Kate Sutton-Johnson  Scenic Designer
The staging dynamics for Becky’s New Car drove the set concept and early environmental decisions more than any other style choice. The pace at which Becky’s story unfolds and the undeniable sense that the various locations in her life overlap and occupy a shared space were departure points from which the set was conceived. The repeating doorways provide quick surprise entrances, while their overall effect is one of theatricality and whimsy. The set attempts to capture a contemporary, somewhat pedestrian look, while at the same time providing a highly presentational and theatrical space: 1950s rambler meets Shakespeare’s Globe.

Nan Zabriskie  Costume Designer
Steven Dietz has given us a play full of truths, full of personal journeys, full of humor, and full of depth. As we looked at the rhythm and structure of the play, we knew we needed seamless, simple, and fast transitions to capture both the melodrama and the poignantly serious aspects of Becky’s journey. Clothes would need to be changed, but not too many, and not too often. Simplicity became our watchword. “What do we really need to tell help our characters tell their stories?” became our guiding question. Establishing location (a city like Seattle), establishing time period (the present), establishing season (summer), and most importantly establishing personalities and relationships. One of my favorite parts of the design process is when the director and designers dig deeply into the script to find our interpretations. Ideas fly, images are presented, and together we create a world. We have to satisfy the logistics of the play while finding (in my case) the item of clothing that most effectively illuminates the character. Where does she shop? How does she feel about her body? What colors does she like? What colors establish the right balance with the other characters in the scene? What class of society is she in? Do we want her to look good in this scene? Becky Foster has many transitions from wife to worker to mother to 40-year-old woman who may want a new life. While it is not our intention to realistically depict each transition, some transitions (such as her on-stage change to a party dress) must be quite specific and realistic, while others may not even involve a clothing change. As Becky’s life gets more complicated, she cannot quite keep up with the pace of the play. Realism is supplanted by theatricality, as clothes do not get changed in accordance with time and locale. Becky’s story is one of seven in the play, and each has provided James Still and me with lots of fun and sometimes incredibly geeky discussion. The final story will be told by the actors who take our ideas add their own, bringing to life the full characters you will live with for an evening.

Michael Lincoln Lighting Designer
Built into the script of Becky’s New Car is the necessity to shift instantly from one location to the next. As the play picks up momentum in the second act, the collision of those separate realities becomes part of the humor of the play. The lighting design is the key to providing those instant shifts, so establishing them clearly and distinctly in the first act is critical. To this end, the director, the set designer, and I have collaborated to build light sources into the set, which motivate those changes. One simple example is a desk lamp that has two different bulbs on separate circuits, so that when Becky is home it’s warm and inviting but when the scene pops into her cubicle at work, the lamplight is a fluorescent source that is harsher. There are many other examples; see if you notice them!

Notes from the designers of IRT’s 2010 production of Romeo and Juliet

Gordon R. Strain  Scenic Designer
Romeo and Juliet was one of the first Shakespeare plays I read. We read it in high school English and then watched the Zeffirelli film. Several years later, I remember viewing and enjoying the Baz Luhrmann film. I have since re-read Romeo and Juliet a handful of times and have seen several stage productions of it. My history with the play, I believe, is not terribly unique; it seems many people have some experience with it in one form or another. Because of this, one of the greatest challenges was to try and block all those influences out and start anew with this production … or perhaps the challenge was to find a way to channel the influences in order to create a different production. In either case, creating a world that captured the love, the hatred, and the impulses that these characters live has been an exciting task.

Linda Pisano  Costume Designer
In approaching the design for this concept of Romeo and Juliet, the production team discussed the details of the time period, the nuances that created the milieu that we might not notice at first when studying this particular era, this location, and these characters. The focus of the costume design became the details in the clothing that impressed upon people in this society their socio-economic class, their roles in the community, and how they treated one another from all vantage points such as gender, race, age, and income level. They are two families alike in dignity but divided. My role was to discover those divisions and similarities in the physical attributes of the clothing such as cut, color, and fabric type that make this story real and meaningful in any time period and every culture.

Peter West  Lighting Designer
I think about lighting as a way to carve out and define a performance space. To define the space I make choices about where the light source in a scene comes from, what angle that source comes from, and the color or tone. Romeo and Juliet is very rich for a lighting designer as the scenes are often defined, in the text, by what time of day it is and by what the light looks like. The play is full of references to early dawn, midday heat, and late-night moonlight. I use all this information to create a dynamic space for actors to perform in and, I hope, to focus the audience’s attention and help them hear the play clearly and be swept up in the theatrical experience.

Gregg Coffin  Composer
The incidental music I’m composing for this production falls into several categories:  rhythmic cues which elevate the tension in the piece, melodic cues which support the love and the loss in the storyline, and auxiliary or highlighting cues which leave the story for a moment to illuminate the framework of the production. For the sound palette, I’m using piano, bass, guitar, and drums (a tight jazz combo reminiscent of early Nat King Cole orchestrations) and organ (for the more church-like music in the production).

IRT’s production of A.R. Gurney’s LOVE LETTERS has begun previews (get your tickets here!).  Sharing the stage with Priscilla Lindsay and Patrick Clear is a work by Pierre Auguste Renoir called Sketch after Danse à Bougival.  The work, a “sketch” by the artist from this larger work, was chosen by director Janet Allen and scenic designer Gordon Strain from the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art to represent the relationship of the play’s two characters.

IMA senior curator Ellen Lee and the original Renoir sketch

The original work housed at the IMA is teeny tiny – 6 1/2” by 7 1/8”.  Hannah Joy Hopkins, IRT scenic artist, scaled it up to a whopping 8’ by 10’!  She did this by making several larger copies – to refine the style – with larger and larger brushes.  Hannah Joy focused on the expression of the girl in the picture – her expression and how it communicates her relationship with the man.  Is she happy to be dancing with him?  Or sad?  Her trial copies also allowed her to establish her color palette for the finished work – no color is used twice!

Hannah Joy Hopkins' "drafts" and a facsimile of the original work.

Renoir used oils on canvas for the original and that canvas in turn was adhered to another one.  Hannah Joy, on the other hand, worked in acrylics for all the copies.  After making the smaller versions, she took the time between the closing of IRT’s first Mainstage production of the 2009-2010 season, The Heavens Are Hung in Black, and the opening of the second, A Christmas Carol, to paint the final version.  While her canvas was attached to the paint shop wall, she worked from a cherry picker to transform Renoir’s tiny “sketch” into a huge, impactful stage element.

Scenic designer Gordon Strain's model of the set shows the scale of the enlarged copy.

Hannah Joy Hopkins received her BFA in Design and Technical Theatre — with a minor in Art History – from Syracuse University.  She also completed a two-year scenic artist training program at Cobalt Studios and spent six months studying in Florence, Italy.  You can see her portfolio here.

Hannah Joy Hopkins and her first copies of the Renoir sketch.

As a team, we began this project with several things in mind. The Sameness of Ms. Lowry’s world is not a prison, even though it must be escaped. It is not actual Sameness; there are small differences, shades and gradations. People have different talents; some people are valued more than other people. The Sameness is not boring, it is somehow inviting. The village is a safe place, a place of order and calm; a place where all know their place and what is expected of them. The world that evolved out of our discussions is clean, ordered, and geometric. It is a world of limited choices: squares and rectangles, circles and triangles, limited materials, limited color. I have used only stained or painted wood and the fabrics of the carpet. The walls and the floor are covered in the same carpets. This ordered world is contrasted with the Giver’s room. The room of books is a place of chaos. It is cluttered. It is not safe. The chaos of the Giver’s room contains as many different materials as we could find: metal, glass, and plastics; bone, horn, and fur; leather, paper, and fabrics of many kinds. It also contains items that represent the sum of our knowledge: science and art, history and culture, sport and war. I have enjoyed the challenges of this play. I hope you do too.

Linda Pisano Costume Designer

The costumes for The Giver are designed to reflect the unified and stagnant world of this community. There is a lack of anything truly individual in the clothing except some reflection of age. Children of a common age wear identical clothing that enhances the uniformity of their existence. The younger child, Lily, has an ensemble that reflects a slightly younger age group but still defines her as part of this very specific world. The fabrics were selected to represent the mass production of similar and utilitarian fabric styles. Ultimately the costumes engage a simplicity and commonality that at first glance seem logical and in theory should produce a sense of unity and equality. However, once Jonas begins to see color, he quickly recognizes the lack of appreciation in his community for the differences, unique behaviors, and varying appearances of each person, as well as his or her potential for great individual contributions to the collective.

Betsy Cooprider-Bernstein Lighting Designer

Lighting will play an important role in telling the story of The Giver by first revealing the gray, utilitarian set and costumes within an atmosphere of neutralized, artificial-looking light—a world without the sun. As the play progresses, lighting will help the audience see the environment transform as Jonas does. The world of the play will evolve into a more colorful environment, highlighted with textures, variety in intensity, angles, and increasingly staccato movements, moving away from a world of Sameness. The play provides big challenges for the design team in the Upperstage Theatre, but also offers a rich landscape for stretching our imaginations!

The top cornice is built of wood and foam.  The foam was extruded from a digital design by Cellofoam, a company with a division located just south of Greenwood, Indiana.

Claire dons gloves and covers the foam in Papier-mâché.

Dentals, the teeth-like details along the cornice, are added by Jim Schumacher as small cubes of wood.

The unit is then painted and stained.  Close-up the effect is remarkable, onstage it’ll be unbelievable!  Be sure to get your tickets now for James Still’s The Heavens Are Hung in Black, our first production of the 2009-2010 OneAmerica Season.

This week we begin a close look at our first production of the season: James Still’s The Heavens Are Hung in Black. We’ll go back to the scene shop to see the skilled artisans of IRT bring designer Russell Metheny’s set to life.  Stay tuned!

I had to take this photo by holding the camera under the catwalk.