Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006 - 53

Old Times

PHOTO BY MARTHA SWOPE

by Harold Pinter, 1983, Roundabout Theatre, New York, directed by Kenneth Frankel.
Marjorie B. Kellogg (sets), Linda Fisher (costumes), Judy Rasmuson (lighting).

in 1982. Abstraction is foreshadowed in even the
"photorealist" American Buffalo, first produced two years
earlier. Everything in the crowded junk shop (the designer
calls it "obsessively detailed") was sprayed with varying intensities of black paint, "with the exception of a few bright
touches," she said in Louisville. "So the whole thing, despite
looking real, was not very real at all." Her purpose, she later
explained, was "to focus attention on the acting area, if not
specifically the performers, who moved everywhere at some
point or another." She likened the paint to "the old Vaselineon-the-lens trick from the movies, to iris in on the main playing area." It was also intended to turn a stage full of
"individual, interesting objects (any one of which might be too
distracting) into a junk-sculpture-like mass of things that were
there and real and specific, but pulled back to blend with the
crowd, as a costume designer will dress the chorus in a close
palette of color so that they're more significant as a group than
as individuals." Although Kellogg describes the black spray as
a matter of practical stage focus, it distinctly echoes Louise
Nevelson. Kellogg calls herself a sculptor in her handling of
stage space, and even in one of her most realistic designs, she
makes us aware of the rhythm and pattern of shapes apart
from their function.
Old Times, the year after Steaming, was as obsessively
stripped down as American Buffalo was built up. Kellogg told
Aronson she tried to give the director realistic details in a
space that was "extremely abstract." She "stretched" an al-

THEATRE

DESIGN

most blank living room and its sparse furnishings into an oblong across the Roundabout's sixty-foot proscenium. "It was so
big," she said, "there was a sense of isolation." The walls are
bare, the window that dominates the rear wall is bare, a single
table and a drinks cart are almost bare. The window's grid of
panes is like a cage. Frank Rich described the room as "an offwhite temple of modernism that looks like an iceberg adrift in
a primeval black wilderness."
Kellogg again shows her sculptor's touch in arranging objects. Two blocky sofas and a severe armchair are set at odds
with one another. Their placement is an interplay of solids and
voids, not a conversational grouping. The designer gives the actors
a place to do what Pinter's characters do, talk past each other. The
furniture's separation captures their psychological separation as
each remembers the past differently. In the carefully calibrated
space between each object, Kellogg finds a visual equivalent of
the Pinter pause.

Abstraction Rooted in the Real
Three recent productions-Lucifer's Child on Broadway in
1991, A Christmas Carol for Milwaukee Repertory in 2003,
and the opera, Margaret Garner, in 2005-show how the
designer's approach has broadened during the last twenty-five
years as she has explored abstraction. It is always an abstraction rooted in the real.

TECHNOLOGY
SPRING

2006

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