My mother trained as an opera singer and when I was quite young I vividly remember her taking me backstage during the intermission of Verdi's Macbeth, and I watched the scene change, and there was this sort of big stonehenge-looking set on stage, and this man walked out and pushed one of the boulders across the stage, and I was just shocked, because it looked for all the world like a 20,000-pound stone, and yet clearly it wasn't. And I think that was the first time I kind of understood stage scenery as an artifice, as something representing something else. I met Hal Prince when I was getting out of graduate school.
And we talked for a minute or two, and I was completely overwhelmed and terrified of him. But the next week, he sent me a letter and said, it was nice to meet you, it was nice to see your work. So Hal has always been a mentor to me that way.
The first time I was really working with him, I think it took me about six months not to be completely terrified. You walk into his office, and the entire history of the 20th century of American theater is on the wall. He either directed or produced most of it.
People often ask me, how did you find your way to doing set design from architecture? And I always think it's a funny question because to me, the tasks that I'm doing are exactly the same, building models and drafting. However, it's almost like set design and architecture are the flip sides of the same coin.
But with set design, it's a completely ephemeral thing. I took my first painting class my senior year of college. And after that I wanted to do a little bit more painting.
And I spent a year in Italy ostensibly painting, but then making my way back to the three-dimensional world. I started building installations and objects and there was actually a teacher of mine he said to me one day have you thought about sonography? He's British so, you know, that's their word for set design. So then I went to graduate school because I didn't know anything about theatre.
Then when I graduated I worked as an assistant designer for a few years and I assisted a designer named George Seepin who also had an architecture background. His studio was sort of like a sculpture studio, you know, and it was great. I find if I get a good concept, a good idea that really kind of encapsulates the show in a simple way, it helps me determine every other choice I need to make in the design and everything else just kind of falls into place because it answers a question and sort of guides me through all the other visual choices that I do.
And if I don't have a good concept or a good solid idea for it, that's when I get into trouble and I start... thinking, well, I don't know what the answer is. I don't know whether it should be blue or red because my idea isn't strong enough. A huge part of what the set does in theater is it creates the frame and the surround that we present the human figure in. I think what in film the camera does in framing things, the set largely has to do in theater with some help from the lighting.
I've started thinking recently of scenery design as a transformation of space over time, is kind of what I'm doing. A big part of my job is how do I get from point A to point B quickly and seamlessly, and in a way, hopefully, that helps tell the story well. What I like to think about actually is like what is the nature of the event.
I've always been interested in like how the audience is engaging with the piece like how to engage the audience in a more visceral way so often when I'm designing a play when there's flexible seating I think about what the relationship is between the audience and the play actually that's sort of the first question that I that I think about One of my favorite things about being a designer is that I'm constantly learning. When I get a play that I've been asked to design, I'll read it. And I try to read it without too much preconception of anything.
I just sort of read it and see what images pop into my head. And before I spend too much time trying to figure out what the set should be, I'd sit down with the director and I'd just like to have a good long talk with the director, or maybe several good talks with the director, to find out what they think the play's about, what they're trying to get across in our telling of the play. And I don't... I don't tend to be interested in, you know, do you think this set should be green, or do you think it should be this style, or those kind of things so much. But I want to know, what's the feel of it?
Does it feel cold? Does it feel warm? Does it feel friendly? Does it feel unfriendly? If I can make a model, sort of a rough model, but finished enough that it looks like something, and just sit it on the shelf for, you know, a week, or, you know, for a few days at least, so it's kind of there in my studio while I'm working on other things, and I kind of see it in my peripheral vision.
And usually then I'll start to think, oh well that doesn't look quite right or some part of it will bug me. And just by having it kind of there on the periphery I start to catch things that I want to change about it. Or the feel of it isn't quite right, the kinetic energy in it isn't quite right. And I'll start to mess with those things compositionally.
Somewhere in there is where we sort of nail down what the set is, and the model gets more and more finished and more and more looking like what the final set is going to be. And then I have to actually get that small model and make the big version of it. And for that, then I've got to do a bunch of technical drawings, and we send it out to a shop to build the full-scale set.
And then ultimately that moves from the shop that's built it, it gets taken apart and brought back. into the theater and installed in the theater. And then we go into technical rehearsals where you add the lighting and you add the sound and the actors get onto the set for the first time. And that's really where it all comes together and that's where you learn whether the set was actually a good idea or not.
I kind of really don't know until we're running the play on the set and you see if it works for telling the story or not. Sometimes something that looked really beautiful and seemed like a great idea just doesn't somehow work to tell the story the way you thought it would. And sometimes something that I really thought might not work, or I was worried about it or didn't think it was a great idea, and suddenly once you get the actors in there to activate it and live inside it, it becomes alive and it really does work. When I'm in early stages of working on a project, often it involves going to buy materials. Sometimes one of the early inspirations for a design can be a material.
I will go to the paper store and see what kind of paper feels right. This is my favorite part, is kind of trolling about and like... kind of letting your thoughts wander and seeing what hits me. Going to the library, that's a big part of my process. Sometimes I go and I just like wander through the aisles and just pick random books.
Like sometimes you don't really know what you're looking for yet, you know. There's also this room called the Picture Collection at the Mid-Manhattan Library, which I pretty much go there at the beginning of every design process. I don't know, there's something about being in that space that is more contemplative than sitting in front of a computer. I tend to draw only as much as I need to in order to figure out the idea. And...
Then I try to move to a model form as quickly as possible. I feel like I'm really a very three-dimensional person, and so I think I figure things out more intuitively in a model form. For me, models don't lie. So in a drawing, you can make it work.
Like, you can fudge things. You don't, you know... The implication of depth in a drawing is just all by perspective, and so you can fake that. So there are things, I think, that you might not realize in a drawing, but as soon as you build it in a model three-dimensionally, you realize, oh, like, oh, we're going to see that side. And then in communicating with directors and choreographers and people who don't, might not necessarily understand a technical drawing, Like things exist in three dimensions, so a model is just a smaller form of it, but it's closer to reality so it's easier to understand and communicate with other people.
So I'm actually just getting ready to shift this model to Chicago to the theater. But I actually have built a new object that I need to look at in this model, so I need to unpack it. This is a play that's about the urbanization of China. It's called The World of Extreme Happiness.
We've decided to use as a kind of neutral envelope for all of the scenes. So then this space opens up and actually acts as like a diorama. This is a moment when they're wandering through the countryside. You know, it's written in a pretty filmic way. And we cut from like, you know, the magic of, you know, the fluorescently lit factory.
Essentially, then the final scene is in a mental hospital. That's sort of the... final, the final scene. Basically I've shot, photographed every scene.
So this is, this is the beginning and then the second scene. So I've storyboarded through with the model. It's a projection moment. This was the grass scene that I was setting up and there's, there's also a backdrop. It's the final scene.
The idea for Act One really came to me in one of those lucky eureka moments. The first draft that I read was 150 pages long. It had 50 locations in it, and all of them were very short scenes, so I had to get from one place to the next very quickly. I'd done a model of kind of an empty backstage approach to the play, and all the different locations would be, you know, an actor drags out a chair, and suddenly we're in an office, and they bring out a desk, and we're in a different place. I was going to show to James Lapine, the director, and the night before that meeting, I had this kind of nagging feeling that the idea just wasn't good enough.
But suddenly I said, wait a minute, no, instead of doing this empty, bare stage, let me do a great big turning thing that has a multiple-level thing on it. And each one of those locations had a little cubbyhole on stage that it existed in, and the set would turn, and you would play a space here or a space here or a space up here. A lot of the needs of the play were difficult and were sort of answered by that kind of a design. So we had the sort of the fancy set for George Kaufman's townhouse, and the not-so-fancy tenement where Moss Hart grew up with a stairwell leading up to the roof, and all the laundry in the backyard, and the theater here, which the curtain came in and out, and we played lots of different theater scenes here, and there was a whole audience up in the balcony sometimes, and an audience in the box.
One play that I worked on recently a few months ago was called An Octoroon. It was at Soho Rep. Sarah Benson, the director, she and I both I think are interested in this question of what is the nature of the event. We started talking about it like maybe as in more of a performance art context as opposed to a theater context. And the reason for that was because we really wanted the audience to not be able to sit back and hold this piece at a distance, like as a historical piece, like this is not something, you know, we're living in a post-racial society and we don't need to think about that anymore.
We wanted it to be like actually like... The audience, like, physically and viscerally affected by the production. The wall that you see when you're coming in, 14-foot high wall, would fall towards the audience.
And when that happens, like, the gust of air that's, you know, blowing out the audience is quite immense. So Who Repped is a tiny theater. It's got 70 seats, and the audience was literally five feet away from where the wall landed. And it reveals...
Two women dressed as 19th century slaves, knee deep in a sea of cotton balls. The next scene in the play is that we're in a plantation. And I didn't want to depict any sort of realistic architecture.
You know, it wanted to be, you know, sort of abstract in a way. When I'm dealing with sort of more realistic things, who the characters are that inhabit that space becomes very important. And in that sense, you kind of have to put yourself into the mind of the character, you know, as much as you can. And it is, I guess, almost like acting or, you know, sort of thinking through what would the character do, what would they choose. If it's a sort of a talky play where people are just sitting around, then I need to provide chairs and things for them to sit on and sort of focus areas around the set that will draw an actor over here or over here to help with the staging.
give the director a reason to make a person walk from this side of the stage to the other, so it's not just a random movement, but it's motivated in some way by something that's existing on the set. My aesthetic bent is definitely not realism. I feel like the reason that we do theater is to be able to see something different, and see something differently.
This is for the dance piece to the Schubert music and the idea is that we're going to make a forest of trees out of string. I would say that my favorite things to do are generally a little bit more abstract and sculptural. My work with the lighting designer is very important to me.
How the light lands on the set, how it affects and shapes the set is so important to me. There's a lot of just kind of physical back and forth that, you know, if I put this piece of scenery here, you can put a light here and you can put a speaker here, and we all have to play together in the same space. And as video has become more and more a part of theater, I'll have a lot of interplay with the video or projection designer as well, so that the set is a surface that will take projection well.
And in the past year or so, I've started doing the projections myself sometimes, because as the set designer, I have a lot of opinion about what that should be, and sometimes I would prefer just to do it myself and have it kind of be my vision. The people who are building the set is really a collaboration with me as well, and all of those people need to have a sense of what I want as a designer because I can't be there dealing with every little detail of all of it I need to have a team of people who kind of understand my taste and and says it works almost like a symphony that everybody's doing their part and it all comes together to create something that's coherent here it is on the town Brilliant. So that's John's only copy of that. So I will guard this? Guard it and maybe once you're done get it back to him.
But I think if you can get it up in some kind of online way for us all to access it would be great. Collaborating with choreographers is very different from collaborating with directors I find. Choreographers obviously tend to think more spatially.
I actually think choreographers and architects. get along very well. They think about space in a sculptural way. They're basically composing bodies moving in space.
Sometimes directors are not necessarily, you know, understanding space quite as strongly as the choreographer. I think the biggest compliment I find when I'm working on a play and then actors come and they discover the set and they start living on the set and if they say to me like oh I feel really comfortable in this space or like I feel inspired by the space like that's that's always like the best feeling. There's a company I work with a lot in Philadelphia called Pig Iron Theatre Company.
They create a performance as a group and so all of the text is generally generated by the actors improvising in rehearsal and the design is created alongside the piece. But what's great about that is that as a designer, I'm there from the very beginning and potentially a design proposal that I put out there at the beginning could could really, you know, dictate the direction that the piece is taking. I find it to be a very gratifying way to work.
It's me and the actors and the director in a room before we know what the play is. You know, sometimes designing a show that isn't fully written yet can be a big challenge. When I was hired to do The Last Five Years, Jason Brown hadn't finished writing the show.
I had an outline and I kind of generally knew what it would be. So I had to design a set for a show that wasn't fully written yet. It was similar on Sondheim on Sondheim. And in both cases, I think it was exciting.
And they're actually two of my favorite sets that I've done. In some ways, I think not having the rigidness of a finished play was kind of liberating. There's definitely like the fear at the beginning of every project when you're staring at the kind of blank piece of paper or the empty model box of the theatre and you're just like I have no idea what I'm going to do. It's a good kind of fear, you know, it feels like it's full of possibility. My real nervousness is that sort of jump from the small scale to the big and putting the people into it.
And, you know, as much as I have some expertise doing it, or I've done it a lot of times, I'm nervous every time. You never know for sure until you see the big thing. If what looked good this big is really going to look good this big.
The budget is important to me obviously because it affects what I can do. If my concept for the set is sound, is really good, then I can do the cheap version or the expensive version. But obviously you can't have a big, grand, expensive, difficult idea if you don't have a big, grand, expensive, difficult budget. But I feel like most things can be solved in sort of a simple, evocative way with scenery. If you're careful, you can really stretch the money and that's the...
the one secret I've found to trying to make a budget bigger than it feels like it is. I do always know the budget before I'm starting the project, but generally I don't tend to let it affect my thinking too directly at the beginning, unless it is very extreme, you know, like unless the budget is literally like $200. And I know that I'm going to have to come up with some kind of very simple idea or some kind of interesting material that's going to be a single gesture. Other than that, if it's just kind of, you know, a normal budget, which can range from, you know, $10,000 to $100,000, I would say, my process would probably be about the same. I feel like it's always best to not be hampered by thoughts of the budget at first.
For the very, you know, just genesis of the idea, I try not to think about it too much. And then, you know, soon after that, we try to figure out how to make it work. Theater, I fear, is an inherently not very eco-friendly art form. Sets tend to be thrown away at the end of a production. I think everybody tries to be sustainable about it, and I do try to save stuff.
And it was interesting working at Lincoln Center recently. Almost all the props for the show were things that we pulled out of storage. Either Lincoln Center had them in storage or some other theater did, and we borrowed them and used them.
But scenery inherently, because it's kind of a custom-made thing for a particular production used in a particular way, A lot of it gets thrown away and I always feel bad about it. And I don't know the answer to it. You would need enormous warehouse space to try to save all that stuff.
The impermanence of set design versus architecture, what that means is generally that after four weeks of performance, the entire set tends to be... thrown in a dumpster, which always just feels like such a tragedy. I have a hard time throwing anything away. I think this is maybe the curse of the designers. Like, every little thing is, like, potentially useful.
I'm like, oh, well, that could come in handy someday. So I tend to keep things and try to reuse things as much as possible. Maybe this is also coming from architecture where like I'm very interested in using real materials.
I'd rather use a real material than have a painted version of it. It's kind of a struggle sometimes because sometimes it's much more practical to fake it. By the time an audience shows up, I kind of know what I think of the thing, usually. And I'm interested in what other people think of it too, but if I don't like it, even if everybody else loves it, I'm kind of disgruntled about the project. There have been other times where I did a set, maybe I did it quickly, or maybe the director pushed me to do something I didn't want to do, and I'm just not satisfied with it in the end.
And I feel like if I really love it, even if everybody else hates it, it was still worth it to me.