Let's Talk About Ghosts; Let's Talk About Set Design

The current revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is not, in my opinion, as bad as the critics think. While I found the mishmash of Southern accents and off-stage servants' chorus distracting, I also found a lot to like with this lush, not-terribly-subtle production. Mostly, I loved the set—a dreamy fantasy of life in the aristocratic south whose soaring windows wouldn't feel out of place at the Met Opera. Some critics complained that the massive space distracted from the intimacy that is at the play's heart, but to them I blow a raspberry. The set was gorgeous—it was the directing (and sound design) that's caused the play problems.

This morning, I spoke to designer Christopher Oram, the genial Englishman responsible for the play's scenery. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, and got quite passionate when I asked him about the choice, in previews, to experiment with having the ghost of Brick's friend Skipper lurk about on stage.

There was a lot of anger about it. It was anger! There was something vile that man wrote, reporting hearsay, but it created such a riot, an absolute riot, and after that it became very hard. A dozen reviews mentioned it, even though it wasn’t in the version of the play they saw. It became a bit of industry gossip, baggage those reviewers brought in when they saw the play.

The point is, Skipper is in the play. He’s mentioned constantly. He’s the third part of the triangle. Having him there really helped Scarlett and Ben [Walker, who plays Brick] establish the weirdness of their relationship. The removal of it didn’t change their relationship.

I’m saddened that one isn’t allowed to experiment. If we’d done it on opening night and it had been removed and we’d gotten the flak, then fair enough. But isn’t that the point of previews? With the Internet, literally the first performance becomes public property. This also makes the critics slightly redundant., if a critic brings that gossip, that baggage into the review.

As much fun as everyone had laughing at the idea of Skipper's ghost, I think there's something to like about a big-budget production having the good sense to admit it was wrong before opening night. No sense punishing a show that's already admitted a mistake.

Read the rest of the interview here. It's a good one.

At Atlantic, The Set Unfolds Like An Onion

At the critically-beloved Harper Regan, running at the Atlantic Theater Company through November 4th, the audience is greeted by a rather grim set. Three rows of steel walls fill the stage, each taller than the one before, closing down the space so claustrophibically that any audience member hoping for spectacle becomes nervous. It looks like a steel birthday cake, or something from the Global Guts vault. The first scene is tense, still, and crowded entirely in front of the first wall. As it ends, one wonders, "Where the hell do they go from here?"

And then Harper starts knocking down barriers. The front wall goes first, with a thud that makes the audience start. Soon, Mary McCann and her fellow actors are finding barstools hidden in the panels, producing sofas from nowhere, and finally inverting the entire back of the set to reveal a cramped English garden. In a play whose tone is icy, whose dialogue is off-putting, and whose characters hardly interact, Hauck's set is an unfolding wonder—a bit of magic in a show about men and women whose lives hold very little magic at all.

"It was quite a long design process," said Hauck in an interview this week. To bring Simon Stephens' ultra-lean play to life, she and director Gaye Taylor Upchurch had to deal with eleven scenes, nine locations, and stage directions that give no clue how the set is to look. Hauck and Upchurch started with a naturalistic, crowded set, but soon scaled it back until it was "very pared down and a little bit merciless," and "gave Harper nowhere to hide." Keeping Harper exposed helps McCann stay vulnerable, and gives her reason for her character's occasional lashing out.

"I think she loves knocking that stuff over," said Hauck. "It's incredibly exciting to me, when she shoves over walls and they become floors. I don't think anybody's expecting it."

As Hauck sees her, Harper Regan is "a person in free fall, a person searching for what to do next, a person completely alone and completely at a loss," who reacts to news of her father's sudden illness by fleeing her family to spend a few days in her hometown of Stockport. Though she goes to see her father, she arrives just after he dies. Visiting hours are over, and she doesn't even get to see his body. When she returns home, something has changed within her, but it's not clear what—a vagueness reflected in the garden that appears for the final scene, which Hauck called, "the moment of rleease and relief and payoff." 

"Those big doors open," she said, "and you finally get a breath of just the tiniest bit of growth."

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​And just when you least expect it—a garden!

Though most of his stage directions were vague, Stephens labored over the description of what is on the breakfast table for Harper's last conversation with her husband—orange juice, fruit, a French press full of coffee. 

"To me, that scene needs to present hope," Hauck said. "The text of that scene is quite complicated, and it's nowhere near as clear as it appears to be. That juxtaposition came from Simon. What he really was hoping to see in that final scene was something organic. So against all of that steel, you have just the tiniest bit of green. It's a backyard, but it's not a hopeful backyard." 

Harper Regan is not a hopeful play, but it is occasionally beautiful. And nothing in it is quite so impressive as the ugly steel set that slowly unfolds to reveal a bit of green.