Setting the Stage. David Hays
with my own company to spend that time. Two went well, and the other badly, lighted by a man who was only concerned with his own effects — the kind of effects that would display his genius.
One interesting lighting problem we worked through on LONG DAY’S JOURNEY was the unlighted formal living room, upstage right, showing slightly behind its archway entrance into the main room. How to make a dark room? Just leaving it unlighted usually does not work onstage — it looks as if you failed to attend to it. What we did was to open the heavy drapes in the room about two inches and shoot bright sunlight through that slot. Just before curtain, the electrician went into the room and slapped a loaded blackboard eraser. At rise, the chalk dust caught the slanted beams of light, contrasting with the darkness behind, and the effect was fine. The dust settled, of course, illustrating that an effect well made at the start of a scene can serve throughout the scene: it remains in the audience’s consciousness even after they become involved in other matters.
Another note on lighting: At the end of the play, midnight, the three men are around the table. Jamie is in a drunken sleep. His father is drunk but knows what’s about to come. Edmund is alert. The father says, “I think I’ll catch a few winks. Why don’t you do the same, Edmund. It’ll pass the time until she —” Suddenly the living room light snaps on and Mary Tyrone comes through that archway, ghostly in flowing white nightclothes, carrying her wedding dress. “Suddenly” is the word, bringing a gasp from the Boston audience. In New Haven, for switchboard convenience, Tharon made that lighting unit larger — going from a 500-watt lamp to a 1,000-watt lamp — and hooked it to a dimmer. The dimmer handle was swiftly lifted — but not as swiftly as the snap-on we had in Boston, and the larger lamp took a small fraction of a second more to reach full brightness. Because of this tiny difference we lost that gasp and caused a murmur instead, as if the audience noticed the effect rather than being struck by it. Tharon corrected that, of course. Small differences can make big differences.
Other productions were mounted during our run, and our assistant stage manager showed me a photo of another set. “Isn’t this great? No ceiling!” he untactfully crowed. The picture itself was interesting, the set similar to mine but indeed no ceiling. The lack of a ceiling signals imagination to some, but I’m not sure it worked well in this case. The ceiling contained the drama of the play; one looked out of the trapped, or trapping, room. Opening the room to the sky frees it — too much, in my opinion.
I was praised by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, our reigning critic, as an “excellent setting of a cheerless living room with dingy furniture and hideous little touches of unimaginative décor.” Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, second only to Mr. Atkinson, said the set was “a perfect echo — curving and empty — of the universe these characters wander.”
WHAT I LEARNED
Some of O’Neill’s stage directions added to our sense of the room without being of practical use. Remember that O’Neill was writing at the end of a tradition where plays were often read at home in evening gatherings — home entertainment before television. (The vestige of these now-rare gatherings is the book club.) To add to these evenings, the playwright might engage us with an extended description of the town and customs of the area. Read Bernard Shaw’s CANDIDA to understand this.
In fact, one learns more about the scenic needs of a play from a close reading of the script than from a playwright’s instructions. Some designers actually avoid reading all stage directions. The designer is hired as an inventive partner, and all ingredients, including the anticipated strength of an actor, should be stirred in the pot. Yes, do what the playwright wants, but, like the director, try to add more to the production and steer away from mistakes.
I was once involved in a conference with the playwright Sam Shepard and the superb costume designer Pat Zipprodt (FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, CHICAGO, THE GRADUATE, and on and on). Sam, just before he stalked out of the room, stated furiously that costumers often didn’t do as he instructed. “But,” said Pat, “if you choose an actress that looks sickly in the black you specify, I’ll dress her in another color. Or if you insist on black, get another actress.”
A note about velour, a cloth used often to cover stage walls, as in this set: It’s essentially a cheap velvet, easy to paint, although it’s important to be aware of the nap — think of stroking a cat the wrong way. You’ve probably seen this painted velour technique used less subtly in Mexican restaurants, with a matador dressed gaudily in yellow and gold, waving his red muleta against a background of black velour or velvet. In the case of this set, I used a stencil to make a faint, rather worn-out wallpaper pattern. The color was a muted green, the tone of the walls slightly heavy, heightening the contrast with the windows and the scattered furniture.
In the theatre, we usually apply the cloth with the nap pointing down so that the cloth more readily absorbs light bouncing up from the stage floor, rather than reflecting it.
Ceilings to these so-called box sets are not, in my experience, made of velour, but of ordinary canvas or linen. They reflect much of this bounce from the floor, and so are painted darker than you might expect. When sets are retouched before opening, you often see the painters darken the ceilings even more.
If only we could stop light after it has done its job on an actor. The bounce that I mention on the walls and ceiling makes set and lighting designers crazy. So we fuss and fuss with focus and framing to pull the actors out of the background. As for box sets, often thought of as rooms with one wall removed so that the audience can see into them, Willy Nolan, a truly wondrous builder of stage scenery, said, “Don’t knock that missing wall. It’s my profit!”
I learned the value of every person’s contribution both from my work and from a course I taught at Harvard to help future audience members understand who does what. Guest lecturers from all the disciplines — producers, directors, actors, costumers, writers of incidental music, and more — came to Cambridge and explained what they brought to the table. To be sure, the playwright and the actors are supreme, but the composer of almost unconsciously heard incidental music may be a greater genius, and he’s doing his best. I mention this here because we can learn so much from teaching. It organizes and clarifies our thinking, and I would urge anyone who has a leg up on this — or any career — to teach. (Teach well, of course. I had a friend who taught that comedy used wavy lines and tragedy used straight lines. Nonsense.)
“Survival time” occurs when one member of a team abandons the big picture and goes off on his or her own, usually because the production is sinking and he (or she) will not go down with it but launch his own lifeboat. This desertion defeats artistry in our industry. Joseph Conrad wrote with authority in The Mirror of the Sea that such behavior destroys art: “He was not genuine in this display which might have been art. He was thinking of his own self; he hankered after the meretricious glory of a showy performance.”
A warning to young designers: No matter how supportive your work is to the production, someone in management is going to say, “You know, your stuff doesn’t sell one more ticket.” Suck it up. They still want scenery. I enjoyed some exceptions to these foolish remarks, and creative criticism and appreciation from Hal Prince, Robert Whitehead, Fred Coe, Cy Feuer, and almost all of the people in ballet and opera, where “the picture” is more important to them.
We took the play to a festival in Paris. There were fine scene painters there, and some old crafts survived. The wicker maker, for example, took my design in stride. The next year, our production played in London. I did not go, but was disappointed in one way when I saw the photographs: the four chairs around the table were not the chairs you would find in a New England seaside home. But consider this: these British chairs meant more to London audiences in creating the “three bears” family than mine. Brits have their own seaside styles, and the recognition of father, mother, and sons’ chairs was more vivid to them this way. A small point but worthy of attention. Interesting. Was I more responsible to honestly show a foreign audience what an American home looked like? Or was the obligation to make the differentiation of the chairs as clear as possible to the audience on their own terms?
Small things make big differences, as I learned from the lighting of Mary’s dramatic midnight entrance. I remember a tiny moment from Olivier’s London production,