Contemporary Set Design

[scenicdesign71]

I've nursed a mild obsession with irises ever since grad school when I saw John Arnone's gorgeously simple yet striking set for Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 several times during its too-brief Broadway run.  As recently as this spring, I tried to get an irising portal of sorts into my Top Hat design; but between the summer-stock schedule and the harrowing logistics of that particular space, the only surviving remnants of that idea are a grey traveller curtain and matching header used in tandem just once, to frame a brief two-character book scene set aboard a small private airplane.  The traveller on its own — manually dragged open and closed by two assistant stage managers without the rigidly-framed edge I had designed — otherwise plays in only two or three of my originally planned nine or ten configurations, without the header; mostly, it just gets opened and closed throughout the evening for downstage "crossover" scenes covering the show's seventeen scene changes, in what has become the summer-stockiest element (against stiff and crowded competition) in a regrettably summer-stock-y-looking set.

So this New Yorker video showcasing Dane Laffrey's spectacular use of irising portals in Maybe Happy Ending, in addition to goosing my interest in seeing the show, also makes me more than a little wistful.  Even without the added cool-factor of his niftily responsive LED-lined edges, irising portals are harder to make truly clean and elegant than their seductive simplicity-in-principle might suggest; I've attempted them in several other shows, some more successfully than others, but never as effectively as Laffrey or Arnone (or countless other designers — most of them working, it should be said, with budgets I've only ever been able to dream of).