Come From Away--Welcome to the Rock by Irene Sankoff

Author:Irene Sankoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Toni-Leslie James’s costume renderings—very accurate!—of Beverley, Claude, and Hannah.

Finding and selecting the right sorts of chairs and tables, however, required an artist’s touch. “We started at La Jolla, so we went into their furniture shop and I just said I like this, I like that and they tended to be kind of wood and worn and things that were interesting. They also have to be light enough that they can pick them up and carry them around quickly. But, you’re making kind of a jungle, so, also, we always wanted them to represent humanity in a sense—that they’re all similar but all the details are different.”

The specificity of the set pieces, costumes, and props had their own laws of unintended consequences. “Once the show was put together, it becomes kind a nightmare replacing each chair as it breaks because you’re trying to find a random chair that fits all those criteria,” said Boritt. “There are only five pieces built for the show [including the matador costume, Beverley Bass’s jacket, etc.]; the rest of it, we’re at the mercy of the manufacturers,” observed James. “As long as they stay in business, we’re good.”

For the costumes, the basic signifiers of character had to be as carefully chosen as the chairs. “You only get one piece; you don’t get two pieces,” says James. “It’s what the actor understands about what to do with that piece. When you give them the right piece, they know exactly what it means and how to transform. The actor changes his voice, his posture, everything, and the piece comes alive. If somebody drops a hat, the whole show could come to a halt.”

Once the basic vocabulary of twelve—highly individual—chairs and two tables was decided on (and the Seattle workshop was invaluable for making sure that template would hold through the next iterations), “The trickier question was then,” posed Boritt, “What is the surround for that? How do you do something that’s minimal enough to allow all those locations but that thematically ties in with what’s going on?” In addition to the rustic locations in Newfoundland, Boritt wanted “something that, at the same time, would acknowledge the reality of 9/11 and what happened that day. So the back wall of the set is meant to be a kind of abstract portrait of the sky—the crisp blue sky of that day.”

The back wall was particularly important for lighting designer Binkley: “It was kind of a palette that I needed to use for transitions and so I could set the time of day and place and this and that.” Normally, a set designer might provide a blank fabric wraparound—called in theater design a cyclorama or “cyc”—but Boritt and Binkley collaborated on, essentially, two cycs: the bare canvas wall upstage and the slatted, wooden wall three feet in front of it. This gave them an exponential variety of possibilities. “When we started this show in La Jolla, the slats in the wall weren’t quite as big as they are now. Beowulf provided me with such a great landscape for the show,” says Binkley.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.