Play's the thing, but it needs proper stage
A stage can be a tug of war between opposites. Flights of fancy have to be reined in enough to ensure actors can move from point A to point B easily.
This is the task of the set designer. Whether in a high school production or a local theater, the set designer builds environments for the actors and makes sure the doors open, the walls stay steady and the stairs don't crumble.
Retired Mars High School art teacher Marlin Clay has been doing it for a long time.
By his estimate, Clay has designed the sets for 70 plays and 25 musicals.
“I enjoy doing the stage and working with the students,” he said. “It's good to make items that make people wonder what you are up to.”
One recent afternoon found Clay alone backstage at the high school building the set for the Nov. 20-21 production of the all-school play, “A-Haunting We Will Go.”
“It's just me right now. I'll bring the gang in once the basics are done,” said Clay who retired in 1997 after 35 years at the high school.
“Charlie (Charlesa Fassinger) and some of the directors asked me back,” Clay said. “I keep saying 'One more, one more.' We'll see how that goes. You're taking it a year at a time.”
“It's fun to see what works. We build up, out and over,” he said, citing two towers he designed and built for a production of “Camelot” that went out over the stage and a four-horse working carousel for “Carousel”
Paula Slomer of Butler, a set designer for the Butler Little Theatre and the Musical Theater Guild, is proud of her design for “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”
In “Memoirs,” Slomer said “How are we going to show six rooms, a hallway, the house's inside and outside in the Butler Little Theatre? 'Brighton Beach' was such a challenge.”“I am particularly proud of last year's musical production, 'Into the Woods.' I was really proud of the forest we built. It was multilevel, and we really put a lot of time in the paint schemes, combining our paints, materials and lightning,” said Patrick McElroy, drama director at Grove City High School.McElroy said, “A few years ago we did 'Noises Off.' It's a farce that calls for a very specific type of set. We built a house and made it a fully rotating set with functional doors and stairs, and I was really proud of it.”Ken Smith, who has been set designer for the Hobnob Theatre Co. since 2012, said the different venues the company uses — Succop Theater at Butler County Community College, the The Art Center, the Grand Ballroom at Cornerstone Commons — each presents a challenge for set design.Smith said, “Succop is always a challenge. The open presidium is 37-by-20-feet high, and it's a big space to fill. If you only put one or two things up there, it is very bare.”Smith said for a 2013 production of “The Tempest,” he used “17-foot tree trunks made out of foam and then bought boxes and boxes of plastic leaves. We put the leaves in bird netting like they were hanging down from the tops of these trees.”“The other venues we've used call for something more intimate, simplistic,” said Smith.For example, the 2014 production of “A Woman of No Importance” at The Art Center. Smith said the stage contained a curtain20 feet wide and 9 feet high, “and we got creative in suggesting what the rooms were like.”“We kept the set design more suggestive and not realistic,” said Smith.“Sometimes you have set designs that are very abstract, especially for Shakespeare, they are artistic not realistic. If you keep the backdrop free of distractions, you focus on the acting and not so much the detailed set,” Smith said.However, warned, Larry Stock, the cultural center director at the 442-seat Succop Theater, audience expectations have to be taken into account when designing a set.
Stock, who teaches a class in technical theater production and has much experience designing sets for shows with many Butler County theater groups, pointed out no one is clamoring for a minimalist set or radical reinterpretation of “My Fair Lady.”“You have to have the big Higgins Library,” said Stock. “For the Ascot Cavort you have to have the railings. You have to have the sets they expect or people will be unhappy.”“With 'Oklahoma,' you have to have the farmhouse, the touches to make it work. The newer shows are much more abstract,” said Stock.But sometimes, the play or musical in question lends itself to a radical stage design, said McElroy.November's play “Spare Change,” will be his 15th production at Grove City High School.“It's a devised piece,” McElroy said. “It's going to be very minimal, mainly because the play is not written yet. We're calling it 'Spare Change: A Devised Play by Grove City High School Students.'”“Devising is kind of a loose term for a work that is created collaboratively by an ensemble over time,” McElroy said.“We are still getting the specifics. We know part of the play will be taking place in a subway car. The challenge is to find ways to suggest places and locations without trying to build realistic sets,” McElroy said.He said a set designer finds his artistic impulses confronted by budget concerns, space considerations and time constraints.McElroy asked, “Are you trying to make it as realistic as possible or are you trying to be more expressionistic or symbolic with the things you are putting on stage?”Whether minimal backdrop or elaborate sets, all agreed the set designer has to work in collaboration with the rest of the production staff.
Stock said the director needs a lot of input in set design.“How do you get from one set to the next? This isn't Broadway, you have a limited budget to make shows go from one scene to the next,” he said.And advances in technology have raised the bar, Stock said.Productions such as “Phantom of the Opera” with its nightly crashing chandelier and “Miss Saigon” with its landing helicopter have left even local audiences expecting more.“The technology change has been huge,” Stock said. It used to be 4-by-8 muslin flats would be brought down or up from the stage to change scenes.Now, set pieces such as the barricades in “Les Miserables” are lowered to the stage.“So many things are computerized and automated. For local theater, lighting has become a huge part of set direction,” Stock said. “You never used to be able to do some these 'gee whiz' things with moving light.”He mentioned Sing Hosanna!'s recent production of “Shrek” which utilized scrims that showed either a curtain or a cast member depending on which side was illuminated.“My philosophy on stage design for most of the shows I've done is to keep it as simple as possible,” said Stock.For example BC3's Pioneer Players' production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” used a minimal set that provided the suggestion of living rooms.“It depends on the show,” Stock said. “For 'Jesus Christ Superstar,' there was no real definition of sets for the show, just groups of actors and singers. I put a platform in the center that became the focal point of the show.”For 'Sweeney Todd' (for the Musical Theater Guild) I tried to copy Broadway as much as possible,” Stock said. “We had the barbershop, the chair with the chute to the oven. It just worked.”
“With the input of Disney such as 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Mary Poppins,' animated films are coming to life on stage,” said Stock.“Working with the director has to be part of the discussion. You can't design a set without working with directors who are in charge of blocking and staging,” Stock said.“The first thing I do is read the script five or six times straight through,” he added. “I don't look at other versions. I read what the stage directions call for and (think of) how to make it work.”Clay said he is set designer/technical director and lighting director for “Haunting.”“There will be a four or five-student crew. There's not a lot of movement required and no special effects,” Clay said of the play's rundown inn set.“I'll get a script and start to doodle, then make some things and make them work,” said Clay. “I look at the script and see if doors, steps or windows are required. I will sit down and think about how I want to handle it.”While in most cases, McElroy said the set designer would collaborate with a lighting director and the play's director, he plays all those roles.“I have the students' input but it kind of all falls on me, but that's fewer meetings you have to have,” he said.“You pick the play, read the script, first to see what the author gives you, what the demands of the play's place and time are,” said McElroy. “Then you research the historical period, the culture, the clothing and start to develop a plan of your own.”“'Our Town' is set in a very specific way. Shakespeare's plays are much more open to interpretation in hundreds of ways. It's up to the set designers to come up with their own concepts,” McElroy said.“I think the audiences will accept whatever is put on stage as long as it is done well and has a clear purpose and fits your production concept,” said McElroy.
