Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1978 - 21

up with was scenery in Italy and supervisors in New York,"
explains Kathleen Norris. "We had no technician on the scene
to look at what the Italians were doing and say, 'That's fine,
but it's not durable enough; that's fine, but it's not fast
enough; that's fine, but it's too complicated a mechanism."
Consequently, a lot of American materials that might have
made things work better were not used because the Italian
shop was not familiar with them. All of the furniture, for
instance, was designed to be made of water pipe, but Italian
water pipe is much smaller than American pipe, so the furniture was all the wrong size.
The worst problem was the space machine. It was supposed to be made of subway grating, and at the time of the
presentation in January. Giannini had brought over a sample
so that the Broggis could find a comparable material in Italy.
The sample she brought, like most American subway grating.
was made of aluminum-Italian subway grating is made of
iron. "So the space machine," says Kathleen Norris, "which
was designed to be fairly light, ended up being this incredible
piece of scenery that weighed tons. I mean, it weighed more
than the entire state of Oregon!" It was so heavy, in fact, that
the day after it was set up in Avignon, they noticed that the
floorboards beneath it were buckling and it was about to
crash through the stage floor. They had to put steel struts
beneath it to distribute the weight more evenly.
It took a very long time to get everything set up and working, and the company's scheduled month of rehearsals with
the set dwindled considerably, although some of the major
Act I, Scene 1: Note boyan tower at upper left.

pieces were ready at least two weeks before the opening.
Beverly Emmons returned the last week to finish setting the
lights. A major part of the task was to attach lights to many of
the set pieces. "I ran around to hardware stores in Avignon
saying, 'OK, I'll have one of these and one of those'-little
things with bulbs in them, nothing as sophisticated as an inky.
That's all 220 voltage, since it had to work on European
electricity." This was also the first chance she had to work
with Wilson on the main lighting scheme. "There's a point
where, if you say blue and I say blue, we look at each other
and nod wisely-but what blue are we talking about?" she
says. "We don't know. Lighting has to be a shared experience." Wilson would explain to her what he wanted. and she
tried different ways of getting it until he was satisfied, measuring her own success by the number of attempts it took before
he approved.
While they worked on the lights, Julia Gillett, the stage
manager, continued dealing with the set. In the first scene, for
instance, there was a tall tower with a platform near the top,
on which a boy stood, throwing paper airplanes. At one point,
the tower was supposed to tilt, forming a triangle with a beam
of light that was being projected across the stage from the
front of a train, while the boy's platform remained parallel with
the floor. "We got it set up in Avignon," recalls Gillett, "and it
wouldn't tilt. It had hinges and everything, but it wasn't balanced properly." As if it were not enough trying to make it tilt,
she also had to lower the platform because the entire tower
was too tall. "The scenery was built for one stage (Venice) and
Photo: Ted Shank

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