Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006 - 61

romanticism, and concentrates it into the iron bridge and
trusses (made for stage purposes, however, out of wood).
"The design," she said, "was a design of materials in many
ways, about stone and iron and the industrial environment."
The design was also about extending a realistic element into
an emblematic, highly evocative image. And with a rock star
Ghost of Christmas Future in a decaying council housing tower
block circa 1960, there's a whiff of postmodernism as well. No
wonder critic Damien Jaques in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said Kellogg's set for what is usually seen as a Victorian
Christmas card had a "muscular look."

The Journey into Abstraction
Margaret Garner is a new opera by composer Richard
Danielpour to a Toni Morrison libretto based on the same
events that inspired her 1987 novel Beloved: the 1856 case of
a slave woman who escaped from Kentucky to Ohio and killed
her daughter rather than see her returned to enslavement. Cocommissioned by Michigan Opera Theatre, Cincinnati Opera, and
Opera Company of Philadelphia, the production premiered at
Michigan Opera Theatre's 4,250-seat Detroit Opera House before moving to the home theatres of its other co-producers.
The director was Kenny Leon, former artistic director of
the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, who has worked with Kellogg

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over twenty-five times in the last thirteen years. It is clearly one of
the most productive collaborations of the designer's career. She
was feeling "a little burned out" with theatre when she first went to
work with Leon in Atlanta. "The community I came into was an inspiration," she said, "because they were doing this work to
make changes in the way people see the world." Kellogg had
done small operas before, but Margaret Garner is the largest
in both scenic and dramatic scope. Its very largeness, however, pushed both the designer and the director to a visually
condensed statement. "The journey into abstraction with Margaret Garner," Kellogg said, "we made together."
Kellogg and Leon share a commitment to theatre as
storytelling and use the phrase "tell the story" frequently as
they describe the choices they make. Leon began by saying he
did not want Margaret Garner to be another piece about
downtrodden slaves. When he first met with Toni Morrison,
"We agreed that we would not tell the story in an historical
way, we didn't want any of that baggage," he said in a telephone interview. Kellogg said, "Kenny wanted them to have
dignity and scale and a kind of magnificence and that the end
should be uplifting, even though it is tragic."
Leon also had practical considerations. He said, "It was
important to me to get 100 singers on stage and to get from
scene to scene so it was almost seamless." He wanted "to have
just enough in the scene to tell the story, to set a place, to set a
time, so nothing about it was cumbersome or slow." Kellogg's

TECHNOLOGY
SPRING

2006
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006
