"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Articles 3 & 4

 

[The third installment of “The Magic of Design” comprises two articles; one is on a New Orleans facility that focuses on productions of what author and critic Richard Kostelanetz calls the “theater of mixed means” and the other, San Diego’s renowned Old Globe Theatre which had to tackle a particular design and tech problem.

[As I have for all series published on Rick On Theater, I recommend that readers keep up with the preceding parts of this multi-part posting.  The first part of this design and tech series was posted on 9 September and part two ran on the 12th.  Please go back and check them out.]

 
“WHEN SPACE IS A CHARACTER”
by Jim O’Quinn

 [In his article, O‘Quinn looks at the New Orleans-based studio founded by New Orleanian Jeff Becker that houses three theater ensembles and focuses on “design-driven dramaturgy.”  Published in the AT feature “Strategies” in the July/August 2016 issue, the report was also posted as “At Catapult Studios, Design Comes First” on the AT website on 6 July 2016.]

How a multipurpose facility called Catapult is energizing New Orleans theatremakers.

CHALLENGE
To nurture creativity and innovation in theatrical design via a collaborative workspace solution

SOLUTION
Join forces to establish an expansive, multipurpose design studio that can house member companies and serve as a development and performance space

WHAT WORKED
Design became more integral to productions; collaboration and artistic interaction flourished

WHAT DIDN’T
Scarcity of funding and dependence on sweat equity means progress can be slow

WHAT’S NEXT
Bring laboratory model of design, rehearsal, training, and resource-sharing to other cities

§  §  §  §

Water, water everywhere. It was flowing in blue waves across video screens, undulating across walls and floors in animated projections, even (in a startling illusion) appearing to fill a cloudily lit glass-walled office space right up to the rafters, turning the room’s three human inhabitants into slow-motion sea creatures. All that surging water was the key ingredient in Sea of Common Catastrophe, a work-in-­progress staged this past May [2016] by New Orleans’s ArtSpot Productions and scheduled to tour widely across the U.S. next season.  [There are records of a production in Atlanta in February 2017 and Brooklyn, New York, in June 2018, but a further “tour” isn’t confirmed.]

The show—as well as its initial venue, a 4,000-square-foot warehouse workspace known as Catapult, situated in the city’s Marigny district just a stone’s throw from the rushing currents of the Mississippi River—is the brainchild of award-­winning visual artist and set designer Jeff Becker. Sea of ­Common Catastrophe had been burbling in Becker’s imagination for nearly two decades, but it was only after he engineered the establishment of Catapult and set the building’s collaborative gears in motion that the production itself was able to spring to life.

Catapult’s clunky concrete exterior—embellished along its Chartres Street side by local artist Laurel True’s swirling, mirrored mosaics—gives little hint of the interior’s organizational sophistication. The 53-year-old Becker calls it “a collective performance laboratory dedicated to nurturing design-driven performance.” It has served as home base since late 2012 not only for ArtSpot but also for two other accomplished New Orleans ensembles with which Becker is associated, New Noise and Mondo Bizarro—“the original gangsters who put in money, time, and sweat” on the project, as Becker puts it. The three core companies share an elevated, open-plan office space as well as storage facilities in the building, whose central feature is a 900-square-foot sprung wood floor suitable for dance as well as theatre. Walls are scarce; everybody working in Catapult can see what everybody else is doing. “We had already worked together collaboratively, so it was not so much a stretch to share a space,” Becker says.

Besides productions, Catapult also presents weekly training sessions hosted by Mondo Bizarro and New Noise’s Sound Off!, an annual festival of new work (its last iteration ran June 2-4 [2016]). An array of local dance and theatre troupes—including Goat in the Road, Skin Horse Theater, and Lux et Umbra ensemble—have begun to use Catapult regularly for rehearsals and production development as well. What all of the companies are participating in, Becker explains, is “design-driven dramaturgy.”

“A lot of companies don’t bring the design world into the work early enough—not because they don’t want to but because the space and time aren’t set up for that,” Becker elaborates. “It’s important to me as a designer, director, and visual artist that the design of a show has the same weight as text, that design is brought in at the get-go. For me, the space in which a show happens is a charac­ter—it needs to live and grow and unfold in the same way a character does.”

But early integration of design is just one plus in Catapult’s tally of theatrical assets, as Becker indicates during a conversation in the building’s compact but congenial kitchen space during Common Catastrophe’s opening weekend run.

“My dream was always to be part of a collective studio space, but in theatre that model isn’t really present,” he explains. Then in 2009, while he was a teacher at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, the city’s well-resourced performing arts high school, he spotted an old building across the street. “Something clicked. It was a laundromat, an ugly warehouse building full of toxic chemicals and old machines. I formed an LLC and bought it and held on to it, renting it out until I could put together a business plan to bring other artists there to work, make it affordable, and so on.”

By 2012 the laundromat had vacated the building, and after a stint renting it to a ­special-effects film group, Becker and his arts team rolled up their sleeves: The rehearsal floor was installed, offices crafted, storage spaces delineated, a kitchen and bathroom with shower added (“so nobody ever really had to leave!”). Eventually the three companies moved their entire facili­ties there—it was cheaper and more flexi­ble than operat­ing independently. Efficiency proved to be only one of Catapult’s benefits.

Cross-pollination was another. “The difference working here is the accidental information you start to receive about other people’s processes and ways of working,” testifies Mondo Bizarro’s artistic director, Nick Slie. “You go, ‘Hey, tell me about that!’ It opens up things for you. The collective unconscious tends to play out when you have access to artists you might otherwise never get close to. Those unplanned meetings, unexpected collisions, are what’s important.”

In addition to locals, Slie and other ­Catapult regulars have mixed it up with members of such visiting troupes as Massachusetts’s farm-based Double Edge Theatre, Pennsylvania’s Pig Iron Theatre Company, and most recently Grenland Friteater of Norway.

Sea of Common Catastrophe, billed as “a new touring show about displacement, detritus, and designer food,” is the anchor of ArtSpot’s 20th-anniversary season [2015-16] and the first full-scale production to occupy ­Catapult. The occupation is total: The staging stretches from the building’s roof to its interior nooks and crannies, showcasing a trio of principal performers—longtime N.O. actor and co-conceiver of Catapult Lisa Shattuck, ArtSpot artistic director Kathy ­Randels, and lithe dancer Kehinde Ishangi—and conjuring its watery effects via Courtney Egan’s video design and Evan Spigelman’s kaleidoscopic lighting. Advance press mentioned the show’s debt to Gabriel García Márquez’s resonant [1961] short story “Sea of Lost Time,” but might audiences perceive it mainly as another post­-Hurricane Katrina play?

“Actually, the idea of being underwater—of history and the past being submerged—first came from a trip to China” that Becker made with Shattuck in 1995. That was prior to the construction of Three Gorges Dam [started December 1994; opened 2003], which flooded hundreds of villages and displaced more than a million people.

“The idea that these 1,000-year-old ­villages were going to completely disappear was intriguing to me,” Becker says. “Later I read the García Márquez story about a town that gets submerged, but life there persists. That’s the connection to Katrina—flooding as a metaphor for change, for wiping the slate clean and starting fresh, and what’s forgotten or left behind in the process of gentrification and renewal.”

How, though, can a show so clearly made to order for Catapult’s distinctive geography adapt to touring? Becker is not worried. “Presenters who have booked the show don’t believe I can make it work, but I’m going to prove them wrong.”

What’s next for Catapult? “Climate control,” Becker deadpans. The building’s office rooms have it, but the large performance space under Catapult’s metal roof needs cooling in the city’s sizzling summer and heating in its sometimes chilly winter months. Money is still tight, but Becker isn’t going to let that slow down his momentum.

“My dream now,” he says, updating his aspirations, “is to start places like this not just in New Orleans but in arts communities across the country, so we can be doing shared residencies, bringing people to town and vice versa. Imagine a network of sacred performance spaces that serve many purposes, from family dinners to serious personal work, from community discussions to workshops, classes, yoga—whatever the community needs. We need to be open to anything and everything.”

[Jim O’Quinn, founding editor of American Theatre magazine, moved to New Orleans.  At the time of this post, O’Quinn was in the intensive care unit of a NOLA hospital with a serious heart ailment.  The last update on his condition was 1 August; no more current information on O’Quinn’s health was available. 

*  *  *  *
 “HOW TO BUILD A MOVING HOUSE WITHOUT A TURNTABLE IN ‘RAIN’”
by Ben Thoron

[Thoron’s article for “The Magic of Design” was not published in the print edition of AT, but was posted as a feature of “First Person” on the website on 6 July 2016.]

For a musical at the Old Globe, we were tasked with creating a structure that could rotate and withstand a downpour. The solution? A self-driving house.

Who knew building a house would be so difficult? After all, a lot of plays are set in houses. But the set for Michael John LaChiusa and Sybille Pearson’s musical adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Rain at the Old Globe (which ran March 24-May 1 [2016]) ranks as one of the most difficult projects I’ve faced in the last 16 years as technical director of the theatre. Because it wasn’t a normal house.

Rain [short story: 1921] is set in a boarding hotel in 1924 Western Samoa, where a prostitute (Eden Espinosa) meets a missionary (Jared Zirilli) intent on saving her soul. Set designer Mark Wendland and director Barry Edelstein wanted a dynamic set, capable of taking the audience from room to room and displaying not just where the action is taking place, but also everywhere else in the house. The concept was a three-story house with no walls. A spiral staircase connected each level to the trap room below the stage, and the house was encased in a three-and-a-half-ton steel frame. It needed to revolve in four rotations and had to separate into two halves, and each section needed to be capable of rotating on its own. Structurally, the 30-foot-tall house had to support its own three-and-a-half-ton weight, in addition to the actors’s [sic] weights.

And yes, just as the play suggests, the house had to endure more than two hours of actual rain. Clearly I had my work cut out for me. It was hard to know where to start. Do we solve the mechanical problem first? Or do we figure out how to build the entire thing? How much is it going to weigh, anyway? And what about the rain? Where does it come from and where does it go?

I tackled the mechanical part first by figuring out the various movement profiles. Each move the house made required careful discussion and engineering. Rotating the entire house could be done in several ways. The first and most obvious idea was to build a turntable underneath the house, but a turntable would have added significant load-in time and required installing an expensive surround deck.

So we decided to support the house on its own wheels. The next question was: How do we drive it? We already knew that the motor’s speed and position would be controlled by our automation system (Spikemark software and Stagehand controller from Creative Conners). The spiral stairs seemed like a possible drive point; they were at the center of the house and circular. Could we use that as a gear to drive the upper unit? Given the modest 5-foot diameter of the spiral staircase, quick calculations suggested that the power required would exceed 12 horsepower, and would create reaction forces greater than I cared to resolve.

So we decided to make the house turn itself. We hung motors under the first floor of the house, and used tires to push the house in a circle.

To say making a self-driving house is not an easy task is an understatement. Think about a car: The four wheels of a car support the load of the vehicle while maintaining contact with the ground. However, you’ll also notice that when you get into a car with several of your friends, the car lowers closer to the ground as it gets loaded. Cars have suspensions to compensate for road variations, rider comfort, and load balancing. But a three-story house on a suspension would wiggle, shift, and settle as actors moved around it. We decided to use a rigid frame to stabilize the house.

But what could the motor and wheels run on? Obviously we couldn’t just let a three-story house on wheels run on the bare fiberboard floor and expect the stage to stay intact. That took some trial and error. We tried using a spray-on truck bed lining bonded to a metal plate, but that peeled off in one rotation. We settled on a circle of perforated sheet metal, which created enough traction so the wheels wouldn’t slip and would also protect our stage.

Once we determined how the house would rotate and move, the next step was building it—both in the shop and in the theatre. For Rain, we had six days to load in the set.

One idea was to build all the elements separately—posts, beams, floor framing, and floor finishes—and assemble everything at load-in. It was not the best use of the stage time, but it was easy to transport. Another idea was to construct the house like a wedding cake, stacking each level in place. This would have saved on load-in time, but the odd arrangement of posts and beams in the set design made this option impractical.

We settled on a combination of the two. The third floor and roof were built as separates units and fully assembled in the shop. The first and second floor portions of the set were constructed in vertical modules that were 20 feet tall and up to 10 feet wide. They were too big for a semi-trailer, so they had to be loaded by cranes onto flatbed trailers—a first for the theatre. The modules allowed for a minimal number of onstage connections, while maximizing stage time, and fully utilizing time in the scene shop.

Mechanized scenery is the bane of technical staffs everywhere and we faced the usual problems—value engineering, faulty connections, and rushed construction, to name a few. Getting the correct friction force was a problem that took us most of the rehearsal process to work through, but there were others that were just as frustrating.

The casters gave us several challenges. We had built our own “triple swivels” casters (three swivel casters mounted on a pivoting bearing) with plastic hub wheels. But after only a few days, we noticed that several wheel hubs had cracked. So we had to replace all the caster wheels with cast iron hub wheels. Thank goodness we had the center stairway for easy undercarriage access! Even so, the “triple swivels” required considerable additional force to turn around a heavily loaded caster.

Until we found the right combination of down force and deck material, the crew (including me) went onstage in previews to give the house a literal shove in the right direction.

Then there was also a matter of the rain. It is an essential part of the script and mood of the play, but it couldn’t rain on the playing areas while the house was rotating and shifting. We created rain zones that we could turn on and off depending on the position of the house. For the rainiest areas, which were downstage, we created covered drainage platforms. Upstage, the water merely collected on the floor to be vacuumed up at the end of each night. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was the best we could come up with in the time we had.

Finally, there was the intermission shift. The house was designed to split apart and be rearranged at the break. Using our entire show crew of nine, both units had to be slowly repositioned, so that a three-quarter pivot pin could perfectly align into a one-inch socket underneath the house. The first run took the crew 30 minutes. Over the next two nights, the time decreased. But one frustrating night, the shift took nearly 40 minutes. The next day, we rehearsed the shift aggressively, adding a systems of chain motors and come-alongs, and choreographed specific actions for each crew member. With the added rehearsal and practice, the shift went from 30 minutes of sweaty, frustrating labor to a smooth 15-minute transition. The end result, with the audience watching us the entire time, regularly earned us appreciative applause.

It was a rough tech and preview process, and we always hoped that we had solved the last night’s issues, terrified of what new ones we would find in front of the artists, actors, and audiences. It was a testament to my team’s grace under fire that they worked through the problems day after day, refining a giant assemblage of steel into a working dependable machine. The Old Globe’s team of artisans, carpenters, welders, managers, and technicians are willing to take on seemingly impossible tasks even when the time is short and it looks like the laws of physics are against them. It is their teamwork and dedication to the theatre—nearly invisible to audiences—that make possible the incredible creations we present to the public, 15 shows a year, year after wonderful year.

[A note on two terms used above with which I was unfamiliar (I told you that theater tech pretty much went over my head!): 

In value engineering, the cost related to production, design, maintenance, and replacement are included in the analysis. For example, consider a new tech product is being designed and is slated to have a life cycle of only two years. The product will thus be designed with the least expensive materials and resources that will serve up to the end of the product’s life cycle, saving the manufacturer and the end-consumer money. This is an example of improving value by reducing costs. (Investopedia.com)

A come-along is a type of hand-operated winch used, for example, to tighten straps, chains, or ropes.

[The next segment of the “Design & Tech” series from American Theatre will be posted on Saturday, 18 September.  It, too, will include two articles: one about robots on stage and one about the Costume Collection.  I hope ROTters will all come back for the continuation of “The Magic of Design.”

[Ben Thoron is the technical director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre; in 2018, he was given the new title of Production Manager.]