Re-envisioning a Set Design

-
posted by Christina Poddubiuk, Scenic and Costume Designer for Phèdre

Christina Poddubiuk designed the set and costumes for Phèdre at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and has reconceived the set design for the show at A.C.T. She writes about this rare opportunity to recreate the world of the play.

When as a set and costume designer you have the good fortune to work mostly in classical theater, sooner or later you’re going to get to tackle the same piece more than once. I’ve done two Hamlets, three All’s Well That Ends Wells, and four Much Ados. What almost never happens is to work on the same play in two consecutive productions, and to have the opportunity to reconceive the set design.

Phèdre was designed for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where it was performed in an old badminton court that is one of their four theaters, on a 60-foot thrust stage. The scenery was necessarily minimal, due to the surround of the audience. We focused on a long painted ramp, and a sculptural piece set far upstage framing the main entrance. The costumes were decidedly baroque, but the setting was nonrepresentational. The imagery was celestial—we painted the inlaid floor as if it were a reflection of the sky, and the “cloud” upstage, built on a metal armature and covered with steel mesh and a gossamer textile, recalled an elemental force that could have been sea, sky, or stone.

Moving the production to the American Conservatory Theater, we took the opportunity of restaging the play for a completely new setting to explore different possibilities. Now the actors are enveloped in a world we’ve created, instead of embraced by the audience. They enter at times through the house, much as they did in a thrust-type theatre, but they can also inhabit the depths of the world beyond the proscenium. Some of the physical elements of the design have been used in new ways: there is a metal mesh screen, and twisting steel tubing. There’s a painted floor that recreates our original “runway,” but the imagery is new. The pulsing music and the raw emotion, tautly sustained in the text, have been translated almost as body parts—as blood vessels and nerve bundles. They lend themselves to many interpretations. They provide a landscape, a force of nature, a divine intervention, or a tangled thread. My hope, at the same time, was to provide more ways, and more visually powerful ways, of bringing actors into the space. And at the time of this writing, I am very much looking forward to how our lighting designer, Jim Ingalls, will sculpt the space and define moments in the play.

Set model for Phèdre

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die,
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me
Read more

Purely Pinteresque: The Elements of Pinter's Language

-
Image
By Taylor Steinbeck Most artists take years to establish their voice and style. This wasn’t the case for playwright Harold Pinter. His first West End play, The Birthday Party, showcases the elements of Pinter’s aesthetic that would later be evident throughout his 29 plays and 23 screenplays: the rhythm of colloquial language punctuated by pauses and silences, mysterious characters who rarely say what they mean, and the unsettling, yet witty juxtaposition of comedy and terror. Suspenseful and comical, familiar and foreign, disturbing and alluring, The Birthday Party is quintessential Pinter. Graphite drawing of Harold Pinter. By A.C.T. Senior Graphic Designer Brad Amorosino. Pinter is a playwright who uses the back-and-forth of everyday conversation to create conflict and shape power dynamics between characters. “My characters tend to use words not to express what they think or feel,” said Pinter in a 1995 speech, “but to disguise what they think or feel, to mask their actual
Read more