Designing Broadway

foreword

ETHAN HAWKE

the first time I experienced the power of set design I was twenty-one, about to make my Broadway debut in Chekhov’s The Seagull. The cast was a group of some of the most talented actors/artists I’d ever been near. We’d been working in an empty space with tape on the floor somewhere in midtown for over a month. On our first day of tech rehearsal, the cast was walked through the Lyceum Theater and up onto the stage, and we saw our set for the first time…

Jon Voight turned to me and said quietly, “We’re sunk.”

I was a kid, and I thought he was kidding.

He wasn’t.

“This is a set for an entirely different production of The Seagull. The one we’ve been rehearsing should feel like a Cassevetes movie. This feels like we are at the Moscow Art Theatre circa 1910.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s gonna be GREAT.”

It wasn’t. As brilliant as we’d all felt our production was in the rehearsal room, we never made the jump to the theater. Voight was right; we never had a chance. Something about our work seemed small, diminished by the grandness of the world we were inhabiting at the Lyceum Theater.

I learned quickly just how collaborative the performing arts are.… When all goes well, the acting, costumes, music, lighting, and writing become one entity—a theatrical event. And that event is held and positioned by the production design. The set is the ship—all the other elements of the production are the wind that must make that ship sail.

I didn’t meet Derek McLane until I was in my midthirties. He designed a production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly. The show was a tremendous event in the lives of those who worked on it, and Derek was the main reason for what felt like our tremendous success. Mike Nichols, who had directed the original production, even came backstage to sing Derek’s praises. He noted that he knew our production would work the second he saw the set. “They’re broke!” he said. “I thought they were rich! I had them eating off glass tables, living behind elegant glass walls. I didn’t get it. Of course—they’re broke. Much better!”

Sometimes a play needs a simple idea to hold it. Sometimes it demands a grand idea. That requirement depends on something invisible to most. Derek functions like a brilliant psychologist, studying the play and giving it the chance to not only function at its best but to accomplish heretofore unimaginable feats. He can fully envision the environment that would heighten the play’s strengths and diminish or hide its weaknesses.

The first play I directed, I asked him to design. The play, Things We Want by Jonathan Marc Sherman, was brand new, and that’s like sailing uncharted waters. The set was arrestingly simple: one room, white walls, one window. The simplicity of the set informed the staging—the lighting, the acting. The final image of Peter Dinklage holding a bonsai tree in the most average room in the world will be with me forever.

The next play we worked on together was the most ambitious and complicated piece I have ever attempted as a director: Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. The set was a living, breathing work of art. It should be in a museum. We dreamed it up over a period of years, letting one concept build into another, deepening and expanding the concept with every conversation. Until finally Derek conceived of an “attic in our mind.” Then he built it piece by piece. When the lights went up, the audience was invited into a dream state immediately. It was a magic trick. And, even better, it allowed the play to be heard—the actors to act, the music to sing.

The third play we did together was a punk rock modern adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. I believed then, as I do now, that to do that dangerous play as the author intended, the audience has to hate it! The work is the psychological equivalent of the gates of hell. We went for broke. The walls

were made of beer cans, the set a stage arrangement of eight doors that all functioned as terrifying musical instruments. We succeeded in our goal of alienating everyone in the audience—and I love to imagine Brecht laughing from the balcony, shouting, YES!

I thought when I first started directing plays that the relationship with the actors would be my raison d’être, but I quickly saw there was no performance without the right set.

Derek always gets it right. Whether he is designing for Off-Broadway, Broadway, the Oscars, Shakespeare in the Park, or television productions, he sets the stage to succeed, supporting the actors, the text, and the audience. He is a brilliant listener and a quiet leader. He can be invisible, he can be a firework exploding, he can be both at the same time.

I’ve been acting on stage now for more than thirty years, and I’ve worked with some staggeringly talented set designers. It’s a hidden art because when it works best, you don’t even see it. It’s an art form that supports and cherishes others. I hope this book will invite you in to see and understand that, while in a theater, the set designer is your god.

introduction

DEREK McLANE

so what does a set designer do? On the first day of graduate school at the Yale School of Drama, Ming Cho Lee looked at each of the ten of us who made up our incoming class and said, “We are the people who make pictures from words.” We all listened breathlessly as he paused and repeated his sentence: “We are the people who make pictures from words.” I still find that deeply inspiring, and a pretty good way to describe what we do as theatre designers. Over the years, I’ve evolved that statement to be something more like, “We are the people who make the visual world of the play”—to me, “pictures” sounds a bit too much like illustrating. We read a play and must create the visual world for it; we invent environments and spaces and decide, with the director, on the rules of that world. As I read a script, I often have a flood of images and feelings about the story, sometimes to the point where I’m distracted by my own thoughts. Sometimes I’ll stop and do a quick drawing, look up a painting or an image I’ve seen, or write down stray thoughts. Those first impressions while reading the script are super important and often fleeting. Hanging on to them through the inevitable crush of practical considerations that will follow is essential to creating an emotional design. While I am doing that early work, I imagine I am an audience member coming to see a play. I ask myself, what is the show I want to see? What does it look like?

From there comes the task of making that fleeting impression concrete. That may be the trickiest part of what a designer does. How do you take those first thoughts and turn them into a space and physical structure that can be created on a stage by other people? That is the skill I did not have when I was in college, the thing I went to graduate school to learn. I start by doing loads of drawings—scribbles, really. Most are just for me and are very crude, maybe not even decipherable to others, but they allow me to develop my idea or impression. From there, I make somewhat more finished drawings, which I typically hand over to an associate to develop. In addition to drawing, I build a scale model of the set (often many different versions), do all the drafting necessary for a scene shop to build the scenery from, create the color elevations, and choose the materials, fabrics, furniture, and props.

I stumbled into set design quite by accident. When I was a college freshman (I planned to be an archaeology major), a classmate asked if I would build a set, as I had some summer job experience doing house construction. Building that set introduced me to the idea of design. I met the set designer on that show and thought I’d like to design one myself. Luckily for me, there was no theatre program at Harvard but lots of productions, and I was able to design as many plays and musicals as I wanted, even though I had absolutely no skill at set design. I didn’t know how to draw a ground plan or draft the scenery. I was just making it up, partly by describing to the carpenters what I imagined. I designed a production of Guys and Dolls in one of the college’s dining halls. I was cognizant of the fact that my work was very crude, but I was exhilarated by the possibilities set design presented. Those early designs were all based on a single idea per show, which was great if the idea was good and terrible if it wasn’t. I couldn’t work in a period or design anything terribly specific or stylish because I didn’t know how to draw it. Still, I loved the process of manifesting an idea visually.

I happened to meet the designer Michael Yeargan, who was on the faculty at Yale. I asked his advice, and after looking at my work he said I should go to graduate school. He told me I needed to stop designing sets and spend all my time studying drawing. That advice was enough to get me into the Yale School of Drama, just barely: Ming Cho Lee, a brilliant and formidable designer, and chair of the department, told me that my drawing was marginal but if I promised to continue my drawing classes, he’d accept me. Meanwhile, back at college, I found the drawing classes overly theoretical—Harvard had a near-obsessive fear of teaching anything that might have a practical application—so I enrolled in the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and took studio art classes in the evenings.

Yale School of Drama was the most intensely difficult experience I had been through. The amount of work seemed crushing at times, and the level of critique could be harsh—indeed, before graduate school, I had never really received face-to-face criticism. I spent much of my first year terrified and exhausted but also exhilarated, as I began to develop new muscles.

After I graduated in 1984, I moved to New York City and lived in a rarely heated commercial loft in Long Island City, Queens. I had a wood-burning stove and was often so broke that I found old furniture on the street to break up and burn for heat. I took my drafting examples to the studios of various working designers and found work as an assistant, something I did for several years. I did a stint for about a year as an assistant art director at The David Letterman Show on NBC, working at 30 Rockefeller Center. It was a glimpse into a world of fame, but the design work was not satisfying. One day, I got a call to design a set at Center Stage in Baltimore, a prestigious regional theatre.

This was the kind of work I had trained to do, and with some reluctance, I gave up the comfortable TV salary and set off on my freelance design career. Over the next six or seven years, I designed somewhere between ten and thirteen shows a year, all over the United States. I’d be on a plane fifty or sixty times a year, often designing in cities I felt I had no connection to. There was great freedom in that. The quantity of work and the fact that I felt anonymous in these towns let me experiment in bold ways. I’d try some outrageous ideas, and if they didn’t work out so well, I’d shrug and say to myself, “I guess I’ll never work in Tulsa again.” That was arrogant of me, but it was a period of real growth.

Eventually, I got married and started to have children, and I wanted to be home more. Despite all the work I’d done, I discovered that no one in New York had any idea who I was, so I started taking little jobs in Off-Off-Broadway theaters—this felt like a huge step down from the scale of work I’d been doing around the country. In 1994, at the age of thirty-six, I got my first Broadway show, What’s Wrong with This Picture?, a flop that played for nine days. I didn’t get my first Broadway musical until 2003, another flop. I was a late bloomer and my Broadway career began with a couple of duds. But I was lucky enough to continue to work, with some ebbs and flows, and I’ve continued to learn new skills. I’ve designed shows in the past few years that I didn’t have the tools to design ten years ago. Where this will lead me in the future is, of course, unknown. I can only hope that I will be fortunate enough to continue to work.

For me, the dilemma of creating this book is that I am so keenly aware of the great work being done by so many of my contemporaries that writing a book focused solely on my own designs feels unjustified. I find really good work done by my peers both exhilarating and upsetting; it inspires me, but it also prompts me to take measure of all the ways I have fallen short. Sometimes, in the middle of watching something really great, I feel desperate to leave the theater and get back to my studio to work. My own design work is done in an unspoken dialogue with those other productions—the shows that excite me and make me want to appropriate an idea and the shows I hated and that serve as a warning of temptations to resist. What I aim to do here is to show some of my work and juxtapose it with the work of other designers who tackled similar problems or came up with similar solutions—often solutions superior to my own. To do this, I called on many of my friends—fellow designers, directors, and writers—and asked to include their work. Almost without exception, they contributed willingly and generously, and I am truly grateful that they did. Their work has influenced each and every one of my designs, which has traces, big or small, of their work. This cross-pollination between designs, between productions, can only happen where lots and lots of shows are happening simultaneously. It happens on Broadway.