10 June 2022 Hot Friday

[KathyB]

It's not really that hot. It's just hot, not HOT. My house was surprisingly comfortable to come home to after being out in the car, which had been sitting in the sun all day. So I don't have the air conditioner on yet. I will, of course, turn it on immediately if I notice B. panting inside, but she's just been running around and barking at something outside the front window.

Today is double-duty pledge drive day: both public television and the local NPR station are having them.

[scenicdesign71]

It's been a gorgeous week here -- of course it has, because I've been in tech all week, ducking out on occasional smoke breaks to be blinded by the balmy West Village sun before scuttling back into my dark cave to ponder why I ever chose this so-called career.

The show's open now, though, so perhaps I'll be able to enjoy the weather before it starts raining Sunday.  I invited a friend (who's currently tearing her hair out trying to pull this together) to accompany me to opening night last night, after some friendly commiseration over overpriced burgers.

[scenicdesign71]

Not having started a thread for this show, I'll just post here for now (since this is where I posted the flyaround, above).  As my second somewhat disappointing post-2020 design (of two), perhaps it's just as well to bury my thoughts about it here in the Daily threads anyway.

We got our first review today, and while overall unfavorable-ish, it is at least mercifully mild.  The mention of the set isn't complimentary, but, while one could read withering disappointment between the lines if one wished to, it's technically more neutrally descriptive (the set really is almost* as barren as described) than explicitly critical.

My only gripe has to do with that "almost": among the admittedly tiny collection of simple design gestures constituting this set, the single most elegant -- the stretched-fabric sky -- goes entirely unnoticed, or at least unmentioned.  The photo accompanying the review suggests why: while there are projection cues which highlight the "sky" more dramatically than the barely-perceptible stars in a pitch-black sky shown here, for much of the show it does go almost (or) entirely unlit -- and, as such, becomes surprisingly recessive, for a 400-square-foot piece of lightish-grey fabric stretched horizontally just ten feet off the floor in an intimate space that we've configured fully in-the-round.

A month or so ago I had opined to my colleagues that this was, imho, not a show where the projection screen -- in this case, essentially a fabric ceiling -- wanted to be "always alive" with light or imagery; that it should only come to life for certain specific moments, mainly a series of freakish meteorological events at various points in the action heralding the imminent destruction of the city.  But over the course of tech I wound up doing a complete 180 on that particular opinion, and I now wish the "sky" were actually lit, with at least a subtle glow, for most or all of the evening.

Unfortunately, I wasn't the projection designer, though I kinda ended up wishing I had agreed to do both set and projections myself; the affable young man they ended up hiring for the latter was entirely new to this kind of work and, notwithstanding the nice mention in this review, the results on that screen really show his inexperience.  In the end, I chose to retreat to my own lane rather than step on anyone's toes; when a friendly tip about some basic tools like fades and anti-keystoning yielded no visible results, I just backed off.  In retrospect, part of me wishes I'd taken a stronger hand, brushed up my own software skills (it's been awhile) and offered the guy some help.  But by that time, the off-Off-ness of the whole enterprise was getting me down so much that I just couldn't muster the energy.

[scenicdesign71]

Oh, speaking of regrets about this show:  I'm also suspecting that I should have stuck to my guns concerning the original functionality of that fabric "sky" and the circular hole in its center (which represents, in what I fear has become a rather clumsily on-the-nose way, the "eye of God" judging Lot's wife, her city, and by extension all of humanity).

Not that there ever was anything all that subtle about it (nor, in a certain way, was there meant to be).  The image of God's eye -- singular, and described in phantasmagoric detail by the wife, Edith, as she's being turned into a pillar of salt -- comes straight from the script, though the idea of actually representing it onstage, even in a relatively abstract way, didn't occur to me immediately.  Once it did, my idea was that when Edith turns back for a final glimpse of the burning city, she would be center-stage rather than off in a corner, and the entire fabric "sky" would slowly, smoothly -- and without losing its stretched tension or rigid horizontality -- descend to the floor: a huge, flat, tensile fabric membrane, with the central circular opening passing cleanly around her, like Buster Keaton (minus the humor, and 99.9% of the hair-raising potential for real-life harm to the performer) or Linzi Hateley (ditto on both counts).  Where the play had heretofore been unfolding on a dark floor under a light-grey sky, we would now have a light floor (a field of salt?) with darkness (the blackbox grid) overhead; and Edith would now be confined to a small sharply-defined circular area at the center of the space for the play's final ten minutes (set some years later just outside the sanctuary city of Zoar, where she's been frozen for eternity).  The "sky", in other words, would have literally fallen around her, and God's eye, descending from directly above, would in a sense have swallowed her up.  All readily-obvious visual metaphors having thus been puréed into a single (hopefully not too lumpy) emulsion, Edith's final monologue -- staunchly defending herself, over the millennia, against His unforgiving gaze -- could then invoke said Eye in a less doggedly literal fashion. 

Instead, as the actual production has turned out -- with the "sky" remaining up above and the "eye" likewise staying put (a good ten feet southeast of the corner where Edith now stands frozen, but I guess God's eye is omnidirectional) -- she's obliged to treat it almost as a scene partner, addressing her defiance to the hole in the "ceiling" several yards away, which feels awkward to me: thuddingly literal-minded, and spatially weak to boot.  Her transformation into salt has ended up consisting of her donning a hooded white cape.  The distinction between Zoar and the rugged mountain pass we've ostensibly spent the previous 80 minutes traversing consists of the rumpled canvas floorcloth being removed, by a pair of omnipresent kabuki-esque stagehands, to reveal an organic smattering of white "salt" deposits painted on the smooth floor beneath.  A certain austerity was always partly the point of this design -- not least because of the tiny budget -- but the loosely-knit (to put it gently) collection of choices that we settled for, in lieu of that dramatic descending-sky movement, feel to me in retrospect like a regrettable cop-out.

While the mechanics of that movement would actually be quite simple in principle, the nuts and bolts of it (and, more than anything else, the prospect of who-knows-what unforeseeable complications, given that neither I nor this company had ever really attempted anything quite like it before) made me nervous enough to agree to cut the effect about a month ago.  And indeed, without it, the sky (as a stationary stretched "ceiling" that just hangs there without budging) went up pretty quickly and smoothly in the end.  But even so... after having sourced and sewn it myself, seeing the fabric up there, held aloft and perfectly flat purely by extreme lateral tension from tie-off points on four vertical grid-to-floor pipe booms at the corners of the room -- the fabric stretched so tightly that even the eight-pound metal hoop in the center, astonishingly, causes absolutely no sag...  Having achieved all this, the original sky-falling idea is more tantalizing than ever.  While the extra time, effort, hardware and rigging required to make it descend would undoubtedly have added some difficulty to our load-in and tech, I can't help feeling it might have been worth it.

What we're left with instead strikes me a classic case of design drift.  What was originally meant to be a strong and simple scenic solution -- not only crystallizing the story's climactic "F/X moment", but rooting it firmly in the structure of the play before and after that inflection point -- has, starting from a single compromise, become (because there were so few elements to begin with) merely small and simplistic, lazy-looking, and generally ineffective.

Okay, [/whine].