Coming Soon...

I am finishing up the model for my second pass of COKEhead by Justin Cioppa. Hopefully it will be done tomorrow and I will update the blog.

Thanks for reading.

New Play Project: COKEhead by Justin Cioppa - - First Pass

COKEhead is a new play by Justin Cioppa that I am designing for my "New Plays" project. In this project we are paired with a first year writing grad, and through the design process help them see what kind of world their play would take place in and how design can help supplement their work. The other goal of this project is for us to have a chance to develop a piece of theatre with no previous standards in place.

I had the chance to design one new play before this, Sweet Water Taste by Gloria Clunie. That experience, in the middle of my undergrad, was a very positive one, opening a lot of doors, design-wise, for me. It is very exciting to work on a brand new play. Knowing that you are the first person to design a world, it's almost "God-like". It is also one of the most freeing excesses one can do as a designer.

COKEhead is a play about a man named Nestor, who lives in a time where corporate advertising has gained a lot of power in the day to day world. If people do not have health care, they can have a corporation underwrite their bills for them. In exchange, they become "Brandeds", literally becoming a living mascot, indentured to their parent company. Nestor is the man that invented this idea, and through a series of events in trying to destroy it. The themes explored in COKEhead include: Slavery, Civil Rights, Greed, Health care, Poverty and Revolution.

At this point in my design, I'm working in a very loose, non-specific, way. Justin and I talked a lot about places like Times Square and Tokyo Square. When I did my initial research I found out that the average person, living in a large city, is exposed to around 3000 ads a day. 3000 per day. You don't notice all of them, because at some point they just become "noise."

The picture below is the base set. There are quite a few scenes that don't take place anywhere specific, and this is the idea for that kind of location. The words are all copy from famous ads, but are meant to just become pattern.In a few of the scenes the characters meet at an unnamed fast food restaurant. The next image is an idea for the feeling that I'd like to evoke in those scenes.
The last image is an idea for the scene when one of the characters, a man who "plays" Poppin' Fresh, is waiting for the bus. The idea behind this image is that ads constantly tell us that "everything is okay," and "wouldn't life be better if you drove a Ford?" Poppin' is inundated with these ads as he waits for the bus, being tormented by a mother and child.
I think this is a very good start to this design. I am very interested to see how it develops.

Update - - 1.18.09

Hello all,

I don't, and may not for a while, have pictures of the work I'm doing in my Scene Design class. We just started a couple projects though, so soon I will have lots of fun stuff!

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment and question.

Painted Panel for "The London Cuckolds"

And now for something a little different..

The following pictures are of a large muslin panel that I painted for the show "The London Cuckolds." I just thought it would be interesting to see the progression from start to finish.

Note: The show has not opened yet so I don't have a final photo. I will post it when the show is up.

This is the designer, Leah Pettis', 1/2" rendering, the final panel is about 24' tall:
Outline on stretched muslin:
First gray wash:
Color goes in:
Darker gray wash goes in, I also punched some of the color at this point, so that it doesn't wash out on stage:
Very dark contouring added in:
The final step was to outline the pattern in a black that washed into the dark gray. That will be seen in the final photos I post at a later date. All in all, I wold say that these photos represent about 20 hours of work. Here is the rendering once more to compare:

Endgame

These pictures represent the final design of "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett.

This was a very interesting, difficult, process for me. I will fully admit that while I still do not care for the play, Beckett does afford a designer almost carte blanche in the visual language of the show and that is exciting. "Endgame" never expressly tells you where it takes place and this was a very hard pill for me to swallow. As I've come to learn in the last few months, I tend to be a very "reactive" designer. I think part of that comes from my experience in small storefront theatre, often having very little time to design and being very conscious about budget. With "Endgame" I had no real clues as to what the space Ham and Clov inhabit looks like. They do mention things, but sometimes contradict themselves and we never really know if they are telling the truth.

In looking at "Endgame" I started to think about reality television shows. One show in particular, "Big Brother," excited me. The concept of this show is that a group of people live in a house and are filmed 24 hours a day. The cameras are hidden, so the people just live their lives, of course they have to do challenges and whatnot, but for most of the day they just hang out. What really struck me about this show is that there is a channel where you can watch the live feeds from the house. This was the element most like "Endgame."

I decided to set "Endgame" in a "tank" of sorts, filming the action with a variety of hidden cameras. The images would be broadcast on television screens mounted on the outside of the tank. Audience members would watch the show never quite knowing if what they are seeing is actually happening inside the tank.

I think that this would be a very exciting, new way to view this work.

Note: I have not designed the inside of the tank as I'm still not quite sure that I know what it looks like, or even that I should know.

The Glass Menagerie - - 1st pass

This image is from my first design pass of The Glass Menagerie," by Tennessee Williams.

This was my least successful idea, but it was very helpful in my process. When I was doing my first readings of the play I was stuck by the beautiful language and the images it conjured up. Tennessee Williams originally wrote in a series of projected images to add to the atmosphere of the play. I have never worked on a show with projections or video and thought it could be a very effective tool.

The set was heavily informed by the Chinese water torture trick performed by Houdini. Tom mentions magic and magicians a few times. Tom also talks about escape a lot and I wanted to show that, while he does leave the apartment at the end of the play, he is still trapped in the story, by his memory. He never escapes. The Chinese water torture trick also heavily involves glass. The set is comprised of the Wingfield apartment, surrounded by the glass walls of a large tank. The apartment is on a rake, helping to push the action closer to the audience. The walls, at times are covered in the images that Williams calls for: blue roses, text, a winter scene, the moon, etc... Below are some examples.
As you can see in the above photos, the images projected onto the glass walls are very striking. However, their size makes them too important, overshadowing the beautiful imagery of the spoken words. The set as a whole, in this design, is too large. There is too much "stuff" standing between the audience and the play.

I do think that projections could be a useful and exciting element to the design for "The Glass Menagerie," but I don't think this was the right way to use them. The next design pass will have no projections.

The Glass Menagerie - - 2nd Pass

This was my second pass at "The Glass Menagerie." It has a similar layout to the first pass, and still feature the raked stage, but this version adds in the full surround fire escape. This is the first pass with color being thought about, fully.

The approach for this pass was to get rid of as much as I could. I felt that my first pass, while very visually stunning, was not staying true to the story. I got rid of all the glass and decided to go with a very spare set, visually. One of the issues that I still haven't solved here is the scale of the show. "The Glass Menagerie" is such an intimate show and the space that we are designing in, the fictional "No Such Theater," is such a large space. At this point in my career the largest house I've ever designed in was 199 seats. One of the big obstacles in the first pass was that I tried to make everything large; to fill the space. That was not what this show needed and now I have to find a way to draw the viewer's eye to a single point in the space.

One way that I tried to accomplish this was by selectively using color. The Wingfield's apartment is all in black and white, framed by the colored fire escape. The story is all told in flashback. At the start of the play Tom explains to us that he is going to tell us a story and that it is his memory. In memory, specifics pop. The set, while black and white, would have colored props, or costume pieces, that would be things that Tom remembered vividly.

I decided to do one more pass because I didn't think that this was the strongest way to tell the story. For example, while I really like the idea of the black and white vs. color, I think there is a stronger way to use it. Right now, the fire escape is too "important" and I think part of the reason is because it is so colorful. I also feel like the proscenium style is not the best form for this set to take. It is too presentational, and doesn't lend the feeling of having a story told to you.

These are a few of the things I want to explore in the next pass.

The Glass Menagerie - - Final

The above image is the final design for Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie." This was a very interesting project for me as it was not the first time I had designed this show. I did a lot more text based research and analysis this time around.

Through this research I made the choice that, while Laura is the most sympathetic character and Amanda the most dramatic, the story is ultimately Tom's. The set needs to not only embody the world that Tom and his memories live in, but to draw the audience into his story.

My approach to this design was to strip the play to it's barest form. It is simply a man telling a story. The audience surrounds him and his story. Tom never leaves the stage, he is both storyteller and player. In a story like "The Glass Menagerie," the viewer can not be distracted by "stuff." The most powerful image is the one in your head. The set is comprised of a colored wooden floor surrounded by a gray-toned wooden fire escape. The fire escape surrounds the Wingfield apartment. Entrances and exits are made via a set of stairs that appear in a section of the fire escape. This entrance is only accessible to Amanda, Laura and Jim. While Tom leaves the apartment, he never leaves the story, as it is his memory that we are bearing witness to.
As scenes shift locals, the furniture comes and goes as needed. For instance, during the dinner scene, they sit at a table, but during the scene between Jim and Laura all that really matters, that we need to see are the candles. These transitions would be "magical" sometimes fading slowly, sometimes quickly. The whole production would be imbued with a sense of magic and wonder.

Hopefully this design would help tell the story of Tom, Amanda, Laura and Jim.

The Workroom is OPEN.

Hello All.

I will be using this blog to help show my design process. All of the projects featured are a part of my MFA classes at Carnegie Mellon University.

I am very excited by this project and I strongly encourage questions and comments.

Thank you,

John Zuiker.