Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1979 - 25

one set of spectators were perhaps a little too bright for a realistic night scene, for example. Perhaps those spectators could
see a little bit too dearly if verisimilitude was their standard. At
the same time, however, the corridor farthest away, brightly lit
to the other audience, was just on the edges of their perception. It was a question of balance. I think it was very successful that way.
M: Is the same premise true of the actors' speech? It seemed
to me that it was possible to hear the actors in the nearest corridors quite easily. When they were speaking from the farthest
corridors, however, one lost part of the dialog. I assume that
you asked the actors always to speak at the same level, and
that when they were farthest away from a particular audience,
that audience found some portions of their speech difficult to
follow.
K: Yes, you are right. It is exactly the same situation as with
the lights. I was hoping, as I was with the lights, that everything would be within the limits of perception. Yet we were
working close to these limits, and they vary from person to
person and from audience to audience. But I was certainly not
trying to hide anything. Since each scene was presented, in a
way, twice and one of the versions was perceptually clear to
each audience, I hoped imagination and calculation might fill
in whatever perceptual blanks occurred. In part, the play was
about imagination and calculation.
M: I don't know whether you intended it or not, but there is almost a kind of cinematic quality about the way in which action
advanced and retreated behind the scrims. That is to say,
there was a sense that scenes faded or dissolved during the
course of the play. Did you intend this?
K: There's no question that the effect existed. I could say,
"No, I didn't intend it consciously," but I'm not sure that I
didn't intend it subconsciously. I don't remember thinking very
hard about a relationship to film, but it was there. When we
began working with the box, we found that dimming of the
lights was often effective, creating glowing after-images at
times.
There may be another influence, too. I also do sculpture,
and I had done some drawings for a piece that was never realized for an exhibit in Italy. The drawing showed transparent
plastic sheets hung at regular intervals in a large room. There
were to be two rows of these sheets. In the center of the first
sheet in one row is a transparent photograph, and this photograph is blown up larger, sheet by sheet, as it moves away
from a spectator at one side of the room. The photographs get
larger exactly in proportion to the distance, compensating for
perspective. Because the pictures get larger as they move
away from you, the retinal size stays the same.
Now on the second row of sheets, a picture taken from the
same spot but in the opposite direction gets larger as it moves
toward you, compensating for perspective when viewed from
the opposite side of the room. On one side the photograph
grows geometrically larger as it moves toward you, and on the
other side it remains retinally the same. So I had already become involved with the business 0f perception and perspective.
Of course the scrim idea had been used by the Symbolists,
whose performances I teach in a course on the history of
avant-garde performance. Symbolists did a number of productions where they used a frontal scrim in order to make the
stage seem dim and atmospheric, and to make the figures of
the actors appear indistinct and vague. I think of my plays, in a
sense, as Neosymbolist because the acting is very quiet. Although the spectators are very close to the performance, and
it is very intimate, I have attempted to achieve the feeling that
the actors possess a certain distance. It is a kind of contradiction-knowing intellectually that they are close but feeling that they are far away. The organization of the performance space for Double Gothic seemed to be a physical way to
achieve this same sort of effect.D
USITI Winter, 1979

Design

through
Evolution:
Michael Yeargan's
Umbrellas

of
Cherbourg

by Michael S. McDowell
On December 29, 1978 spectators at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre witnessed the preview of a production unusual in
both concept and execution. Director Andre Serban and designer Michael Yeargan staged a theatrical interpretation of
the 1965 French film: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Although
employing the film's plot, character development, and a
shortened version of Michel Legrande's original score, this
production explored a novel approach in staging.
One of Serban's basic premises concerning staging is that
"the design should evolve with the rehearsal process." Serban feels that if the theatrical environment is too carefully
planned before production, it becomes static and can not further develop with the performance. It becomes a stifling element constricting both director and performer. He believes the
set should become a performer, growing and changing with
the production-the philosophy behind the Serban-Yeargan
collaboration for Cherbourg.
'
Both director and designer received their preliminary ideas
by viewing the film. It exhibited "
high color ... impressionistic look ... lots of textures
varied bright colors ... "
contrasting with the omnipresent gray rain of Cherbourg. (This
quote and all subsequent quotes are from an interview with
Michael Yeargan in March 1979.) The settings were varied
and location changes were rapid. The problem was to adapt
these effects to the theatre convincingly.
Cherbourg was originally to be produced in the Newman
Theatre, the proscenium house of the Public Theatre, to facilitate Broadway adaptation. It was hoped that Cherbourg
would soon move uptown and, subsequently, help fund
Papp's theatre. Due to delays caused by experimentation,
however, Cherbourg ran nearly a year behind production
schedule and was moved to the Martinson Theatre where the
performance schedule was not as restrictive. Here the design
staff would have the time to allow the set to evolve freely.
With Cherbourg in its final home, the staff began to establish "givens" about the design. First, they needed a very flexible set to accommodate quick and immediate scene changes
and multiple locations consecutively. Second, they desired an
impressionistic feeling much like the movie. And finally, they
wanted the "rain" of Cherbourg to pervade the production.
Theatre Design & Technology

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