11 February 2024 Superb Owl Sunday

[KathyB]

I have such an enormous craving for chicken wings. I had the opportunity to pre-order them, but yesterday I decided I was not going to get anything special for the game. I am trying to see how long I can go before I feel I need to see what's going on (if I can make it through the entire game without seeing any of it).

Yesterday I saw a play called Cebollas (Español for "onions"). It was billed as a comedy, although the playwright refers to it as a dramedy. The play was about three sisters who transport a body from Albuquerque to Denver. The body was a life-sized dummy (I guess the same kind that's used for CPR and the like, because it looked reasonably heavy) and was almost like the fourth actor in the show.

The show was good, but not great. I enjoyed it, although not as much as I enjoyed Fun Home. The set and projections were terrific. The set included a life-sized "car skeleton" (I don't know how to better describe it--it was like the body and hood of a car without the doors or the roof or the trunk, and I wondered if it was made from a disassembled car, or if it was built from the ground up). Most of the play took place in the car. The three actors playing the sisters were excellent.

It didn't snow as much yesterday as I was expecting, so I stopped at the supermarket on the way home. I was going to buy some Coke (they had a Buy 2, Get 3 Free special, but they raised the price of a 12-pack of Coke so it's now $1 more than it used to be just last week, so buying 5 would not have saved me anything from the deal I got last week, so I decided not to get it after all) and Lean Cuisine. The store was very crowded. I forgot to bring my reusable bags in, and I thought I would just pay 10¢ for a plastic bag, but this store is phasing out plastic bags, which is good in a way, but it was awkward to carry six boxes of Lean Cuisine to my car. Wow, that store was crowded.

I'm figuring that halftime is happening now, so I've got about an hour and a half to go.

[scenicdesign71]

Judging by photos and video, I'd say that's a real car modified for the stage.  It's not an area where I have much personal experience, but cars are such complicated sculptural objects that, in general, if you're looking for realism, you just use the real thing and modify it for the production's needs.  A rare exception would be something like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, where (a) all the tricks it needs to do, and (b) its being a period magic automobile, make starting from scratch the logical choice.

The few times I've dealt with cars onstage were all much lower-budget than either of those examples — lower-enough to rule out detailed realism from the start.  On several occasions I've used real car seats to represent the whole vehicle -- one time surrounding the front and back seats with a sort of cat's-cradle of thin aircraft cable in the shape of a mid-1970s T-bird (talk about a "car skeleton"!).  At the hokier end of the spectrum, I've done painted flat cutouts of cars (and a truck, and an Airstream trailer) in profile, frontal or three-quarter view.  The only times I've attempted any sort of in-the-round, built-from-scratch "car" were for Fame and Ragtime.  For the former, plausible scale and cosmetic detail (researching the right NYC-cab yellow for 1980, plastering it with all the appropriate decals and checker tape, etc.) went some tiny way toward distracting from the distinctly made-by-loving-hands-at-home quality of the (sculpted-foam) "auto body" itself; taxis of that period did tend toward boxiness, but it was a small blessing that the car was almost always surrounded by dancers helpfully impeding our view of it.  For Coalhouse Walker's Model T,  I jettisoned realism entirely and came up with a pair of modular mahogany (faux-finished) risers which flipped and folded to become (highly "theatrical" representations of) Coalhouse's piano as well as the front end of his car.

Oh, and there was a summer-stock Greased Lightning about which the less said, the better.

So, yeah: cars onstage are tricky, but in situations where any kind of realism is important, it's almost always best to start with the real thing — or at the very least, with real car parts.  If that's not feasible, then in most cases building a convincing replica will be even less so — in which case your best bet is probably to abandon realism altogether, find a way to represent a car more abstractly, and then design the rest of your set accordingly.  (Those cheesy old-fashioned cutouts fit beautifully into a flat, painterly Rodgers & Hammerstein world; aircraft-cable sculpture worked nicely for an avant-garde Chuck Mee fantasia at La MaMa; swapping those two solutions, or setting either of them in a cinematically-real environment, would make no sense).