"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Article 7

 

[This is the penultimate installment of the American Theatre Special Section on theater tech and design.  In Article 7, Tara Anderson writes about the technical problems of flying actors in the cast of For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, Sarah Ruhl’s homage to her mother, who, as a teenager, played Peter in a school production of the original play.  In her article, the author reports on how the Actors Theatre of Louisville brought ordinary reality to new heights in their production. 

[Anderson’s report is from the “Production Notebook” of American Theatre’s July/August 2016 issue; it was also posted as “Taking Flight: How Sarah Ruhl’s ‘For Peter Pan’ Got Off the Ground” on the website on 20 June 2016.

[Though the nine articles in “The Magic of Design” all stand on their own, I recommend reading the whole series because each report examines a different aspect of the design and tech aspects of theater.  This is the fifth installment in the Rick On Theater republication of the series; the previous four posts were published on 9, 12, 15, and 18 September.]

“THE BEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING”
by Tara Anderson 

In Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, everyday reality takes flight

“And if it means I must prepare
To shoulder burdens with a worried air,
I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up . . .”
      —Carolyn Leigh [lyricist, 1926-83], from the 1954 musical Peter Pan

WHEN IS A PERSON TRULY A GROWN-UP? 

Is it when they get a real job, when they have a child of their own, when their parents die? Is “never” really an option?

These questions are at the heart of Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, which takes the tale of the boy who never grew up for a new spin while telling a story about something we all have in common: death.

For Peter Pan, which ran March 8-April 10 [2016] as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, was inspired by Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen, who played the character onstage as a teenager, and who is seen on the poster for the play looking perky in her green costume.

“When I was growing up, whenever I visited her family house in Iowa, there were these pictures of her as Peter Pan, in green tights, flying,” Ruhl recalled. “So it was part of my association with my mother, and also part of my association with what theatre was.”

The play opens with a 70-year-old Ann (Kathleen Chalfant), a sort of stand-in for Ruhl’s real-life mother, directly addressing the audience about the joy of performing the role as a child. Ann is the oldest of five, with three brothers and a younger sister, all of whom are dealing in different ways with the impending loss of their father.

Ruhl tells the story in three “movements” without an intermission [the play runs 90 minutes]: First is the vigil at the hospital; then the informal, whiskey-fueled wake around the kitchen table; and finally a fantasy sequence in which the siblings jump into the world of Peter Pan—or rather, a children’s play version of Peter Pan, but with their creaky knees and bad eyesight.

To make the final part work, some technology would be necessary—you can’t do Peter Pan with everybody’s feet on the ground. Louisville happens to be the home of ZFX Flying Effects, a company that handles everything from building equipment and harnesses to aerial choreography for productions around the world. (Cirque du Soleil, for one, gets all their black steel cables from ZFX, whose technicians developed a coloring process that makes wires invisible onstage.)

“I had always thought the flying would be a metaphor and we wouldn’t actually be able to afford flying one character, much less five, around the stage,” Ruhl admitted. But director and longtime collaborator Les Waters—whose first order of business when he took over as ATL’s artistic director in 2012 was to commission a new play from her—had other ideas. He told Ruhl, “Oh, we’re flying them.” [Waters left ATL at the end of the 2017-18 season.]

Because the script in the fantasy section calls for the characters to fly rather suddenly, the actors couldn’t be taken offstage to clip into their flying lines. So the decision was made to allow the mechanics of flying to be seen, along with other elements of the stagecraft.

“Seeing those moments then allowed us to make the general decision that the crew can be seen manipulating and setting scenery and props whenever necessary during the metatheatre parts of the play,” said scenic designer Annie Smart.

Brian Owens, senior flying director and lead trainer at ZFX, worked with the creative team to determine where and how the flying effects would work. While Owens has worked on massive productions, including the Arabic version of “American Idol,” For Peter Pan allowed him to work on a much smaller scale.

“The biggest challenge was coming up with a way to tell the story so that the flying effects supported the rest of the script and didn’t just become this thing we did,” explained Owens. “It was really just this artistic process, this collaborative art form that I so dearly love, of saying, ‘Well, what about this idea?’ or ‘What if we change this moment a little bit?’ It doesn’t matter where those ideas come from, whether it was me or Les or Sarah.”

In January, most of the cast gathered at ZFX’s cavernous rehearsal space for some flying practice. Chalfant and Lisa Emery, who played younger sister Wendy, were the only two actors who would wear harnesses and fly in the production; both said that the opportunity to fly was a huge draw for them to do the play. Chalfant had never flown onstage before, though she spent years in the role of Hannah Pitt being jealous of the Angel in Angels in America. [Chalfant played the role from October 1993 to December 1994.]

“It’s sort of everything you imagine it will be, and it feels absolutely safe,” said Chalfant, after coming down from pirouetting 15 feet in the air. “It’s one of those things that’s only fun.”

“Except when you’re trying to turn,” added Emery, laughing. She described the experience of flying as “ecstatically beautiful.”

Meanwhile, though the brothers—played by Scott Jaeck, Keith Reddin, and David Chandler—didn’t fly individually, they did clamber onto a bed that became a pirate ship and was hoisted aloft.

The play’s initial read-through also marked the first official day of work on the 2016 Humana Festival, as the entire Actors Theatre staff, along with a few donors and volunteers, gathered in the rehearsal room for a kickoff and family photo. There was a festive feeling as everyone introduced themselves. When it was Ruhl’s turn, she said simply, “I’m Sarah and I wrote the play,” and the room burst into applause.

Surveying the energetic whirl as the space was being set up for the reading, Ruhl said, “There’s something surreal about writing a play in your solitary room, and then there’s all these people and dogs.” (A canine in the play’s second section is triple-cast.)

Another production of For Peter Pan would go up May 20-July 3 [2016] at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre, with the same cast save Emery and Jaeck, who had other commitments. “The wonder of doing a new play in a theatre like Actors Theatre, and knowing that it will go on to Berkeley, is that there’s a long period of development,” said Chalfant. “A play like this, which on the page looks quite simple, is in production going to be pretty complex. And it’s wonderful to know that you have the time to realize it.”

At first glance it does look pretty straightforward on the page: lots of silence amid ongoing conversations, mostly good-natured family meandering, all the characters in one room together. But then you may notice some of the details Ruhl tosses in: 

◾ A suggestion that the siblings might “form a ragtag five-piece band with trumpet and accordion and sing and play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’” or a marching band might enter, at the end of the first section. In Louisville, actual marching bands—six different local high school bands taking turns over 20 performances—were hired to perform the song as the set changed behind a classic red velvet curtain.

◾ The aforementioned dog—the ghost of the family pet, to be precise. In the production the role was assayed by a rotating cast made up of a golden retriever, an Irish wolfhound, and an English sheepdog. The sheepdog was fired after a few shows for sleeping on the job, but the golden did so well she landed another role, as Crab in The Two Gentleman of Verona, at Kentucky Shakespeare through August [2016].

◾ A splashy sword fight between Peter Pan and Captain Hook in which Peter is slain, then revived by audience applause, in a neat twist on the Tinkerbell tradition.

◾ As we said: flying.

In short, For Peter Pan isn’t as simple as it may seem. For one, as Smart noted, the entire design had to factor in the flying from the beginning. What’s more, the differences between the three sections presented a design challenge.

“In many ways, Sarah has written something she imagines very pared back—a studio show, a black-box event, something intense and intimate—for parts one and two of the play,” Smart said. “And then within that, she imagines the sudden and delightful appearances of traditional stage curtains and flying drops—the trappings of an old-fashioned touring house.”

Smart built a two-walled hospital room using rolling units that could then become the family home, creating the enclosed space of the first two movements. In part three, the walls cleared to make way for a giant nursery window, creating a more expansive-feeling fantasy sequence while paying homage to the traditional Peter Pan aesthetic.

Lighting designer Matt Frey also chose to approach the first two sections differently. “We were trying to start in a very real place as much as possible, and then show signs of de-evolution as the play proceeds and shows its cracks of magic, humor, and nostalgia,” Frey explained. “By the end we are in a very different place than where we began.”

Actors Theatre’s Pamela Brown Auditorium has some built-in limitations that restricted what could be done: The grid ceiling is less than six feet above the lights, so a flying actor could not be lifted out of sight, nor could scenery be flown in. Adding to the complexity, at Humana For Peter Pan played in daily repertory with Wellesley Girl by Brendan Pelsue, the stage floor for which was installed beneath the floor for For Peter Pan—i.e., trap doors were also off-limits.

[A note on theater jargon: You can say that a character in a play “flies” and it’s perfectly understandable to even the least experienced member of the audience.  You can even say, as director Waters does, “we’re flying them,” making ‘fly’ a transitive verb with an object, and everyone will know what you mean. 

[But in theater, ‘fly’ is the word used to mean ‘hoist aloft’ or ‘lift out of sight,’ usually into the ‘fly space’ or ‘fly loft,’ the space above the lighting grid, out of the view of the spectators.  Hence, “flying in scenery” and “flying drops” mean to raise or lower objects—including humans—from or to the stage by mechanical means.]

Flying complicated Frey’s job as the lighting designer as well. “You have performers moving on a whole new axis,” he said. “In addition to stage left/stage right and upstage/downstage, we now add up/down. So we try and account for that by addressing all the possibilities of where they might be.”

As director, Waters had some adjusting to do as well.

“How do you rehearse that in a rehearsal room, where you pretend somebody is 10 feet above somebody else?” Waters wondered. The answer: You just have to pretend until you can get into the theatre.

At a run-through about 10 days before opening, the rehearsal space was packed with observers, including Actors Theatre’s troupe of acting apprentices. Even without costumes, sets, or a flying apparatus, the show had several observers openly weeping by the end. A burly twentysomething guy turned to me, a stranger, with tears in his eyes and asked for a hug.

When I shared this moment with Ruhl after the rehearsal, she said, “I think that anyone who’s lost someone in a family can relate, but I also think that for people who’ve been in theatre, it sort of ends up being a love note to what it means to work in the theatre. I think that’s partly what the tears are about.”

During rehearsals, before Chalfant even put on the famous Pan costume, she transformed into the classic character with her posture: back straight, chin up, one foot slightly in front of the other, arms akimbo. She is elegant and slim, with short hair, and she waggled her hips as a taunt to the lumbering Captain Hook.

In performance, Chalfant as Ann wore drapey pants and a loose sweater in the first two sections; the attentive observer might have seen a sliver of green above her short boots when she crossed her legs. But when she at last doffed her pants, revealing patchwork shorts and green tights, donned that iconic green cap with the red feather, and released a raucous crow call, the applause was spontaneous.

Most of the cast enjoyed hamming it up in the third movement, as the entire production took on a heightened feel, with underscoring (selected and arranged by sound designer Bray Poor) and sharper lighting. Frey described his lighting concept as “a place that is fantasy, memory, and a community theatre from over a half century ago—sometimes one of these things, and sometimes all.”

Ruhl said she wanted that section to feel as if the characters were putting on a children’s play, but also as if we’re going “into their dream life or their unconscious. They’re both children and adults at the same time.” Accordingly the characters shift between acting their parts as the Darling children and commenting on their “real” adult lives. In performance the contrast was both jarring and funny.

Smart’s set for this section was dominated by the huge nursery window, which she made even bigger than usual so that the adult performers looked a little smaller and more childlike. At the same time, the window piece was constructed to be extra-strong so that the flying actors could hold onto it and use it as a midstage anchor.

“The window represents light and dark, the home and family, escape from such, and later becomes a closed and locked gate—the adult ‘children’ return to look longingly through it at the old house, now sold and owned by another family,” Smart explained.

ZFX’s Owens said the moment when Wendy flies up behind the window and looks in was a happy discovery during tech rehearsals. They didn’t plan it, nor did Waters or Ruhl.

“When we realized that we could pull that window farther downstage toward the audience and put her behind it, and have this really nice quiet moment after all these big flying effects, we all went, ‘Yes. Yes, that’s the thing,’” Owens said. “In my 10-plus years of choreographing and creating flying effects, that was quite literally one of my favorite pictures that I’ve ever seen on a stage.”

During one performance I attended, the pirate ship had a little trouble getting off the ground, and Ann-as-Peter had to urge the boys to “think lovelier thoughts” before it finally lifted up. A few minutes later, the action came to a halt as the stage manager announced that there were some “flying problems,” leaving Emery and Chalfant dangling in the air stage right, with Chandler, Jaeck, and Reddin perched on the flying bed.

A few crew members with headsets came out and stood underneath Emery and Chalfant as they were slowly brought back to the ground and unhooked from the cables, but the bed stayed aloft. It was one of those stage moments that was impossible to hide or finesse: At the most fantastical part of a fantasy, reality—and gravity—intruded.

“Anybody know a song?” Chalfant gamely offered. Someone in the audience started “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and soon the entire room—cast and crew and audience—was singing together. This unplanned reprise was the perfect choice for the moment.

In total, the action was paused for about 10 minutes; then Emery and Chalfant were rewired and the play was off again. At least one audience member I spoke to later was convinced that the entire “malfunction” was part of the play—that after going from a Midwestern dining room to full-fledged Neverland, maybe anything was possible.

After all the magic of the third section, I was surprised to hear from several audience members that their strongest reaction was to the “authenticity” of the first two movements, especially the handling of the family’s faith.

“I’m a Catholic, so I could relate to so many things,” said Suzanne Higdon, a frequent attendee of the theatre. “It was so similar to how they handle very serious moments in their lives and turn to prayer.”

“The death scene—like a lot of people, I’ve seen that room a lot of times, and it was really right on,” said Tom Hay, another Humana regular, who added that he thought the second section, set around the dinner table, was too slow.

Waters said that that second part is intentionally uneventful—that it’s meant to overturn a familiar trope of the American family drama, in which characters “get drunk and tear each other apart,” and “something will be revealed and someone will say, ‘Actually, I was abused by my father’s uncle’ or ‘I’m your mother,’ or whatever.” In Ruhl’s play, “It doesn’t—it deliberately doesn’t. It’s a reminiscence. So that is actually very tricky to play.”

Critical response was mixed though generally positive. In The New York Times Charles Isherwood called the cast and direction “superb,” particularly noting Chalfant’s delight in her role. Elizabeth Kramer at Louisville’s Courier-Journal also praised the performances and the direction, while writing that the marching band transition “disrupt(ed) the story and the mood.” Ashlie Stevens at WFPL, Louisville’s NPR station, also found that moment “cumbersome,” but thought that director Waters’s “knack for the darkly fanciful elevates Ruhl’s script.”

The delicate balance of family relationships that the actors developed would have to be adjusted for the Berkeley production, with two cast members being replaced. Speaking near the end of the Humana run, Waters said he wasn’t sure if there would be any rewrites, but he did think there would be some changes to the scene transitions.

Smart also said there would be more experiments in Berkeley with revealing the stage machinery rather than having changeovers happen behind the curtain. Owens said the theatre in Berkeley allows for slightly more room to fly, so he was hoping there would be more room for dynamic action than in Louisville’s more limited space.

For Peter Pan may have presented its production challenges, but for Ruhl it was all about audiences finding resonance with the characters and the universality of the story.

“I hope the audience brings their own personal experience to it, their own personal narrative about what it means to grow up, what it is to exist in a big family, what it means to lose the head of a big family,” Ruhl said. “The play is not a message play. I don’t think it reduces neatly that way, but I hope people connect with it emotionally.”

Chalfant certainly did. She joked in rehearsal that she would be “too old” to play the 70-year-old Ann by the time the show opened in Louisville: She just turned 71. “People who are 71 years old don’t usually get to fence and fly,” she said.

This wasn’t just Chalfant’s first time flying; it was also her first stab at swashbuckling. She has a vision problem that makes stage combat a challenge, and credits her fight partner, Chandler, with being extremely brave. “I’m almost blind in one eye, so I don’t have any depth perception,” she said with a laugh. “I can see where he is, but, you know—sort of.”

But the play’s main dimension is one Chalfant had no trouble perceiving.

“The depth of it, the fierceness of it, has been kind of a surprise that we’ve found,” she said. That sounds like a pretty grown-up discovery.

[Tara Anderson has an MFA in writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and contributing editor of WFPL, Louisville’s NPR station.  She’s the host and producer of Five Things, a podcast on WFPL and holds degrees in music performance and journalism from the University of Kentucky.  

[Anderson earned a master’s degree in communications from New York City’s Fordham University, where she was the assistant program director at WFUV, Fordham's public radio station.  In addition to American Theatre, she’s been a contributor to All Things Considered, the BBC World Service, and Louisville magazine; she’s also been heard on-air on WFPK and WUOL, both also in Louisville.

[“Bearable Lightness” is a report on a technical achievement on stage that was significant to the production of Ruhl’s play; so was “How to Build a Moving House Without a Turntable in ‘Rain,’” Article 4 (posted on 15 September).  Just to illustrate how important the effect of such an accomplishment can be, let me retell an anecdote I’ve related several times before on ROT.  Some readers may recognize it:

[When my family spent part of the summer on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, back in the mid-1950s, we always went to the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis at least once during the season.  To this day, I remember being amazed at a production of The Wizard of Oz when I was probably around 6 or 7. 

[After the tornado generated by the tech crew with lighting and sound effects, the lights came back up—and there sat Dorothy’s house, with the legs of the Wicked Witch sticking out from under one side!  ‘How did that house get there?’ I wondered.  The Melody Tent being an arena stage, with no curtain to hide behind, this all happened right before our eyes (albeit, in a semi-black-out).  It was impossible!  It had to be magic!

[Clearly, I’ve never forgotten that technical bit of stage sorcery.  (And, by the way, I still don’t know how they did it!)

[One last personal note: I’m not quite old enough to have seen the Mary Martin Peter Pan on Broadway (20 October 1954-26  February 1955); I was 7 and 8 during its run, too young still to come to New York City to see a Broadway show.  But I did see the TV version broadcast by NBC on 7 March 1955—though it was in black and white. 

[Curiously, I didn’t want to be Peter—I wanted to be Captain Hook, and I dressed as Hook for Halloween for several years after seeing the show.  To this day, it’s Cyril Ritchard’s voice I hear for Captain Hook, singing “Who's the dirtiest dog in this wonderful world?” (“Captain Hook’s Waltz”).

[Oh, and if you check “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010), you’ll see that I did make it to Broadway about four years later.]

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Articles 5 & 6

 

[There are two articles from American Theatre’s “Design & Tech” Special Section in the fourth installment on Rick On Theater.  The first is a report on robots on stage and the second is a description of the Costume Collection run by the Theatre Development Fund, a boon for costume designers from all over the country.

[As I’ve affirmed all along, these nine articles are independent of one another, aside from their common theme of theatrical design and technology, and it makes no difference to their comprehension in what order you read them.  Nonetheless, I strongly recommend checking out the four preceding articles already posted in this series because they cover many important aspects of current design and tech applications on today’s stages.  The first three instalments were posted on 9, 12, and 15 September.]

 

“DO ROBOTS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SCENE PARTNERS?”
by Amy Gijsbers van Wijk

[Van Wijk’s discussion of robots in use on theater stages was posted on the AT website on 6 July 2016 as a feature of “Education.”  It’s one of the articles in this series that didn’t appear in the print edition of the magazine.]

Robots onstage are less likely to replace humans than to heighten the contradictions of the human condition in a technological age.

In recent years, the question of where theatre and technology meet, and if they should at all, has been in the air. From live-tweeting during plays to tech-driven shows [Article 1, posted 9 September], theatremakers have their brains in the Cloud. With technology onstage and off reaching greater and more ambitious heights, what’s next frontier? Most likely robots.

And not just actors playing robots, as in Mac Rogers‘s riff on Kar[e]l Capek [1890-1938], Universal Robots [first presented: 2007 Off-Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Source; based on Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920], but actual programmable performers constructed of metal and wire. As a playwright, I’m personally interested in the topic of robotics in theatre. So while pursuing an MFA in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University, I have attempted to make work with a robot.

In 2014 and 2015, I collaborated with a roboticist and artist named Garth Zeglin, and we attempted to create a short play, Remembering, for a robot named Herb, who lives at Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics lab in Pittsburgh. The piece featured an unnamed man putting his deceased father’s belongings into boxes with the help of his son’s robot. It was a fitting topic, considering that Herb is a robot that was made to physically assist the elderly. But because Herb lives in the university lab, his parts are always being upgraded and replaced. When I met him, Herb’s body comprised of [sic] a large metal torso supporting two robot arms, an X-Box Kinetic camera for eyes, and legs on a Segway base. He also wore a bowtie.

“The Herb project was originally a side project of the Carnegie Mellon robotics lab,” says Zeglin. “The notional thought was that drama has the lessons that talk about how bodies communicate meaning, and maybe we could use that in research.”

I was first inspired when I learned Herb had previously performed in a play, directed by then-BFA directing student Sam French. He felt the project would allow him to explore elements of theatre not examined in his university experience thus far. “I was really burned out on the phrase ‘the human condition,’” says French, now a freelance director. “I was interested in a production that looked at the human condition of a robot. I wanted to do anything to show that that phrase could sometimes be meaningless.”

This short experiment resulted in a scene from All in the Timing [1993] by David Ives, performed by Herb and a student actress named Olivia Lemmon. It was a fruitful if technically challenging experience, according to French. The “biggest roadblock,” French says, is that “the internal clocks of the processes for a human actor and a robot are just not the same.”

Still, though it took a robotics team to program reactions into Herb that would be instantaneous for a human actor, French was inspired by the interactions between the human body and technology.

“What was really beautiful about it was actually bringing Herb in,” he says. “Rather than removing an actor, it felt like we were adding 20 actors. The team was helping to develop his movements, his voice. And it was all being done from a dramaturgical and a scientific perspective.”

Eventually the lab’s work on Herb went in a different direction: He started as a fully functioning robot but ended up reduced to just a hand, and ultimately there was no way to perform with him. But that doesn’t mean that a collaboration between theatre artists and robots is impossible.

Robot-based production and theatre collaboration often develop between universities or faculty and theatre artists. A Double Bill of One-Acts, written and directed by Oriza Hirata and featuring the Seinendan Theater Company [Tokyo] and the Osaka University Robot Theatre Project, premiered at the Japan Society in New York City in February 2013 before touring nationwide.

For Washington University in St. Louis’s acting professor Annamaria Pileggi, work in the world of robotics began when she started working with Bill Smart, a roboticist at WU. “Originally, I started doing research exploring the use of actor training techniques to improve human/robot interactions,” says Pileggi. She and Smart developed a series of short exercises featuring humans and robots performing nonverbal actions. One memorable piece, The Forgiveness Piece, featured a human actor seeking forgiveness, wordlessly, from a robot.

“At the time, we had a very rudimentary robot that was like a trashcan on wheels with a camera for eyes, and no arms or legs,” recalls Pileggi.

The tests resulted in a commissioned play called SKY SKY SKY by Liza Birkenmeier, an alumna who had acted in the experiments. The play, which ran in March 2015 at the university, imagines a world where an elderly woman named Joan puts her life in the hands of a robot caretaker, with the intention of ending her life. The actions of a robot named Harris were programmed by David Lu, a doctoral candidate at the time.

“When we were workshopping scenes with Harris, he would have maybe 30 seconds of what I would call choreographic demands,” says Birkenmeier. And as with any piece of complicated technology, working with a robot led to a number of glitches.

“At one point, Harris was supposed to brush my hair, and that didn’t quite work out as planned,” recalls Nancy Lewis, who played the elderly Joan. “My hair got caught and he kept going. It was one of those things where you realize: Okay, this isn’t a real person. Someone has to stop him.”

Like people, different robots have different abilities and strengths, as well as different kinds of bodies. A production in New York City last year used a robot with a less imposing physical presence who could respond to questions: the bust-sized Bina48, a social robot created by Martine Rothblatt and Hanson Robotics. (Bina48 stands for “Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture 48.”)

Bina48 was modeled after Martine’s partner, Bina; thorough research and interviews with Bina served as the foundation for the social robot’s persona. Director Andrew Scoville came across Bina48 while researching trans-humanism, a broad philosophical ideology concerned with ways that humans can be enhanced and harmed by technology. Last fall, for the Big Outdoor Site Specific Stuff Festival [October 2015], run by En Garde Arts [New York City-based theater company specializing in site-specific performances], Scoville created An Evening with Bina48, which ran at the Hudson River Park. It featured Bina48 interacting with actress Lynne Rosenberg. “We landed on this idea of a blind date,” recalls Scoville. “The success of the piece rode on Lynne. She was able to dance with Bina48 in a way that I think was essential to making the piece work.”

The rehearsal process for the production was less like a traditional rehearsal process and more like going over a game plan, Scoville explains. The key was making sure that Rosenberg was comfortable and that logistics were in place to handle where the conversation would go, as well as how to end the date.

Bina48 is supposed to be able to carry a conversation in her Siri-like speech patterns. But occasionally she would respond to a question with a non sequitur, or—in a way that was arguably quite human-like—without responding to the question at all.

“Once, Lynne asked her, ‘Do you feel comfortable talking with me?’ and she just answered in this way that was truly nonsensical,” recalls En Garde Arts executive producer Anne Hamburger. “She went off onto something else altogether. But you could also see how the audience was so interested in her, and what she would do or say next.”

Dramaturgical functions notwithstanding, a common thread among these robot theatre collaborations is a simple appeal: Working with robots is just plain cool.

“It’s not about replacing humans,” says Scoville. “I’ve always been very curious about robots.” To him, robots can just be another tool in a dramatist’s toolkit. Like other tech-heavy effects, such as video design, “We just have to accept them for what they are, and the limitations that they bring.”

Theatre artists aren’t going to stop working with robot[s] any time soon. If anything, the prospect is becoming mainstream: Cirque du Soleil’s newest show Paramour, currently running on Broadway [Cirque du Soleil Paramour, May 2016-April 2017], features eight drones flying over the actors and audiences (a collaboration with Verity Studios). The kicker is that these robots are autonomous; no remote control is needed.

Considering that audiences have a hard time just turning off their phones in the theatre, is putting robots onstage just feeding our debilitating dependence on devices? Have we reached peak technology?

“I left this work feeling even more conflicted about technology, because I’m dependent on it, and yet I see how it’s isolating us as a society,” admits Pileggi.

As for me, I find this ambivalence to be the most compelling element about making robot-based work. If a robot can provide comfort, labor, or entertainment, then shouldn’t humans be providing the same for one another? The stilted-ness of a robot’s movements and speech patterns should serve to illuminate our own seamless bodies, their agelessness heightening our aging flesh.

It is my hope that after an evening of robot-based theatre, when the novelty of robotics has lost its sheen, the unanswerable question of what makes us truly human will remain—and theatre artists and audience members will seek answers, with or without the help of robots by their sides.

[Amy Gijsbers van Wijk is a journalist and playwright based in New York City.

[One participant in robot theater says, “Rather than removing an actor, it felt like we were adding 20 actors,” and another asserts, “It’s not about replacing humans.”  The contradiction is disconcerting—and not at all comforting. 

[Just as the American Federation of Musicians was exercised by the appearance of recorded music and synthesized orchestras, displacing live musicians in a theater’s pit (see “The Sound of Muzak,” posted on ROT on 16 June 2011), something tells me that Actors’ Equity Association and the other performers’ unions are watching very carefully and preparing for a campaign against robotic actors on U.S. stages.]

*  *  *  *
“WORN AGAIN AT THE TDF COSTUME COLLECTION”
by Allison Considine

[Considine’s article on the Costume Collection appeared only online at https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/07/06/worn-again-at-the-tdf-costume-collection/, posted on 6 July 2016; it wasn’t published in AT’s print edition.]

Threads from Broadway, tours, and the Met hang out between engagements at an Astoria warehouse that’s now accessible to shows all over the U.S.

“Oh, if only these costumes could talk . . .”

Stephen Cabral repeats this as he leads me through the impressive home of the estimated 80,000 costumes at the TDF Costume Collection. Housed in a 16,000-square-foot warehouse at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, the costumes—most originally created for theatre and opera productions in New York City—hang in 12 rows 4 tiers high. In the last year, 12,000 of them have traveled to 36 states and appeared in more than 1,000 productions across the country.

“In some ways, most of TDF’s programs are about getting people into the seats,” says Cabral of Theatre Development Fund, which runs Times Square’s TKTS booth [same-day discount tickets to matinee and evening performances of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals, plays, and dance productions; there are three other locations in the city (with varying hours and practices); check the TDF webiste], as well as a popular membership program. “Our program is not about getting people into the seats—it is about the experience they have once they are in the seats.”

As the director of the collection, Cabral is a walking encyclopedia of costume history; at a glance he can usually recall where certain costumes came from, many of the productions they were rented out for, even the famous stars who wore them onstage. As we turned a corner, he pointed to an elaborate brocade cape that was donated by the Metropolitan Opera. The weighty piece is one of many in the collection from the Met, the organization that kickstarted the collection with a generous donation in 1969.

Costumes find their way to the collection by way of touring shows, estate donations, and the unfortunate scrap of Broadway costumes in previews—such as pairs of tall military boots I spy on a top shelf that appeared in Hamilton when it was at the Public Theater [Newman Theater, January-May 2015]. No donation is ever turned away, a policy that has amassed bins upon bins of patent leather dress shoes and the occasional gem. Cabral describes the process of sorting through a new donation like Christmas: You never know what piece will come through the doors.

The collection is separated by type of garment and period: Bustles live in aisle 7, flapper fare can be found in aisle 6, Shakespearean styles can be located in aisle 10, etc. The many designations are laid out in a handy map for customers, many who pull the costumes themselves.

“It is a little more leg work for the customers that come in,” says Cabral. “But they can create the show by going to the specific period of the show they need. It allows the designers who come in really great artistic freedom, because they are not taking someone else’s idea of a show—they are pulling their vision of the show.”

On any given day among the racks, Broadway designers mingle with parents volunteering to pull costumes for an elementary school play. For theatres located too far away to travel to the collection in person, the TDF Costume Collection recently began offering the services of an in-house designer who can assist in pulling a show: A costume designer can provide TDF with sketches, research on the production, and the cast’s measurements, and TDF’s in-house designer can pull costumes and ship them anywhere in the United States.

The services rendered by the costume collection thus allow nonprofit theatres to [. . .] put quality costumes onstage at little cost. Prices are determined on a sliding scale according to the length of performance and the number of seats in a facility. A costume is defined as anything that an actor can wear at one time, from bootstraps to bonnets.

And while Western hats and Colonial coats can be spotted at church productions and in school auditoriums, costume pieces from the collection also appear in films and on the occasional episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Costumes are rented to commercial projects on the basis of artistic merit—the collection is not the place for social events or high-end Halloween parties to browse, and they’re not allowed to be rented for anywhere that food and drink will be present. In any case, large corporations pay more. “In some ways our commercial rentals are helping to offset the costs of running the place for the not-for-profits,” says Cabral.

As we pass racks of clothing that have already been pulled for shows, I spot a blue silk gown and a row of coat blankets for a production of Gypsy. Nearby hangs a row of curtain dresses and nun’s habits gathered for The Sound of Music.

[On the assumption that a coat blanket is the same as a “blanket coat,” it’s a long coat, often with a hood, made from a blanket (Native American blankets are very popular, and may have been the origin of the practice) or blanket material; they may be belted or not.  It’s also called a ‘capote,’ which originated in Canada among fur traders.

[By the same token, a curtain dress, as far as I can gather, is a dress made either from an actual curtain (think Scarlett’s famous green gown in Gone with the Wind or the parody in The Carol Burnett Show’s 1976 “Went with the Wind!” sketch—but I even found a reference to a dress made from a shower curtain) or from curtain fabric.  Another interpretation is a dress that drapes over the body rather than being fitted; I found a reference that called an Indian sari a “curtain dress.” ~Rick]

Next Cabral takes me to the Special Stock Room, a section deemed worthy for brand-new pieces, costumes from notable productions, and pieces built by well-known designers. There I walk between bedazzled suit jackets designed by William Ivey Long for The Boy from Oz [1998; Broadway, 2003] and a hand-beaded evening gown by Bob Mackie. There are also some newer, brightly colored fairy-tale dresses and bright green leisure suits—popular items for costume designers looking to jazz up a classic show.

“Everyone is doing their own spin on different period,” says Cabral. “Nobody wants to do a production of Titus Andronicus that looks like a period production of the show.”

But there are also historic pieces in pristine condition, properly swoon-worthy for period productions. I pull out an Elizabethan gown with intricately embroidered sleeves; it is so heavy that Cabral helps to hold it up. The gown was built in the 1970s for the Met, and Cabral shows me the corset stays inside the waist and the adjustable fasteners on the seam that have allowed for the dress to be worn by performers of many sizes. Clearly the Met spared no expense, and the ornate costumes have lived on: Eight tags are sewn inside with different actress[es]’ names.

Customers can gain access to the Special Stock Room if they have rented from the regular stock and followed the rules of the collection, returning each piece within the allotted time and dry cleaned. As we reenter the regular stock room, Cabral shows me a distressed velvet jacket with gold buttons. The piece once lived in the Special Stock Room, and like many costumes, the repeated dry cleaning, sweat under hot stage lights, and gradual wear and tear have moved it through to the regular stock room and into the “distressed” aisle—a haven for designers pulling for Les Misèrables. In a few years, the jacket may appear in one of the two annual bin sales that the collection holds, at which hundreds of customers seeking costumes for high schools and church plays pay a flat fee to fit as many pieces into a bag. It’s an event that sometimes dictates what shows a given organization is able to produce that year. Other designers sort through the recycled pieces with measurements in hand, pulling specifically for productions.

The loudspeaker sounds that it’s almost closing time, and costume designer Kate Mincer scurries to gather helmets from a bin. She is pulling pieces of armor for a Nine Inch Nails-inspired dystopian Rome production of Julius Caeser in Stonington, Me. The TDF Costume Collection is one of many places that she has come to gather armor pieces that are too difficult to build. “It is possible to put together a really sophisticated show and to give the audience what they want to see,” says Mincer about her many trips to the TDF Costume Collection over the years.

“This is the type of situation that is a big portion of our business, where designers are not getting the entire show here,” Cabral adds. “People are getting the portion that is impossible to build, or the portion that is too expensive to build.”

[Costumes can be “made,” but inside the world of theater, especially among designers and costumers, they are “built”—just like sets and scenery. ~Rick]

Mincer says she plans to ship the [. . .] unwieldy armor up to Maine, another helpful service provided by the collection.

Before I depart, I try on a massive hat from the Christmas Spectacular Show at Radio City Music Hall; judging from the ruffled feathers, it made its debut many Christmases ago. I’m reminded of that feeling an actor has when they first try on their costume—that simultaneous sense of transformation and ownership, as the clothing changes you and you take that on.  At the costume collection, that feeling is elevated—after all, the hat on my head was worn by [a] Rockette. And who knows? The dress you may try on just may have been created for Carol Burnett.

[Allison Considine is the senior editor of American Theatre.  She studied literature and cultural studies and theatre arts at Pace University.

[The next installment of ROT’s republication of American Theatre’s “Design & Tech” Special Section will appear on Tuesday, 21 September.  Article 7 is all about flying on stage—and I’ll let you all see what that means.  I encourage all ROTters to come back then to read the next articles in the series there are some very interesting topics on the fields of theater technology and design still to come.]

"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.] 

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Article 2

 

[This is the second installment of the AT special series on stage design and technology.  The design arts, whether scenic, sound, lighting, costume, make-up, wigs and hair, or any other design category, are wholly different from the other creative aspects of theater, namely writing, composing, acting, or directing.  The technical fields, which are often allied to the design arts, are even more dissimilar, reliant on such technological worlds as mechanics, computers, electronics, optics, textiles and needlework, and so on.  

[I took several design courses in grad school because I thought—and still think—that a knowledge of these arts can’t but help an actor or a director (which is where I thought I was heading) to do her or his job.  But the technical ends of the designers’ arts always eluded me.  It remains the field (not counting the business end of the business of show) about which I know the least—by a rather wide margin.

[That’s one reason that I decided to run this series of articles on my blog.  Of all the moving parts of theater, stage tech is the most like magic to me.  Ironically, the next article (below) is all about actual magicians (no, not the thaumaturgic kind) and how they’re contributing to theater.  

[Even though the nine articles in “The Magic Of Design” stand on their own, I recommend reading the whole series—which ROTters can do in any order—to familiarize yourselves with all the design and tech fields discussed.  Installment one, which was posted on 9 September, includes the editors’ introduction to the AT Special Section as well as Diep Tran’s article on productions especially conceived for put stage technology at their center.]

“SLEIGHT OF MIND”
by Zac Thompson 

[The second article in AT’s Special Section on design and tech, also from the July/August 2016 issue, was posted on the magazine’s website as “Stage Magicians: Good for More Than a Few Tricks” on 6 July 2016.  Thompson looks at some new ways that stage magicians are finding to use their illusions.]

Magicians are working in the theatre as dramatic artists. not mere tricksters—though they’re always good for a few tricks.

“Here’s what often happens when people decide they’re going to use magic in a show,” says Teller [stage name of Raymond Joseph Teller], the one-named illusionist best known as the silent partner in the duo Penn and Teller. “They get three quarters of the way through the production—they’ve built the set, they’ve blocked everything, and now they go, ‘You know, it’d be pretty good to have magic in here.’ And then they call some hapless person in—and I’ve been this hapless person on occasion—and say things like, ‘We think it would be really nice for him to be standing centerstage and just turn into an elf.’”

News flash: Magicians are no longer content to conjure rabbits. They want to be seen as legit theatre artists in their own right. And increasingly they’re getting that chance, being called on to weave magic into the texture of theatrical stories rather than asked to tack it on as an afterthought. More and more directors and playwrights are collaborating with magicians from the get-go. Some notable upcoming projects include The Magic Play by Andrew Hinderaker (receiving its world premiere at Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Oct. 21-Nov. 20 [2016]), and in New York producer Randy Weiner’s immersive theatre collaboration with Neil Patrick Harris, who in addition to being a triple-threat performer and seasoned awards-show host is also a skilled magician (the opening date will be in the fall; Harris is not slated to perform in the show). 

[Though there was considerable coverage of the Weiner-Harris collaboration in March-September 2016, including a casting notice in Backstage that listed the scheduled opening as May 2016, there was no coverage of a show presented by the duo.]

In most of these new efforts, the idea is to use well-executed tricks as a way to advance the narrative and reveal something about characters, rather than simply pulling off a cool effect for its own sake. In a collaboration on par with a director’s back-and-forth with set or costume designers, or a playwright’s conversation with a dramaturg, the magician becomes a fully integrated part of the creative team. The result might look like neither a straightforward naturalist play nor a traditional magic show, but a kind of hybrid that synthesizes the emotional openness of theatre with the awe evoked by a good illusionist.

Among those leading the way are Teller, who has collaborated with playwright/director Aaron Posner on two Shakespeare productions: a “supernatural horror thriller” version of Macbeth (first produced in 2008 at Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C.) and a take on The Tempest that calls to mind Depression-era carnivals and traveling tent shows (it first appeared at American ­Repertory Theater [Cambridge, Massachusetts] in 2014 and was restaged at Chicago Shakespeare Theater last fall).

In those productions, the supernatural elements called for in the text—floating daggers, magically appearing bloodstains, vanishing sprites, conjurers with the power to make things levitate, and so on—were achieved via sophisticated illusion design not typically seen in your average Shakespeare production.

“When a character is supposed to be baffled by blood on their hands or a floating dagger, usually one either doesn’t see the dagger or you see it being held by another actor who isn’t supposed to be visible to us,” explains Posner. The effects created by Teller, on the other hand, have “the capacity to put the audience in the same mental place as the character—baffled, confused, surprised, horrified.” That justification in the text itself was “really the thing that was compelling to us in harnessing magic not as a specialty act but to be integral to the storytelling,” says Posner.

As codirectors, Posner and Teller made a strong effort to create magic that was awe-inspiring but never gratuitous. The floating dagger appeared via a mirror trick, underscoring Macbeth’s increasing susceptibility and false appearances. In The Tempest, the nimbleness of the spirit Ariel was established thanks to actor Nate Dendy’s facility with sleight-of-hand card tricks. “We take all of our cues from what Shakespeare wrote,” says Teller.

At the same time, both men believe magic can help make Shakespeare more accessible for audiences. “We’re both deeply populist,” says Posner. The same might be said for the Bard himself, who, for all his high-flown poetry, could never resist thrilling the groundlings. In Act Three of The Tempest, for instance, a stage direction calls for a banquet to vanish “with a quaint device.”

As Teller points out, “What he’s saying is, ‘Please do a magic trick here.’”

The broad appeal of magic is one reason why it’s frequently used as a storytelling tool by the House Theatre of Chicago, a storefront troupe specializing in original, pop-tinged work and bold stagecraft. The company’s first production, in 2001, was Death and Harry Houdini, a biographical portrait of the famed escape artist, written and directed by Nathan Allen. The magic tricks were devised by company member Dennis Watkins, who also played Houdini. In the years since that first production, the House has remounted and revised the show several times, most recently this past May and June (the production will travel to Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center in 2017).

For Allen, the power of a well-executed magic trick lies in the way it can unite audience members by surprising them all at the same time—which has extra significance in a communal art form like theatre. “When you are looking at other audience members who are sharing your sense of wonder, and you can see the gaping mouth on the other side of the stage, you share that moment of, ‘Oh my God! What?!’ We want it to be a social experience.”

He believes that unified feeling is easier to achieve in a small space, even if pulling off Houdini’s death-defying stunts in close quarters becomes extra difficult. “Certainly you will never see the Water Torture Cell done in closer proximity,” he says. “You just won’t. It’s challenging, but we don’t want to be bigger than 200 seats. We want to give people a sense of the epic in an intimate space.”

In Death and Harry Houdini, that challenge has fallen on Watkins, who has appeared in and designed magic for every incarnation of the show. He describes the process as an exercise in reverse engineering. Allen will tell Watkins what he wants to see the character of Houdini accomplish—walk on broken glass, make people disappear, escape from a tank of water he’s been lowered into upside down while hanging from ankle restraints—and it will be Watkins’s job to make it happen, often only a few feet from the audience and in the round. This is “never the way a magician would design things,” concedes Watkins, citing the illusionist’s tendency to let the performing space dictate the scale of the magic: card tricks for small rooms, for instance, or daring physical stunts for Vegas-style amphitheatres where distance is a magician’s best friend. “In the last production of Death and Harry Houdini,” Watkins recalls, “Nate said, ‘We want to put a levitation in the show.’ And immediately I go, ‘Nate, it’s not possible. Look at this room.’”

But two months later, Allen was able to convince Watkins to give it a try, and surprisingly it worked. Though Watkins (ever the magician) won’t give away the secret of how he pulled it off, he does attest that the performance was “one of the most naked performance situations where I’ve ever seen a levitation work. It stretched me to think there’s a lot more possible with storytelling and magic than I would have imagined.”

Another thing that expanded possibilities, says Watkins, was the bump in production values as the company proved popular with audiences and budgets grew (though still nowhere near the size of what you’d find in a large nonprofit or commercial theatre). It wasn’t always thus: In Death and Harry Houdini’s first production in 2001, the House couldn’t even afford a real Water Torture Cell, so they made do with a cardboard cutout.

“I hung from those ankle things you put on when you put a bar across your door and do exercises,” Watkins says, “and we raised a blue curtain to look like water.” It wasn’t until the show’s 2003 revival that an actual tank was brought onstage so that contemporary viewers might feel the same hold-your-breath suspense Houdini’s audiences felt (and yes, it’s filled with actual water).

That doesn’t mean Death and Harry Houdini is a magic show per se. Story comes first to the creative team, which meant paring the magic down to key moments and cutting whatever felt superfluous, however impressive it might look. A bit with magically appearing doves, introduced in 2003, was discarded in 2013—not because working with live animals is a pain in the neck (“though it is,” Watkins admits), but because it didn’t advance the story.

A useful later addition, by contrast, was a scene in which Houdini, as a child, watches his dying father get sawed in half by the Grim Reaper. Far from seeming extraneous, says Watkins, “The way it feels for an audience member is you’re watching a kid experience death for the first time. And it becomes something that’s emotionally compelling as well as awe-inspiring.”

Using theatre and storytelling techniques to add emotional resonance to magic tricks is also a strategy employed by San Francisco-based performer Christian Cagigal. “While I love just doing a trick sometimes,” he says, “when I’m doing a show I’m always trying to create a narrative, a cohesive piece of theatre.”

His solo shows include Obscura [2010]—an exploration of death, war, and the devil—told with close-up sleight of hand. Another piece, Now and at the Hour [2014], combines mind-reading tricks with the personal story of Cagigal’s father, a Vietnam vet with schizophrenia and PTSD. Beyond confounding the audience, the purpose of the show is to reflect on time, memory, and the mind.

Cagigal, who has theatre training and is a former member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, likens his work to musical theatre, which also has two distinct yet interrelated entities: score and book. “Once upon a time in musicals, a loose plot strung together a bunch of pop songs,” he points out. “But then when you get to Sondheim—his mission is to push the story and character development through the song.” Cagigal aims for something similar in his work: magic that furthers a narrative, making both elements richer.

It’s not always an easy sell, especially with spectators inclined to approach magic as something to be dissected rather than enjoyed. “When I was doing a personal show like Now and at the Hour, I’m being vulnerable and open while sharing this piece of magic with someone onstage,” he says. “But sometimes, because it’s magic, they’re thinking to themselves, ‘This is a trick, so I won’t be fooled,’ and they won’t get with me on the same page. They’ll be antagonistic or funny during the routine. And I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I just opened up my soul to you! Don’t be a jerk!’”

But when it works, the moment of awe inspired by a successful illusion, like laughter for a good joke, can open minds that might otherwise stay closed. “Something that breaks up the trance in which we exist through our days can be a wonderful moment to digest a new idea. It’s the basis of all great art,” attests Cagigal.

Currently Cagigal is writing his own show about Houdini, though he plans to focus less on the magician’s famous stunts than on his early struggles to make a name for himself as a Jewish-­Hungarian immigrant in early-20th-century America. Cagigal sees contemporary resonances in Houdini’s defiance of instruments of authority, from straitjackets to supposedly impregnable jail cells, particularly in light of current protests against police misconduct. “Plus, every solo show is really about the person onstage,” admits Cagigal, who feels a personal connection to Houdini, as the son of immigrants (Cagigal’s father was born in Spain, his mother in El Salvador).

[Harry Houdini (né Erik Weisz, 1874-1926) was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz (1829-1892) and Cecília Steiner (1841-1913). Houdini was the fourth of seven children (and the fourth of six sons).  The Weiszes arrived in the United States in 1878 and changed their name to Weiss, the German spelling, and Erik became Ehrich (nicknamed “Ehrie” or “Harry”).  

[The family lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as a rabbi.  Mayer Weiss moved with Ehrich to New York City in 1887 and the boy began performing; he took the name Houdini in 1890 when he became a professional magician (after reading the autobiography of French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, 1805-71, known as the father of the modern conjuring; Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, 1859 – trans. of Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, 1858).]

Andrew Hinderaker’s The Magic Play—which, after receiving its world premiere at the Goodman [October-November 2016], will appear at the Olney Theatre in Maryland next spring [April-May 2017]—isn’t about real-life figures. Instead, the playwright uses a fictional gifted magician to explore aspects of his own life, as well as broader themes like loss and heartbreak. “I have an uncle who passed a few years back who was a fantastic set designer and amateur magician,” Hinderaker explains. “He was somebody who was consumed with his work . . . . And his life suffered a lot of consequences because of that.”

Something similar happens in the play, which starts out as an ordinary magic show built primarily around card tricks. As things progress, however, the magician’s messy past and shattered love life intrude. The tight precision required in sleight of hand is contrasted with flashier effects performed by the magician’s father—who uses a gimmicky deck of oversize cards—and another figure doing aerial stunts.

Actor/magician Brett Schneider, who plays the central role and helped develop the tricks in the piece, believes The Magic Play gets to the core of what attracts people to performing illusions in the first place. “As a magician, he’s very skilled and he knows how to control practically every situation he’s in,” says Schneider. “He knows how to handle any audience member, and he knows how to elicit responses. One of the fundamental questions of this play is, What does that do to a person who can simulate intimacy but is never truly vulnerable in front of someone else?”

Loss of control often pops up as a theme in Hinderaker’s plays, which include Suicide, Incorporated [2010], about a company that lets clients outsource the writing of their suicide notes. In The Magic Play, Hinderaker ups the ante, stripping not just the characters of power but sacrificing some of his own control as well. Because the play is structured, at least at first, like a traditional magic show, it’s interactive. In one part of the show, the magician reads an audience member’s mind. In another instance, an audience member is brought up to the stage in order to help facilitate the spike in a bag trick (where the magician slams his hand down on several paper bags, in which there may or may not be an upright nail); it’s part audience participation, part trust exercise for the characters in the play.

“One of the things that’s really important to me is that the audience is invited to engage on a much deeper level than they normally would in a play,” says Hinderaker. To him, breaking the fourth wall heightens the play’s immediacy and introduces an electric atmosphere of unpredictability; the script is even designed at some points to accommodate different outcomes based on audience responses.

Another crucial part of the show’s development has been the playwright’s collaboration with Schneider, who’s been closely involved with the project since its inception. Schneider’s credentials include a membership at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

“Brett and I have been meeting on a weekly basis for about four years,” Hinderaker says. “The first year, Brett was constantly referring me to books, performances, magicians, and showing me a ton of pieces of magic that he admires.” Both men found that they were drawn less to showy stuff like assistants sawed in half than to elegant tricks such as the classic Sympathetic Cards, in which two shuffled decks somehow end up with their cards in identically matching order.

The magic in Hinderaker’s play is not just stand-alone special effects; it also comprises moments of dialogue and character development. So it was important for Hinderaker to write all the tricks. Schneider admitted that it was a challenge to both create and perform, but it’s also been a creative booster.

“A lot of the times when you’re thinking like a magician, you’re immediately giving yourself limitations because you know what’s been done before and what the technical parameters are,” he says. “But when you’re thinking like a playwright, especially one as gifted as Andrew, none of those limitations apply.”

The Magic Play has expanded Schneider’s idea of what’s possible in both his acting and his magic. Not to mention, he adds, “We’ve been able to successfully portray every moment that [Andrew’s] written so far,” he says.

This foray into magic is part of Hinderaker’s fascination with capturing in the theatre that visceral thrill spectators get at other types of live events. A previous play of his, Colossal [2012], tells the story of a catastrophic football injury using dance, a drum line, and full-contact hits. The tricks and interactivity in The Magic Play—and really, any magic-theatre work—are another way of exploring what “live” theatre truly means.

“If we’re going to talk about something that’s live, and especially if we’re going to use that bullshit term about a conversation with the audience—the most one-sided conversation that exists on the planet—if we’re ever going to embrace that, then it can’t be pure control and manipulation,” Hinderaker attests. “If we’re not willing to loosen that grip, I question whether we’re ever able to create something that feels like magic.”

[Zac Thompson is an arts journalist and critic formerly based in Chicago and now in New York City.  His byline has appeared in the Chicago Reader and Chicago magazine.

[The third installment in “The Magic of Design” series will be posted on Tuesday, 14 September.  It includes articles three and four of the series, covering, respectively, a New Orleans studio that focuses on design-driven productions and how the designers and technicians at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre created a house on stage that revolved and withstood a rainstorm.  I hope all you readers will return to the continuation of AT’s design and tech series.]