Setting the Stage. David Hays
I LEARNED
Take a good look at the room where the play will take place. If you are going out of town, to Philadelphia or Boston or wherever, and know where you will end up in New York, look at that final house and imagine it. The total effect when the curtain rises is a good lining for your brain as you design. Perhaps, for example, the auditorium supplies a gaudy gold picture frame for the stage. And size really matters. We once had a good comedy playing in Boston’s intimate Wilbur Theatre: Robertson Davies’s LEAVEN OF MALICE, directed by Tyrone Guthrie. Then it died at the immense Martin Beck (now the Al Hirschfeld) in New York. I believe that if we had opened at the intimate Golden or Booth we’d still be running. If your theater is “off Broadway,” this thinking is unavoidable, because each space, usually an open space, is different.
I learned to light such an open stage (no proscenium). An actor standing on the edge of the stage facing the audience is easily lighted from positions above the audience — but when she turns around, how do you hit the face? Light on the face, from the best angle, would carry on into the audience’s eyes. So you pick away at angles, from sides — and it sometimes works.
Another example of unusual space considerations: Ray Sovey designed the original OUR TOWN. Easy, right, since there was no set? Not so. The bare stage of the Henry Miller Theater was full of distractions — radiators and iron ladders and the like — and these had to be adjusted or carefully painted to blend in. And the basic question: Is it a bare stage that the play demands? Or a bare space? It’s the former. Mr. Wilder wanted to challenge theatre tradition.
Another note on Thornton Wilder. At the end of my Boston year, I designed THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH for an outdoor production on the Boston Common. There wasn’t much I could do on that platform, although I later learned how. The remarkable thing was that Mr. Wilder showed up, and we had a lively discussion. Can you imagine the thrill to a young designer? Wilder’s point was that the house of the Antrobus family should reflect all styles of architecture through the ages. My thought was that this would be vague and drab, and we would fare better if we were to pinpoint a fleeting style like high Victorian. The audience would get it: how bright things rise, then fade away. I thought Mr. Wilder’s idea would create a sort of permanent dullness, everything blended to make a bland soup, instead of emphasizing the ephemeral. So be specific! That is usually good advice. I have no memory of how we ended the conversation, but I suspect I received another Olivier-like “My dear boy,” and a pat on the shoulder.
Concerning the author Joseph Mitchell, I am serious when I suggest readings like this to students. Learn to read, suggested Robert Edmond Jones. Design students should not just look at pictures. Read what is so often behind them. Good writing sits in your memory. Often, years after I’ve made a design, the source, subconscious at the time, will occur to me, and it might be literary as well as visual. Even sounds that enter your mental warehouse can influence design. Consider the surprising explosion of pigeons’ wingbeats when you walk into an abandoned building. There’s a color, a shadow-sense in that, a curtain-raising mood.
Teamwork is important. A team of painters is different than an athletic team, but not too different. You don’t compete to win, but you do race time: the curtain will go up. You strive for the approval of the designer of the show, and should be a bit nervous when a respected designer shows up to look at what you have done. The key to my first jobs at Rakeman’s and the Met was not just skill, but coordinated speed — yes, just plain speed, whether that meant me racing four flights to the bottom of the paint frame to hold the end of a chalk line, or quickly priming a drop with an eight-inch brush loaded with heavy starching goop. It was tiring but satisfying work for five or six of us, and the drops or set pieces or props we produced were often beautiful and always useful.
I mentioned that in the theatre, the curtain is “out,” not “up.” I use both “up” and “out.” To the audience in a conventional theatre, the curtain is “in,” or down, as they enter, then goes “out” for a limited time while they watch the play. (A great remark, attributed to George S. Kaufman or Groucho Marx: “I saw [the play] under adverse conditions — the curtain was up.”)
Now, in most stage houses (the backstage) a drop flies out (up) into the flys. (I know, I know.) You might say it goes out of sight, and comes back in to sight. If you haven’t got the height, drops can roll up like window shades and there are other tricks, such as “tripping,” but that’s another book. In my experience in Broadway theaters, the height is usually sixty feet, but the ballet and opera houses I’ve worked in go up to ninety, even one hundred and ten feet. That’s a lot — but if your proscenium can open up to forty feet high, that’s what you need. Of course, we all must work in houses where there are no flys at all, and miracles are expected for scene changes.
To stage workers in rehearsal or scenic set-up, the front or house curtain is always out for days or weeks. Finally the audience starts to enter, usually a half-hour before the show starts. It’s surprising then for us to see the curtain in, and once we had so ignored it that just before performance we discovered it didn’t work. After the show, the curtain stays in for perhaps fifteen minutes while the audience files out, then it is out again. Quite opposite to the audience experience.
EXERCISE
When you read any book, including the Bible, imagine the setting. Try imagining the problems: When Moses drops the heavy tablets at the sight of the Golden Calf, do they fall and crush his sandaled feet? How can you supply a tasteful grouping for a circumcision? Arrange the room where Raskolnikov breaks the vase in Crime and Punishment.
Try envisioning book jackets, too. Do you read mysteries — detective stuff? What will express the dilemma, showing something relevant to the plot and the mood, without giving the ending away? And just as a cover helps sell the book, so a poster does for plays. Do a poster for HAMLET. Do another for a less well-known play. Again, the mood, the spirit, a hint of the content, all help attract an audience. I mention enlarging a sketch. Take a small photo or postcard and draw half-inch squares on it. On a large sheet draw three-inch squares. Transfer (enlarge) the small drawing.
CHAPTER TEN
Broadway Briefly
SOON AFTER ICEMAN, and a year before LONG DAY’S JOURNEY, José was asked to direct a play on Broadway: Ted Apstein’s THE INNKEEPERS. This was José’s first play on Broadway, and he asked me to design it — my first as well.
The set was the courtyard of a Mexican inn, with a bedroom placed to one side. I elevated the bedroom two steps to help separate it from the courtyard. Borders (overhead masking cloths) were of leaves, and a heavy wisteria vine ran up the courtyard wall to justify them. The essence of the play was that the owners of the inn are fleeing — trying to solve their troubles by running from town to town, owning one inn and then another. There was nothing in this that seemed to be reflected in the setting: we simply had two spaces in an attractive inn. It was the lighting that underlined the drama of the couple’s battles in the bedroom, and made the courtyard either pleasant or sinister.
One problem was that the producer ran out of money before the set was finished. It was built, but not fully painted. The lay-in was not quite dry when it went into the truck. “Well,” said Joey Tulano, the boss painter at Rakeman’s studio, “maybe better this than to dibble around with it.”
Joey had only one working eye; the other had been lost when a tack flew into it as a canvas was ripped off the floor. This was still the age of tack-spitters. Do not try this. Do not take a mouthful of blue tacks and spin a magnetic hammer in front of your mouth, removing a tack on each pass, the tack facing the right way as you spin the hammer again and drive it in with one tap, fixing the cloth to the frame or floor, each tack driven in less than two seconds, spaced at four or five inches. (Spaced too far, the cloth drop will scallop when it is painted and shrinks. Too close, and you might hear the cry, “Who’s the sonabitch what every inch tacks?”)
Joey