Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1985 - 9

There is also a dress with a life of its own.
For a dream-sequence song, Dot wears a dress built
on a remote-controlled mechanized dress frame.
As she sings about her dreams while posing for
George, the dress opens and remains standing in
place while she moves about on stage.
Tony Straiges approached the setting somewhat
differently. Faced with three-dimensionalizing a
painting he opted for the blatantly theatrical. As
part of his research he had a book on Seurat that
showed the stages of development of the painting
and one of the first versions was simply a green
park and the dog. "In a funny way," explains
Straiges, "it looked like a set. What he did was
plant people in il." Straiges created an old fashioned wing and drop set with the scenery painted

Blow-drying pain I on 001 's Jackel.

on the wings and backdrop and scenery flying in
and out. It is all flat and two-dimensional. "It's
one of the oldest forms of stage design," notes
Straiges. "I felt it was a way to deal with Jim's play
and Stephen's music. It reminds me of a little Viennese show. The perspective of the setting encloses the actors. I think of it as a little jewel box
or those Easter eggs you look in and see a picture."
Scenically, Straiges and director-writer James
Lapine play with the theatrical possibilities. Two
dimensional cut-out characters pop up through
the stage floor and mingle freely with live actors.
Sometimes they change causing delightful confusion. Scenery flies in and out as George sketches
and erases. The scenery has the playfulness of the
nineteenth century, although it is now controlled
by computer. The second act, set in a current day
art museum, provides a laser light show created by
special effects expert Brian Ferren. It may be modest compared to a rock concert, but it is daring
within the staid confines of the Booth Theatre.
Straiges created a Pointillist effect by painting
the set with an ostrich-feather duster to create a
suggestive texture. To obtain the shimmering effect of the colors he used' layers and layers" of
transparent oil pastels over a base of white "so that
when it dried, every color would read and the white
would always come under it." The trees and leaves
are covered with a textured, colored fabric, then
painted over with oil pastels. Again, the various
colors come through to create a vibrancy. In the
second act, Straiges used photo blowups for part
of the scenery because, he explains, "when a photo
is blown up it has a grainy tooth. In a funny way,
that's what Seurat did."

Ironically, the only place where dots appear are
in Richard Nelson's lighting. Using gobos, the set
is covered at times with a matrix of dots in such a
way as to appear part of the scenery. Nelson calls
this his "dottage."
It is the lights that ultimately hold all the visual
elements together and make the total image vibrant.
Stage light, of course, is created in much the same
way Seurat created light: the mixture of colors to
create an impression of "white" light or other colors. One of the things elson did in this production was to split colors so that many instruments
are covered only with half-gels, thus mixing colored
and white light-just as Straiges did, and, of
course, just a Seurat did. The dots-some like
foliage, some abstract -are focused on the scenery,
on the actors, in the air, and on the canvas that we
see George painting. They are not there all the
time, just some of the time, and they create a scintillating interplay with the colors of the sets and
costumes.
Nelson also plays with reality, although this is
less apparent to the casual observer. "I want it to
look as naturalistic as possible, with only a hint of
the painterly," he notes. "Bur I've also made an
attempt to make each of the Sundays and many of
the sections within each Sunday look quite different from each other, timewise. They should not
be considered continuous in time, but all visual
moments of George's. It's as if he made the light
the way he wanted it to be."

The Nllrse's cape, showing Ihe leXl1Ires and appliqlles IIsed 10 creOle shadows.

And therein lies the visual clue to the production. This is not merely a play about a painter or
a painting; it is not just a clever tableau that recreates a famous scene in three-dimensions; it is a
through-the-looking-glass journey into the world
of the painting-a world of dots and color. In the
second act the characters sing a song about fading
away dot-by-dol. At the end of the play Nelson
has overlayed the stage with a complex pattern of
dots that gradually fade away, leaving the two
main characters in pin-point lights from the follow
spots. These, too, fade away. Seurat's vision, and
the designers' visions give way-the audience must
do the \ ork now.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1985