Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2017 - Public - 21

n July 2015, a new production of Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes
opened at Playhouse San Antonio (Texas) at the Cellar Theater, a small black
box theatre that seats 60 audience members with very little backstage space
and ceilings only 9 feet from the stage floor. With such limited space, projection would be challenging from the start, but the script called for projected
media to be a part of the scenography of the production.

The play centers on individuals meeting in a chat
room for recovering addicts, with several scenes taking
place in their online space. Additionally, with characters
meeting in more than one dozen different real-life settings, the media design could assist with the creation of
those locations. The solutions offer a model for budgetconscious productions that uses interdisciplinary collaborations, theatrical design tools, and the open-source
software PiWall.
When Set Designer Ryan deRoos presented her
rough design at the first production meeting in early
May, it included a 23-display video wall lining the cement back wall of the Cellar Theater. Depending on the
scene and location, these displays would show different
configurations of images and video. For example, if the
entire stage was being used by one location-a flower
shop-during a scene, then the displays showed one entire image of the shop's interior divided up so that each
display showed only a part of that image. If the stage
held two separate locations (stage right a church, stage
left a train station, for example), then the screens could
be divided so that some displayed one image and others displayed a different one. Or, if the scene was taking
place in the virtual chat room, individual displays would
show the chat icons for the characters as they logged on
and off. In addition to this, a 24th "display" was added:
a front projector that would work with the video wall in
the play's final scene to create the effect of a waterfall
cascading down and across the stage floor.
Initial research into video walls and pricing was not
encouraging. Playhouse San Antonio does not have a
large budget, and its Cellar Theater shows are the smaller, more cost-effective shows in its season (as opposed
to the musicals that take place on the mainstage). The
video walls found in airports, stadiums, or stores can run
upwards of $10,000. Rear projection, a suggestion made
early on, wasn't possible in this space (front projection
obviously was not a viable option due to the low ceilings).
UNUSUAL COLLABORATORS
The ACTLab at the University of Texas at Austin is
something of an incubator for collaborative problemsolving efforts. The author was reminded of her own
experience in the ACTLab with founder Allucquere

Pi wall programming. Photo: Alma E. Hernandez / Reprinted
with permission of the San Antonio Express-News.

Roseanne Stone while mulling solutions for the video
wall for the Water by the Spoonful production. In the
ACTLab, students of all disciplines come together for
a semester to focus discussion and creation around one
topic. The ACTLab is housed in a former TV studio in
the Radio/Television/Film department, where students
have access to computers, software, projectors, cameras,
lighting, and sound equipment, as well as teaching assistants willing to help with projects. Many of the students were from computer sciences and were interested
in hacking, and the class encouraged unusual collaborations. It also encouraged students to teach themselves:
If you didn't know how to do something, go and figure
it out.
Perhaps seeking collaborators outside of the theatre
world was the solution the team needed for the Water
by the Spoonful production. The author contacted Dario
Landazuri, a systems engineer, through gaming circles
in Austin. Landazuri thought a free, open-source project called PiWall might be a good solution. PiWall allows users to set up video walls with any number, shape,
and size displays using Raspberry Pi computers. It was
developed as an affordable solution for a video wall in
2013 by Alex Goodyear and Colin Hogben. The software package is available for download online, and comS p r i n g 2 0 1 7

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