Wow Factor: Without Walls Festival Part Two

This is a continuation of 'Wow Factor: Without Walls Festival Part One.' 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.

Tom Dugdale’s Our Town

In Tom Dugdale’s production of Our Town, young actors invite the audience to party under the stars. They pass around a camera, hoping to preserve the moment. Ian Wallace, who did the scenic and projection design, says the goal was to create a sense of community by suggesting a backyard barbeque, with a big table surrounded by lawn chairs. “The audience was given sodas,” he adds. Christmas lights helped create the backyard ambiance.

Our Town (Photo Credit: Daniel Norwood)

Wallace says the big open area helped define the moment, with actors sitting around a table eating hotdogs in the first act, while spectators moved about the space. For the wedding in Act Two, actors moved chairs in front of an exterior wall of the nearby theatre, which was used as a projection surface above them. “The audience moved 30' to a vastly different environment, open, under a tree. One actor had a camcorder and took a home movie of the audience and actors at the end of the second act,” says Wallace, who edited the footage in record time so a wedding video could be projected on the wall. Balancing lights so the audience could see actors and the camera could capture them was tricky. “It’s the nature of the festival that tech time is relatively short, and we could only tech with lights and video after sunset,” says Wallace, who was at every performance, using Isadora to capture the live video into the computer, and edit it together with prerecorded video of actual childhood home videos of the actors.

The third act took place indoors. “We moved across the lot to a very small basement theatre with a three-quarter thrust and a low ceiling for the cemetery scene. We moved from an open backyard to a big, imposing, in-your-face video to a quiet, underground kind of world. All the locations played huge roles in the way we thought about the show,” says Wallace. The scenery was minimal; the biggest expense was 100 lawn chairs. “We wanted to be as organic to the space as possible.”

Wallace says he and Dugdale looked at different areas throughout the city and considered different plays they might do. They thought about doing The Glass Menagerie in an old movie theatre, Orpheus and Eurydice on an island on a bay, or Our Town in an old community hall before deciding on a backyard setting for the last. They considered doing the third act on the nearby beach before opting for the underground location.

El Henry

Wallace also designed recent WoW production El Henry. In this futuristic retelling of Henry IV, Part One, “all of the gringos of California will have fled,” says Wallace. It is 2045, in a huge, run-down metropolis that once was San Diego, and “political apathy and corruption run the city while violent barrio families run the streets,” the release adds.

To create this dystopian future, the production team wanted a downtown, urban environment. They found it in San Diego’s East Village neighborhood, Makers Quarter, which has been undergoing revitalization. An open lot, surrounded on three sides by graffiti-covered walls from other buildings, and a silo on one end, served well. “It was a big open canvas in the middle of downtown San Diego [that evokes] images of Rio and Mexico City, shanty town environments,” he says.

El Henry artwork, Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse

In the lot, he created a collage of trash, suggesting that people had fled, leaving their things behind. A bar, made of old plywood and metal, stood in the space as well, and projections helped set the scene. Old tube televisions in the trash pile set the stage for the introduction of projections later, when video was projected directly onto old TV sets. The set was otherwise comprised of found objects, useful for the small-budget production, set against graffiti-covered walls and the old silo. Vehicles—cars, motorcycles, and bicycles—also were important. “We had to make sure car paths didn’t cross audience paths to bathrooms or exits,” says Wallace.

“One of the wonderful things about San Diego is consistent weather, cloudy in the morning with clear sunsets at pretty much the same time,” says lighting designer Jennifer Setlow, who had to deal with natural light in a wide open space with no shade for part of the show. Theatrical conventions did her no good. “What is this piece? How does it live?” she asked. “The world of the play is very much a world when the vast majority of everyone who wasn’t Chicano fled from this community, and all the technology left with them. There is electricity, but there are no cell phones. A huge rig of moving lights didn’t live in that world,” Setlow says, adding that she used mostly incandescent fixtures that became part of the scenery. Flood lights and other outdated theatrical lighting supplemented.

Limits to power in the 60'-wide playing space limited the number of dimmers she could use. Isolating areas for particular scenes had to happen early, before they were blocked, because lighting couldn’t go just anywhere in the space. Setlow favored uplight both for the look and because most fixtures could be placed easily on the ground. Two enormous shipping containers that were part of the design allowed for set mounts and booms. Because the car culture dominates, “it felt right to use headlights as another source,” she says.

“We weren’t trying to butt ourselves against things that make it harder than in an actual theatre, but to embrace what we couldn’t do,” says Wallace, who appreciated the lot’s uneven dirt surface. Sure, it would be harder to build on, but it was more real. “I worked for many years at a theatre in a barn,” Wallace recalls, explaining that animals used the barn in the winter and then moved out, allowing for summer performances. “I really enjoy working in raw spaces and trying to use what’s there. A giant pile of TVs wouldn’t have come to me as an option if I hadn’t been faced with the problem of how to have video elements before the sun went down. Every challenge that presents itself is an opportunity for a new idea.”

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.