonial wine, made from the skin of blue dart tree frogs and said to be a truth serum. When their neighbors visit on Halloween night, uncensored honesty prevails, and marriages threaten to unravel.
At the end of Act One, Lauren tells her husband she knows of his affair with the neighbor. The other three are stunned. Act Two might have become a rehash of a melodramatic chestnut. It doesn’t. It could have moved into magic realism. It doesn’t. It straddles the line between the realistic and the stylized and symbolic, mixing stark reality with a touch of magic in the wine and the fanciful holiday.
Although both scenic designers related to the reality of the characters, the set for both was a basic living room and kitchen, and the venue was the Rose’s three-quarter thrust. The creative teams responded to the storyline by taking the play in two subtly different directions. “At the Rose, they encourage everyone to look at everything we do as if it were an original production, as if it had never been done before,” says Dana White, who designed lighting for both productions. “Plus the cast was so different.”
Rose artistic director Guy Sanville, who directed the world premiere in '08 and has worked with MacGregor on three other plays, says MacGregor is “a great storyteller with a wicked sense of humor and a huge heart. He’s very smart and ruthless with his own material.” Although MacGregor made major changes during rehearsals for the 2008 production, the tweaks and updates for Rhiannon Ragland’s 2017 production were minor.
Theatrical Or Realistic?
“The original version had a very realistic set with a naturalistic color scheme. It looked like a home you could move into,” MacGregor recalls. “The current version is not like any home I have ever been in, although I’m sure a home like that could exist somewhere. The palette of the set is dominated by various shades of blue, which ties in with the whole idea of blue wine.”
“In the original production, the idea for the set was not to have any walls, just to have an outline of windows to see out into the yard, taking it a step away from reality,” says White, adding that the team rethought when Sanville realized he didn’t want the audience to see characters before they entered, and walls went up between the windows.
Stage directions say the play transpires in a suburban neighborhood. Walker said the team changed this to Ann Arbor, a college town, and he created an arts and crafts bungalow that had been redone with a sunken living room; he designed stained glass windows for it, too. “We raised the back half of the stage and handmade a staircase with zigs and zags and interlocking balustrades. They were artists who ended up in this corporate photography,” says Walker, explaining their home would indicate the dissolution of their art and their marriage, of the ideals they started out with in life. By indicating a downstage fireplace, they could be lit by firelight for a ceremony at the end of the play.
Generally, Walker prefers doing “things with steel and plexiglass, Chekhov with drapes and gobos” and leaned at first toward an abstract set, but remembers thinking “how much it was a really interesting straight-up take on a marriage and how it gets chewed away.” The Rose provided the time and resources to take everything as far as he could imagine, and Walker felt that this Frank Lloyd Wright-style realistic home served the play in the end.
Making It Modern
Pearline created a modern home in 2017. “For the most part, we wanted a realistic place, a plausible place where these people actually live, where we could get lost in the story,” says Pearline.
The neighborhood and the season informed the set, too. “There had to be leaves,” she adds. “In a lot of ways, the region doesn’t matter. There could be leaves or plum trees.” The team decided that as artists, the characters might be living in the least expensive house in the neighborhood or in a house that required renovation, but they would have a sense of design. There might have been hardwood floors in the kitchen, but perhaps there was a flood, and the floor needed to be redone, hence tile. Their furniture would be eclectic, allowing Pearline to find pieces she felt were right.
Pearline considered a few large photographs, as had decorated the walls in '08, but decided against anything big and bold. “They talk so much about their international travel,” she says, noting that the couple would bring home little things that we might see on shelves and, since they are photographers, they would also bring back many photographs. The walls were filled with photos, mostly 8x10s. The palette, Pearline says, was blue running against neutral colors.
Pearline put the sofa on a diagonal to meet a staging need in the three-quarter thrust. “It’s all about staging things in terms of a triangle, so the person you want most to see at any time is at the apex,” Sanville explains. “When someone does a speech at the apex, and lights dissolve into the person’s face, it gives the whole thing a lot more depth.” From a seat in the house, the asymmetry of the furniture arrangement helped create a sense of unpredictability.
The team thought about eliminating the kitchen, but nixed that idea. “We wanted characters to escape the main playing space without being able to leave,” Pearline says.
Danna Segrest, who did the props for both productions, says the two directors wanted to say different things about the characters with the props, and the actors, too, had an impact on prop selection. One actor did more with a golf club in the first; the same character was played by someone with musical talents later, resulting in bongos and a guitar on stage.
“We started out with lots of kid’s instruments for a while, too,” says Segrest. These were cut because while the couple’s offstage children left more of a mark on the first set, with their stuff strewn about, this time, the show focused on their mother. “A key to Lauren’s character is she wants to be on the cutting edge.”
Segrest twice commissioned Fireworks Glass Studios in Williamston, MI to create a wine bottle, changing the shape for each production. The first one was elongated and blue; the second, tear-drop shaped with an orange leaf that sets off the blue wine.
Creating the wine was a challenge. How do you make Gatorade look like wine? Segrest and her properties apprentice tried a variety of modifications, finding a touch of pomegranate and almond milk effective.
Halloween props were also prominent. These changed from kid-carved pumpkins to adult-purchased objects that included a fancy metal sign and a spooky zombie-doll controlled by batteries that an actor turns on and off, props that Segrest says “were a little deeper and a little scarier.”
Read more in Part Two!
For more, read the June 2017 issue of Live Design.