The Craft and Art of Scenic Design

Strategies, Concepts, and Resources

Robert Klingelhoefer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317384373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

The Craft and Art of Scenic Design: Strategies, Concepts, and Resources explores how to design stage scenery from a practical and conceptual perspective.

Discussion of conceptualizing the design through script analysis and research is followed by a comprehensive overview of execution: collaboration with directors and other designers, working with spaces, developing an effective design process, and the aesthetics of stage design. This book features case studies, key words, tip boxes, definitions, and chapter exercises. Additionally, it provides advice on portfolio and career development, contracts, and working with a union.

This book was written for university-level Scenic Design courses.

Chapter 1
The Nature of the Craft

Design for the theatre is a very special field. In the chapters that follow we will attempt to look at it through the prism of its individual aspects: work with the director and with the text, research, the design idea, and using theatrical space. In this first chapter, however, it seems necessary to look at the craft and art as a whole and attempt to define what is at its core: the nature of the craft.

This is not easy.

Each project the scenic designer undertakes has its own demands, ranging wildly in style, period, and intent. His work is in collaboration with others whose work he affects and who’s in turn affects his. He may go from a large stage to a tiny one in a variety of architectural forms. The style of his designs may vary from realism to abstraction to poetic to industrial in four successive, or even concurrent, projects. And no two designers will approach the same play in the same way.

A single statement that attempts to define the goals of the scenic designer is therefore difficult to make, but a good place to start might be:

The scenic designer’s task is to imagine and plan the visual and physical aspects of how a particular performance-event will be presented in a particular space.

Imagine and plan speak to the two sides of the designer’s work. Imagine implies the creation of something new, of something that does not yet exist. Plan implies the process of executing these creative thoughts. It can be said that the designer’s work is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent organization and communication, but the creative phase is, of course, crucial to creating a good design, and organization and communication are critical to shepherding that creation through the process of its construction until it arrives onstage and the actors and the audience make it complete. The designer may create beautiful renderings and models and meticulous drafting as part of this process, but the designer’s true “product” is a performance environment in which the play takes place.

Visual and physical speak to how this environment will look and how it will work. The designer does not simply make pictures. He is, in fact, more concerned with problem solving; the problems he solves involve not just the practical but the aesthetic and the emotional. What does the play need to work in the space? This includes the tangible objects required like a chair, a window, and a spinning wheel, but also a certain quality of space and a certain mood.

Particular speaks to the fact that the designer’s work is always one-of-a-kind, a particular play, in a particular space, with a particular team of collaborators, at a particular moment in their lives and in history.

Assessing Design

Work in the field of scenic design has an obligation to serve the play for which it is created. This means that the breadth of design work being done at any given time will be as wide-ranging in style and intent as the plays being produced at that time. Because design serves the play, its assessment must include its appropriateness for that play. This is very subjective.

Another handicap to evaluating stage design is that we must acknowledge that it is very difficult to fully assess a design without seeing it in production, in real time, with all the other elements that are a part of the production in place to contribute to the overall impact of the performance. From photographs alone so much is lost, but theatre is a temporal art; it is here and then gone. If we are to learn from it, we must make do with what evidence we have.

In a field made so diverse by the range of theatre literature, and the immeasurable differences in designers’ and directors’ approaches to that work, can we say what good design is objectively? Not completely. But, again, to begin the work we need to try.

After filtering out as many of the variables and as much of my personal taste as I can, the following is a list of three things that might serve to define a successful design:

• The scenic design supports and extends ideas in the play.
• The scenic design effectively and creatively solves problems of presenting the play in the given space and production circumstances.
• The scenic design seems of the present, a contemporary view of the play, valid and interesting for a contemporary audience.

To supply more detail let’s examine each of these items individually:

The scenic design supports and extends ideas in the play. Support of the ideas in the play would seem obvious but for the many ways it can go wrong. The designer cannot support the ideas of the play if he has not put enough work into understanding those ideas. Designers are visual artists, and sometimes their visual skills take them too quickly past reading, researching, and talking about the play, to the creation of visually strong designs, which on closer examination do not fully fit the play. While what “fits the play” is very subjective, aspiring to this, in his own way, must be considered one of the designer’s chief goals.

Extending ideas in the play concerns taking the playwright’s ideas past how they are presented in the play or in a different direction than the playwright imagined. This may at first sound like an imposition on the play, and it indeed can be. But when the playwright lets his manuscript, written in solitude, out into the world to be produced the play is forever changed. A director, several designers, and a cast of actors will bring out ideas in the text that the playwright may only have given cursory thought to. Think of the different colors and textures different actors of great skill have brought to the same role: Lee J. Cobb and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Willie Loman or Laurence Olivier and Kevin Spacey as Richard III. Different designers’ approaches will lead to colors and textures that can add just as much to the production.

Sometimes a play written in the past has different meanings in the present than the playwright could have imagined, and the production team will be responsible for explaining this meaning to a modern audience by either putting it in a context that makes the premise more understandable or simply by addressing its meaning in the present. The First Folio lists The Merchant of Venice as a comedy, and one of the shocks of producing the play is that most of the text is indeed a delightful romantic comedy. This comes as a shock because in the contemporary world we are so aware of the anti-Semitism in the play. This element changes how we feel about the play in a post-Holocaust world. While racism has never been right, and should be called out wherever it appears, in Shakespeare’s time it did not present the ethical dilemma it does today. Do we let this aspect of the play change profoundly how the play is perceived?

The scenic design effectively and creatively solves problems of presenting the play in the given space and production circumstances. The second key part of the scenic designer’s task is his challenge to make the ideas and required elements in the text work in the finite space in which the play will be performed and solving problems presented by this initial coming together of potential and reality. Often ideas and requirements in the play will be at odds with the space or budget parameters. The space may be too small for some element in the play or too large for its budget. The director and the scenic designer are charged with making these challenges work. The solutions may range from simple nips and tucks to more severe changes. Big, complex plays and musicals may require a profound re-imagining of the work.

Most productions have to make hard decisions about what to do and how to do it within a budget made months before the design work began, sometimes without much consideration of the design and technical needs of the piece. The designer’s goal should always be to use conceptual ideas to reconceive the production in ways that make the space and budget work. This is a fundamental part of his mission, and not doing so will only force cuts late in the process that can only weaken the design.

The scenic design seems of the present, a contemporary view of the play, valid and interesting for contemporary audiences. It can be said that all theatre is contemporary because it is always a live performance event. Regardless of the period in which the play was written or is set, the performance is now. While not every play may want an aggressively contemporary-looking design, the designer’s work acts as a bridge between the history of the play and today’s audience.

Production: Oklahoma!

The designs for this production of Oklahoma! may serve to illustrate some of these ideas. One reason to choose it for this purpose is that Oklahoma! is, on the face of it, a pretty straightforward musical from the era of great musicals. It is well known. It is safe.

In planning any production, the designer and director look at the text of the play from many different viewpoints. Much of this book is an examination of that work. The decisions made in the design process shape what is put on the stage. In planning this production of Oklahoma! it was decided that while the story is essentially realistic, its tone, especially in the music and lyrics, becomes something of a fantasy, a dream of life in a better time in a golden, open place. Oscar Hammerstein II was determined to turn the description at the beginning of Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs, on which Oklahoma is based, into lyrics his audience would hear:

It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in a meadow, blades of young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a golden emanation that is partly true and partly a trick of the imagination, focusing to keep alive a loveliness that may pass away.¹

It was decided for this production that the character at the center of the play was Laurey. This was her dream; the summer of a young woman on the edge of growing up, and falling in love.

Figure 1.1 Preshow

The first photo (Figu...