The La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls festival (WoW) brings theatre to outdoor areas in San Diego. Although artists look for places that meet the needs of a script, sometimes the locales they find determine the nature of the piece.
Chekhov’s Platonov
When director/designer Jay Scheib was developing his adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov, he toured San Diego with Gabriel Greene, director of new play development at the Playhouse, and an idea came to them. "He and I went to a number of different places," Scheib recalls. "I was most taken with an old drive-in movie theatre, so we hatched this idea to work with cameras and project a drive-in movie." The movie would be projected on a gigantic screen above the actors.
The real house had to go by the boards when insurance costs proved exorbitant. The theatrical house that went on the boards instead may have better served physical performances that included crashing through walls.
The location couldn’t be obtained either, but by the time Scheib realized he couldn’t secure the movie theatre, he had secured an idea that could work in any space that could accommodate a 35' screen. They opted for a park on the University of California, San Diego campus, nestled between a public art sculpture and trees. There, he choreographed himself into the action, walking among the actors
with a handheld high-definition camera and creating a live 100-minute single-take feature film. The work was staged simultaneously on the ground by actors and above the space on screen in real time. He didn’t play a character. “I kind of disappeared inside the action,” he says.
Performances took place after dark. “Cameras are very sensitive in terms of color and temperature, so whatever ambient light we were working with had to match, even in the dark,” notes Scheib. A combination of film lighting and theatrical lighting, primarily Fresnels and scoops, and color-corrected fluorescent lights hung around the space.
Scheib says that, once he chose the location, the site determined the design and the staging. “Choosing a site has an impact on the content more than a particular work demanding a particular location,” he says. Even so, he was able to transfer the play to an indoor space in New York (The Kitchen) and recreate much of the San Diego design. Again, actors performed the work while he filmed a simultaneous broadcast, but instead of showing that broadcast to people in the theatre and replicating the San Diego experience, it was shown at exactly the same time to a different audience at the AMC Cinema in Times Square.
In San Diego, the work was called Platonov or The Disinherited. In New York, the play at The Kitchen was Platonov and the film, The Disinherited. “Because revenue streams are such a challenging issue, the idea was to try to create two works of art in a single production process,” he says. “The movie is called The Disinherited, the theatre being one of the things that has been disinherited.”
Patricia Rincon's The Myth Project: Altar
Che Café in San Diego has been an iconic, youth-driven eatery and center for political radicalism, alternative music, and art for several decades, making it an ideal site for choreographer Patricia Rincon’s The Myth Project: Altar. “It’s about the revolution in the '60s, when the café was built and right now with the Occupy movement,” says sound designer Melanie Chen.
The production, based on interviews with, and writings of, muralist Mario Torero, takes audiences around four sides of the café on what is billed as a “socio-political journey through past and present.” The first segment is in the patio area, which features a Torero mural on the outside wall. “We took audiences on a ride,” Chen says. “We started out on the patio area, then wrapped around the building and ended back on the patio.”
Chen had to incorporate “a low buzzing sound, kind of like a faraway waterfall” from the city’s water filtration center, which stands across the street from the café, along with sounds of heavy traffic, for a scene on one side. Her sound design took on a different tone for each scene, from rock-based and “very gritty” pieces that included the music of Rage Against the Machine, to discordant avant-garde works with voices and other textures.
Torero participated in the piece. “The first piece started off with him typing, putting ideas from his revolution and what he was struggling with when he created the paintings,” Chen says. “Dancers started flowing out of the building onto patio furniture, interacting playfully with the graffiti on the walls. In the next segment, we were commenting on the history of the Che Café. It used to be a place with a take-out window. You could order food from daily specials. We played with the idea of somebody working there and others asking for food. Within that piece, a solo dancer created an image of a mother and baby that Mario had painted.”
Audience and performers “interacted with nature in another piece,” Chen adds, explaining that spectators were asked to bring leaves and stones to an altar, created for the occasion. The last piece brought them back to the patio, where Torero reflected on the political climate then and now. Chen, who ran the sound console at each performance, was responsible for moving audiences from one scene to the next by turning up the sound on the side that the next scene occurred.
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