24 March 2022 Thursday

[KathyB]

What I've done today:
1. Went on a morning walk
2. Took B. to Costco to get gas
3. Took B. to McDonald's to get breakfast
4. Took a shower

Not like last night where I was working on my taxes until 12:30 a.m. I'm not able to get an appointment with my accountant until April 12, which makes me feel like a lazy bum going that late, but that was all that was available on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and I didn't get the last piece of paperwork until last week, so I couldn't call earlier. Oh, well.

[scenicdesign71]

Limited accomplishment is something I can sympathize with.  I'm finally making visible progress on Much Ado, but it has taken months -- including a couple of weeks off, which I really couldn't afford to take off, from "real," gainful (i.e., television) work -- and is still proceeding at a snail's pace.  Fortunately, an end is in sight, though I'm still worried that the scale of this design may stretch this company's resources.  I really am trying to use every cheap trick I can think of to make this set less complicated and expensive than it looks; but when it comes right down to it, it's a huge space to fill and an equally huge (outdoor) distance across which everything has to somehow read clearly to a potential 3000-strong audience.

Anyway, here's the centerpiece of the design, a big challenging piece of construction with a big challenging paint treatment (both to design and -- ultimately, for some Floridian painter I've never met but who seems to be abundantly qualified in terms of talent and experience -- to execute on the actual set) that I've finally managed to get out of my brain and, in painstaking detail, onto the screen:

The house's basic architectural shape is, as you can see in this flyaround, quite three-dimensional and viewable from multiple angles in an amphitheater with an extremely wide "fan" of audience sightlines.  (I don't often model offstage areas, but they were raised as a topic of practical interest at a recent production meeting, so I added a rough indication of the backstage layout here).  But while the building's basic spatial volumes are fully 3D, almost all the details -- stucco and stone textures, Spanish roof tile, mouldings and columns, even windows -- are just trompe-l'oeuil paint on simple planar "wall" and "roof" surfaces; the only real complex sculptural element is the cornice.  (And while all that intricate painting might seem daunting, I've actually translated everything into a somewhat simplified and heightened style which can hopefully be executed relatively quickly and loosely and still tickle the eye, if not fool it entirely, across the long viewing distances involved).

One thing that pleases me about how this design is shaping up: I've always (dating all the way back to my student days) had a somewhat vexed relationship to research; but for this design, for perhaps the first time in my career, I found a single historical source -- a real sixteenth-century villa in Lombardy -- which proved so useful in so many ways that, without turning the set into dull re-creation, it's still easy to see the original inspiration in the finished design (which in turn benefits enormously from having some anchor in reality, however fancifully adapted -- and never mind that the real villa is located closer to the Italian Alps than to the play's Mediterranean setting).

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It's funny how the design, while sizable in stage terms, is obviously much smaller than the original villa -- yet incorporates not only many of its most notable features but also doors and windows from various other sources, a wrap-around colonnade for sightlines, a scrap of Sicilian heraldry, fragments of the wall frescoes from the Pompeiian Villa of the Mysteries, and even a Latin motto for the city of Messina painted as a kind of "Home Sweet Home" above the side entrance to the governor's estate.  In my unaccustomed enthusiasm for research, I've crammed this distinctly miniaturized villa to bursting with almost too many ideas.  (I do wish it could be several feet larger in every direction, just to give all these elements a little more breathing room).  But while I may yet be asked to simplify, if not for the sake of elegance then at least for that of budget and/or schedule, for the time being I'm just deciding to call this somewhat clumsily overstuffed quality "charming".  Or something.