Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2007 - 45

When you are starting to work on a production, how do you
approach a script?

I learned, as I became more successful in working with directors,
that when I meet with a director to talk about a design, the ﬁrst thing I do
is put a mat knife, and scissors, and glue down on the table before I even
take the model out of the box, because we are probably going to end up
taking it apart. So, the point of all of this is process is much more important than presentation.
Even The Egyptian Book of the Dead says, "Process is all." In my
favorite poem, "The Journey to Ithaca," it's the journey that's important,
not the destination, because we all know Odysseus didn't get home until
years later. His story was not his return home, but the journey home. So
that's how we think about the process.
In reading a play, I have a lot of respect for the text. Although I do
believe innovation is the bottom line in the theatre in producing plays, and
that innovation is the most critical element in bringing a play to life on the
stage, I think the stage is quintessentially a playwright's medium. Film is
quintessentially a director's medium. For the stage the text is at the core.
PHOTO COURTESY JOHN EZELL

Unlike the way in which I was trained, I work differently than I
thought I would. Designers used to do renderings of stage sets, and
I guess that was a primary step. I know, for Oenslager, we used to do
at least one of these a week. We would bring it in for presentation
properly framed.
We think that is not the way to go anymore, and that we're not goal
oriented now in scene design. We are process oriented. The process is
what's important. In other words, what do you do ﬁrst? What do you do
next? What do you do next? What do you do next? If you do those four or
ﬁve things, the end result will take care of itself. We used to have a kind
of mentality that we were going to lay a design on a director. We'd even
go so far as to put a piece of glass over a rendering-the inference being,
"This is it. What you see is what you're going to get, and we're not going
to tamper with this."

Much Ado About Nothing,
New York Shakespeare Festival,
Delacorte Theatre, 1988.
"This production starring Kevin
Kline and Blythe Danner opened in
Central Park during the wettest New
York City summer on record. The
residual moisture that accumulated
in the understructure added tons of
weight to the turntable."

1997 Master Class
The Three Musketeers
1998 Death of a Salesman
1999 The Taming of the Shrew
2000 Into the Woods
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
2003 The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?
2005 The Mystery of Edwin Drood
This Is Our Youth

THEATRE

DESIGN

2006 Humble Boy
2007 Heartbreak House

1977 The Royal Danish Ballet, Copenhagen
Krigshelten
1978 Lyric Opera of Kansas City
Die Kluge
1978 Swedish Rikstheatre/Cullberg Ballet,
Stockholm
Droemeren

The Dybbuk
1983 PBS Television
The Playboy of the Western World
Wilder Wilder
1983 Schubert/Blackstone Theatre, Chicago
The Life and Adventures of
Nicholas Nickleby

TECHNOLOGY
WINTER

2007

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