[The final two articles on the AT series on stage design and technology are largely about recognition and invisibility—and both use Broadway’s Tony Awards as the context in which to examine these issues.
[In her article, Pamela Newton spotlights costume designers, though her points, and those of the artists she interviewed, can clearly be applied to set, lighting, and sound designers as well. John Gromada has a somewhat different point to make with respect to sound designers, and I’ll have more to say about his article below.
[As I have throughout this series, I suggest that ROTters make a point of going back and reading the foregoing seven articles in this collection. None of the nine pieces depends on any of the others for comprehension; they all cover different aspects of the arts and techniques of theatrical design of production.
[The result, though, is that the Special Section of the AT design and tech issue taken as a whole provides a panoramic view of stage design and tech, one of the least-well understood facets of play production among most theatergoers. (I have already admitted that theater tech has always eluded my grasp.) This is a good opportunity for readers who haven’t been following along to see what the design and tech fields are all about nowadays.
[To remind you all, Articles 1 through 7 were posted on 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21 September. You can read the five posts in any order.]
Tazewell, a black costume designer for whom this represents a sixth Tony nomination, is excited not only about his nomination, but also about what shows like his say about the current state of Broadway.
“The possibility has opened up for a new way of telling a story, presenting an idea, presenting a musical,” he says. “It’s no longer as interesting to see a Broadway musical served up in the usual way.”
This is Ramos’s first Tony nomination, and even as he celebrates the diversity among this season’s design pool, he bemoans that designers aren’t more visible to the theatregoing public.
“There were quite a number of designers of color this year, but you don’t see us,” says the designer, who is of Filipino descent. “It’s hard for us to get any attention. A lot of people ask, ‘Where are the designers of color?’ And I always say, ‘We’re out there! We’re just as busy as other designers!’ But we work behind the scenes, so we can’t get as much attention as the people onstage.”
Although it is par for the course that designers of all backgrounds stay out of the spotlight—and many of them prefer it that way—Ramos thinks this invisibility exacerbates the diversity problem in design. Though there has been no demographic study about designers on Broadway specifically, a recent study from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, which surveyed 1,000 cultural nonprofits, found that out of 346 theatre designers polled, 81 percent were Caucasian (the percentage was the same for the 1,676 technical/production staffers polled).
“There is a dearth of young artists of color going into design for the theatre,” says Ramos. “And part of that is because they don’t see themselves in it. I never saw people who looked like me. I was never exposed to them. I had to seek them out.” It creates a vicious cycle, he explains. “How can we address the problem when we can’t attract young artists of color into the design field?”
The answer may be to start at the institutional level. Cecilia Friederichs, the national business agent of United Scenic Artists, a union for designers and scenic artists, says that the stage design field is having a conversation now not only about racial equity but gender disparity as well. Apart from the category of costume design, women are woefully underrepresented in all categories of USA’s membership. And according to a study released last year by the League of Professional Theatre Women, men Off-Broadway outnumber women in all backstage disciplines save for costuming and stage management. The union has formed a diversity committee this year to address both gender and racial equity in theatrical design, and plan out action steps to promote both.
Still, on the production end, small changes can be made to highlight more of the creative team beyond just the directors and writers. Ramos believes that designers’ names should be included in the publicity materials for shows.
“It’s important that people see my last name there,” he says. “Because I think young artists will see a last name like that and think, ‘Oh, there could be a place for me there.’” He cites a trend about 20 or 30 years back that saw some female lighting designers using only their first initials and last names to increase their chances of getting hired in a male-dominated field. “I understand. They wanted to even the playing field. But I think it also didn’t serve a lot of women designers because it masked the reality.”
Tazewell believes that a big part of the burden for fostering diversity falls to the people at the top. “It will take forward-thinking producers and directors asking designers [of color] who are just great designers period,” he says. “Inviting them to design Shakespeare, inviting them to design Ibsen, inviting them to design a musical that’s all showgirls and sparkles.”
Tazewell’s résumé also includes a number of African-American-centered productions, which he is proud to have been involved in. But to him one of the great frustrations for designers of color is being told that they “should be working on a production that is specific to a diverse story.” It’s ironic, considering that audiences never see the designers. “There is no reason for Broadway or commercial producers to distinguish between designers of color and white designers,” Ramos says. “Unlike with casting, we have the benefit of the fact that it doesn’t really matter what we look like. If the design is good, it doesn’t matter.”
In this sense, Ramos suggests that the invisibility factor goes both ways: It may be harder to see designers of color than actors, but it’s easier to hire them based on skill—that is, if you can find them.
Over at United Scenic Artists, the diversity committee is working to address the disparity by urging established designers of all backgrounds to hire and mentor assistants from a more diverse pool. Explains Friederichs, “We’re interested in getting involved in encouraging people to choose assistants in a way that fosters a growth of diversity.”
There are also hopeful signs on the national level. Crowded Fire Theater in San Francisco, for example, provides grants and professional development to Bay Area designers and technicians under the auspices of its Ignite Fund, described in its official wording as having “an eye toward supporting the plurality of race, culture, class, gender, and age in our local design and technical community.” And Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.[,] has an internship and fellowship program for designers, technicians, and administrators, named after Allen Lee Hughes, a black lighting designer who has worked at the company since 1969.
Ramos also cites the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as two companies that, in his experience, have made it part of their core mission to attract diverse theatre artists. The Guthrie offers internships and a job fair for artists on and offstage. OSF offers a fellowship and residency program, called FAIR, for theatre practitioners, including designers.
In spite of the headway being made on Broadway and beyond, though, it remains to be seen whether this season was an inspiration or aberration. There have certainly been other years when Broadway has offered daring fare and showcased underrepresented groups: Take 1996, when the proto-hipster musical Rent [29 April 1996-7 September 2008], August Wilson’s Seven Guitars [28 March-8 September 1996], and George C. Wolfe’s black history musical Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk [25 April 1996-10 January 1999] (with costumes by Tazewell) were all up for Tonys, and many thought it heralded a new age. But the next year it was back to the safety (and predominant whiteness) of A Doll’s House [2 April-31 August 1997], Chicago [14 November 1996-Present], and Titanic [23 April 1997-21 March 1999]. (Notably, there was a Broadway revival of The Gin Game that year as well, starring white actors Charles Durning and Julie Harris [20 April-31 August 1997].)
Both Ramos and Tazewell maintain a cautious optimism toward the current moment. “I think if you asked people of color, most of us have a guarded sort of stance,” says Ramos. “We think of it as a blip, something that may not happen again.”
“I am hopeful that this is the direction we’re moving in,” says Tazewell, “but history has proven that there’s a pendulum. The pendulum I think will start to widen, start to open up more possibilities, but it is bound to shift back, because that is the nature of the beast.”
Ramos pointedly cautions that the work is not over. After all, this has been a notably diverse season for designers only in relative terms.
“We’ve certainly made strides in terms of diversity on Broadway,” he says. “but for designers and people who work backstage, it’s still not as diverse as we want it to be.” For him, the key is to take the present momentum and keep on moving forward. “If we in the American theatre are really invested in diversity and the breadth of human experience, then it is imperative that we populate our industry with more designers of color who, just by the nature of who they are, offer a different worldview, with a different body of experience.”
[Pamela Newton is a freelance writer and college writing teacher living in New York City.
[I don’t know if the diversity issue had progressed among theater designers in the ensuing five years since Newton wrote her report, but it occurs to me, reading “The Broadway Season Was Diverse Offstage” that the same points the author and the artists to whom she spoke make above are equally valid with respect to artists with physical handicaps—and I’d bet that they meet with the same discrimination and invisibility that women and artists of color have.]
“TONY, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
by John Gromada
[Gromada’s article, published in the “Opinion” feature of the print issue and posted on 6 June 2016 on the website, is a protest, born of disappointment. The Tony Awards on Sunday, 12 June 2016, omitted the contributions of sound designers. The absence screamed loudly for Gromada, who had campaigned to have sound design added to the award categories; it was included in the 2008 awards.
[Gromada was nominated for the award himself in 2013 for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, but the next year, he saw the Tony committee yank the award away again. What he couldn’t know when he wrote his article, though, was that the Tony Awards Administration Committee would relent and on 24 April 2017, would announce that the sound design awards would be reintroduced for the 2017-18 season.
[I’ve decided to run Gromada’s argument anyway, even though the reinstatement renders his main point out of date, because the article is still an important examination of the problem theater design artists have fought since stage design became part of the theatrical landscape: lack of recognition. As you’ll read, the work of designers is either overlooked entirely or considered the realm of technicians and craftsmen, not artists.
[That’s just among other theater pros like producers and directors; among theatergoers, the work is often not even noticed. (I read a lot of reviews when I write my performance reports and it’s clear the review-writers don’t know what to say much of the time when it comes to the designers’ contributions. If the reviewers mention them at all, it’s a few words at the end of the notice, almost as if they felt obligated to say something.)
[I said at the start of this series that I took several design classes in grad school in order to learn more about that part of the business. That put me in a position later as a director to appreciate what designers do for a production—which goes far beyond making pretty pictures or sounds. They also solve problems, smooth over glitches, and enhance the drama—or comedy—of the production in ways that actors, directors, and even playwrights never could on their own.
[And I never made the mistake of feeling that what they do is anything less than an art. So John Gromada’s other point is right on target. As Linda Loman said in another context in Death of a Salesman: “Attention must be paid.”]
The absence of sound design categories at the Tony Awards screams louder each year.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of my professional career in the theatre, where I’ve had the good fortune to make a life designing sound and composing music for numerous productions, many of them on Broadway. I have been privileged to receive one of the highest accolades in the theatre for my work: In 2013, I was nominated for a Tony Award for designing the sound for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful [23 April-9 October 2013].
Unfortunately, I am one of the few sound designers who have been recognized, or might ever be recognized, by the Tonys for their work; the following season was the last the awards were given. That’s because the American Theatre Wing announced that they were eliminating the Tony categories for sound design, relegating any recognition in that area to the occasional special Tony. [The Tony Awards Administration Committee made the announcement on 11 June 2014.] The reasons were enumerated in The New York Times: “Many Tony voters do not know what sound design is or how to assess it; a large number of Tony voters choose not to cast ballots in sound design categories because of this lack of expertise; and some administration committee members believe that sound design is more of a technical craft, rather than a theatrical art form that the Tonys are intended to honor.”
Suffice to say, the decision was an incredible blow to me. And I was far from the only one: The afternoon of the announcement, I started an online petition asking the Tony administration committee to reconsider, thinking that if I could get 1,000 signatures, it might persuade the committee to change their minds. In an hour, I had 1,000 signatures; in a few hours, the numbers grew to 5,000, then 10,000. In a week, more than 30,000 people from around the world signed the petition—including luminaries like Hugh Jackman, Stephen Sondheim, [director] Diane Paulus, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
People from all disciplines expressed shock and dismay. What the Tony committee saw as a simple administrative adjustment demoralized thousands of people around the country who felt as if their role in the theatre had suddenly been invalidated. For so long we had fought for respect and recognition for our art. After many years of lobbying, we were able to get Tony categories for best sound design—one for plays and another for musicals—established in 2007 and implemented for the 2008 ceremony. It seemed that the battle was over. The Tony Award was the last of many hurdles our profession had faced in gaining respect, visibility, and the potential to make an adult living. Or so it seemed.
Getting sound design recognized as a legitimate career and art form has been a long and arduous process. In the late ’90s, we were able to convince United Scenic Artists [the union for artists and designers in the entertainment industry] to represent us, marking a major step for our profession. For the first time, working sound designers were able to have employer-based health insurance and could look forward to a pension upon retirement. And we began to close the pay gap between the fees we received and what other designers made, meaning that to make a living we no longer had to do twice as many shows as our colleagues just to get by. We could spend more time, energy, and thought on any given production, and maybe, just maybe, even think about supporting a family while engaged in this business we love.
Sound design is now such a necessity that most major theatre graduate programs in the country offer sound design MFAs, turning out scores of young bright designers looking to make a living in this field.
Meanwhile, most of the other major awards, in New York and elsewhere, have added sound design categories. When the Tony Awards joined in the trend, it was a monumental validation. As a nationally recognized and televised event, the Tonys finally gave us access to the highest level of visibility available to a theatre artist, and the potential to turn that visibility into a sustainable career. A designer with a Tony, or even a nomination, can command higher fees and respect, and use the honor to leverage all sorts of opportunities.
Now that opportunity for recognition is no longer available to us. The manner in which the categories were eliminated, and the way it was explained in the press, gave the impression that some kind of mistake had been made in adding sound design categories in the first place, as if previous sound design winners didn’t truly deserve their awards because, after all, Tony voters never knew how to judge what we do. I was told that many people on the Tony administration committee believed that sound design was nothing more than a matter of “Can I hear them?” and that to justify the continuation of the categories we would need to change that perception.
Of course, we had already jumped through all of those hoops back in 2006 and 2007 during the process to establish the categories—a process that included months of lobbying, education, and gentle persuasion. In 2006 after a preview of Lisa Kron’s Well, which I had designed sound for, producer Liz McCann [1931-2021; she died this past 9 September] came up to me and said, “John, I love so much what you’re bringing to this production. I think you should win a Tony Award!”
I responded that many in the theatre community shared her opinion that there should be a sound design category. She then offered to begin a process to make it happen. The conversation expanded to include several of my sound design colleagues, representatives of our union, and members of the American Theatre Wing who valued sound design and understood our place as partners in the process. Our allies on the committee shepherded the idea through the byzantine and opaque political process that shapes Tony Awards policy. They arranged for an education session in which David Budries, head of the sound design program at the Yale School of Drama, spoke to committee members and Tony nominators about what we do, and what to look for in judging sound design.
What Budries told them is that sound design is a discipline that defies concrete definition, and that it’s often best when it’s not noticed. Still, any perceptive theatregoer is equipped to vote on excellence in sound design. All it takes is simply to think a bit about what you’re listening to. It doesn’t take any more special knowledge than it takes to judge lighting design or orchestration or even costume design. Listen to the design and think: Does it serve the play and production? Is it distinctive in some way that is unique while helping tell a story? How does what you’re hearing make you feel?
Admittedly, we generally aren’t used to thinking about the sounds we hear, because sound is processed in a very different part of the brain than visual stimuli. Sound works on the unconscious, animal parts of our brain; we’re often not aware that it’s happening or what kind of effect it’s having on us. That’s why it’s both so potentially powerful as a design element and yet so easy to overlook.
Some heard and understood what Budries said, but others reportedly found it hard to break out of the traditional notion of what constitutes theatrical design. To them, design is what they can see, not hear, and sound design, as far as they could tell, was simply about making things louder. Still, after more than a year of work lobbying and gathering endorsements from theatre industry leaders around the country, we had enough support that when a vote was finally taken to establish the sound design categories, it passed in 2007.
I clearly remember that day; a producer on the committee called me excitedly with news that the motion had passed. There was no better evidence that sound design had finally come of age than the American Theatre Wing recognizing our art with a Tony Award.
For us sound designers, being considered for a Tony Award was a long-awaited vindication of an essential concept: that we were an integral part of the theatre world, and have been making invaluable contributions as artists to productions on Broadway and across the country for a very long time.
I first learned this myself 30 years ago in 1986, when I made my professional and Broadway debut designing the transition sound and music for Jonathan Miller’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey. I was 22 years old and a senior at Duke University, where producer Manny Azenberg had brought the production to try out. I had spent nearly four years at Duke doing this thing called sound design, inspired by Jeff Storer, a charismatic teacher/director who had thankfully steered me away from acting and into this relatively new discipline, where I could perfectly combine my musical ability and my love of theatre.
That semester I was doing an independent study in music composition that included work with one of the very first samplers—an expensive and rare instrument that few had access to. While in rehearsal with the show, Miller discovered that he needed some kind of music or sound to tie together the different scenes in his production and indicate the passage of time, and there was no time to bring someone in from New York to execute it. Friends who were interning on the production steered him to me, and I soon found myself in a room with Miller, who hummed for me examples of the tone-like music that was in his head. Overnight I composed a little sound score of pieces that pleased the director; they made it into the production and onto Broadway. Though a modest contribution, it was part of the glue that held the entire piece together. And I actually received a paycheck for it.
After Miller trusted me to compose transitions for his productions, I arrived in New York at a time when directors were just beginning to clue into the possibilities of sound, and there seemed to be a shortage of sound designers approaching productions as artists. I found myself working with forward-thinking directors—JoAnne Akalaitis, Michael Greif, Anne Bogart—and veteran designers, including [scenic designer] Ben Edwards [1916-99], [lighting designer] Tom Skelton [1927-94], [costume designer] Jane Greenwood [b. 1934], and [lighting designer] Jennifer Tipton [b. 1937]. They treated me as an equal member of the design team and understood how my work complemented theirs and how aural elements could be used to tell a story. And my skills were enough in demand that I was able to cobble together a living among Off-Broadway nonprofits, resident theatres, and a Broadway production or two most seasons.
In 1990, I found a home at the Public Theater during Joe Papp’s last year, where I composed the sound score for Grief’s landmark production of Machinal [25 September-25 November 1990] and won an Obie for it. I’ll never forget the thrill of being at my very first awards ceremony, feeling surrounded and embraced by a community of theatre artists. At that ceremony, and the others that followed over the years, I felt like I was part of a family of people all trying to make a go of it in this crazy collaborative business. What these awards have said to me is: We value you. You are part of the family. We understand and appreciate the hard work you are putting into our art.
That’s why in 2013, after having designed sound or composed music for 35 Broadway productions, it was so satisfying to finally gain validation for all those years of work from the Broadway community in the form of a Tony nomination for my work on Michael Wilson’s fine revival of The Trip to Bountiful. I understood the Tonys as a high-visibility marketing tool, but still thought that at their core the awards were about recognizing excellence within the Broadway family, a family that I have long felt a member of. As I partook in all the Tony events leading up to the ceremony, I sat at luncheons and cocktail parties with actors and producers and other designers with whom I’ve worked for years, and listened to members of the American Theatre Wing and Mayor Michael Bloomberg [in office: 2002-13] talk about how important theatre artists are to the life and economy of the city.
Most importantly, I felt I was part of a community. Had I won that year (my colleague Leon Rothenberg won for his sound design on The Nance [15 April-11 August 2013]), this is part of what I would have said in my acceptance speech: “Thank you to all of you out there for embracing me and my work as part of this Broadway family for so many years. I feel most privileged to have been able to make a life of this, creating art with you all. Thank you for listening. And thank you for your continued support of sound designers as part of the Broadway community.”
A year later, after learning the categories were taken away, I was speaking with a colleague on the Tony administration committee, asking him how this could have happened. He told me, “I’m so sorry. You guys were just beginning to come into your own.”
Just beginning? I thought. Haven’t you been paying attention to what we’ve been doing all these years? We’ve been here for decades. A sound designer’s job isn’t just to set the volume on the microphones. It’s to convey the world of a play or musical to the audience’s ears; it’s creating and structuring sounds that underscore text, choosing or composing music to facilitate a scene transition, or making the orchestra and singers sound as good as they can, even to the rear mezzanine.
And when sound designers are not recognized at the Tony Awards for our efforts, it sends a very clear message: that what we do isn’t creative, that we’re not true theatre artists, that we are a disposable member of a production’s team. All because a group of people won’t take the time to understand the creative and necessary work that we do. Somehow the voters for other notable awards—the Drama Desks, the [Lucille] Lortels [New York Off-Broadway], the [Laurence] Oliviers [professional theatre in London], the Jeffs [Joseph Jefferson Awards, for theater produced in the Chicago area], to name a few—have figured out how to determine excellence in sound design. Tony voters, of which there are more than 800, sell themselves short when they think they’re not equally equipped.
As Lin-Manuel Miranda said in a recent Rolling Stone article, “Set designers sculpt with physical materials, lighting designers sculpt with light, and sound designers sculpt with sound. They are responsible for your aural experience at a Broadway show,” adding that we create “literally the sound of Broadway.” It’s about time Tony voters learned how to listen.
[John Gromada (b. 1964) is a Tony-nominated sound designer and composer. He has designed 37 shows on Broadway and numerous works Off-Broadway and regionally. He’s won many awards both in New York City and around the country. Gromada also works in film, television, and radio.]
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