Daisy Journal: Set Design - Get Ready, Get Set...

Gotta get some sleep. It's 7:15 AM and the only reason I'm even conscious is because my wife called me from the road (on her way to work) to wake me up. My brother John, Jeff Cantor, and I were at the theatre until around 3 AM building the Driving Miss Daisy set. (I then went home, finished the Daisy program, emailed it to John, and hit the sack by about 4). It's Wednesday morning, the show opens on Friday evening and there are about three days of work remaining on the set. As usual, it will be a race to the finish line.

"What was that", you ask? "How much work could there be for the Driving Miss Daisy set," you wonder? "Isn't that the set where the car is only two stools and some good wishes," you begin to recall?

Well, yes and no. In our production, the set if far more. And no, it's not a matter of the OnStage team overdoing the production values, as we are sometimes accused. (Though I have to wonder how people can argue that we over produce community theatre. If you work in community theatre, you know that statement is an oxymoron. But that's for another posting.) No, what's going on here is a matter of translation -- the translation of a show from one venue to another. Let me explain.

There were many challenges that we faced in producing Driving Miss Daisy and the set design was a big one. People will recall that the original production was a very simple affair in which the settings were barely suggested. The car was two stools, Daisy's house was a chair and a telephone, Boolie's office was a desk, and that was about it. The result was a small, personal, intimate story. The reason the original production team went in this direct was more out of necessity than artistic choice. When it was originally done Off-Broadway in 1987 by Playwrights Horizons, Daisy was produced as a Black Box production. The theatre sat about 70 people (mostly Alfred Uhry's family in the beginning.) In a venue like that, you have to "be creative with less" because "more" just won't fit in the theatre.

The challenge we faced was two-fold. First, how to translate the show to a 400 seat venue like Kelsey theatre and not lose the story's intimacy and emotional impact. Second, we needed to meet the expectation of the folks who typically patronize the Kelsey Theatre, and they are always looking to get a lot for their money. Only in places like New York, Chicago and L.A. can you find theatre-goers happy to plunk down $60, $80 or $100 for a ticket to a show where two people sit on stools in the dark and pretend. At Kelsey Theatre, where most people come to this show by way off the Academy Award-winning movie, they expect a hell of a lot more -- and for only $12!

To meet these challenges, set designer John Maurer decided to bring everything as far down stage and close to the audience as possible to ensure intimacy. Then after many discussions together, we opted for a design that blends both realistic and abstract styles. The few indoor locations would be realistic, the many outdoor locations and the car would be slightly abstract allowing us more flexibility. So Daisy's living room, Boolie's Office and home, and the nursing home were constructed on a series of platforms with walls and furniture.

To accomplish this, John physically changed the layout of Kelsey Theatre. The Kelsey has a faux proscenium with a thrust stage. The proscenium (the frame around the front of the stage) and the stage right and left wings are actually created with a series of curtains. John (with permission of the Kelsey staff) lifted all the curtains in the theatre, and stored them in the catwalks above. Then he brought the set pieces down stage and spread them out. In the end, Daisy's living room abuts the physical wall of the theatre where the stage right wing was, and Boolie's office and house and nursing home are on the opposite side of the stage, where the stage left wing was, abutting that wall of the building.

So everything came vertically down stage closer the audience and got spread out horizontally, and even even slightly wrapped around the first few rows of the audience. As a result, the first few rows of the theatre actually feel like they are thrust forward into the playing area. There are seats in the theatre where audience members can reach out and nearly touch the actors. People in those seats feel like they are sitting in Daisy's living room while the action is taking place. It doesn't get more intimate than that.

Then there's the car, which sits center stage and is surrounded by the abstract locations. Continuing the hybrid realistic/abstract style, John designed the car with apolstered bench seats, a real steering wheel, and just enough beyond that to suggest a hood and a boot. Then he placed it on a rotating circular platform. The car is built to rotate during and in between scenes to suggest motion or to help reflect a change in location. The car is maneuvered by an operator hidden behind a wooden plank fence that runs horizontally across the stage and ties all the set pieces together.

My description doesn't do his work justice. In the end, John designed an environment that provides close proximity for the audience and affords several separate small spaces where three actors can play out very intimate scenes. Trust me. When it comes to maintaining intimacy and emotional impact, John's plan for migrating the show from a 70 seat venue to a 400 seat venue loses nothing in the translation.

Now, if we can only finish it on time.

Daisy Journal: Props - God is in the Details

When it comes to props and set dressing, God can be found in the details and so can Alycia Bauch-Cantor.

During The Emperor's New Clothes, which she directed for Maurer Productions OnStage, Alycia exhibited a wonderful eye for detail when it came to all aspects of the production, but especially props and set dressing. You can see what I mean by visiting the Emperor page on our website and viewing the picture gallery of the production. You'll need to sift through all the pics of people having fun at rehearsal and backstage, but look closely at the images of the set and you'll get the idea. After seeing this, I asked her to bring that same skill to the props and set dressing for Driving Miss Daisy, and was thrilled when she agreed.

Daisy is a deceptive show when it comes to props (and given the way we're producing it, dressing as well). You'd think a production with three actors wouldn't call for much, but it does. The show covers 25 years. That passage of time is expressed not only in the make-up and the performances of the actor, but Alycia also reflects it subtly in the props as well. If you look closely, you'll see how some of the set dressing changes slightly as time passes. Just two examples you might look for are the phones and the flowers.

The telephones are period to the best of our ability. As the story progresses, the phones change to reflect the time period of the scene. Also, there are the flowers. Flowers are a big theme in our production. In our interpretation, Daisy is a gardener. (We've even blocked several scenes to take place in her garden, a setting that didn't exist in the original play. ) Daisy's home is full of flowers that she has cultivated in her own garden. They represent her strength, her independence and her spirit. As time passes, Daisy ages, and she loses her independence and her spirit dwindles, the flowers slowly disappear from the stage. By the end of the show, the garden has withered (because Daisy has grown too old to tend it) and the flowers in the house are all gone. Only a portrait of a bouquet of Daisy's above the fireplace remain.

Alycia had the portrait commissioned especially for this production by local artist Jason Tribble. Each of the flowers in the show were carefully chosen and arranged by her. Both the garden and the cemetery (where Daisy plants flowers on her husband's grave) are designed with a mix of real soil/mulch and artificial flowers and such to lend texture and realism to the moments Daisy works the soil. These are examples of things that only happen for a brief moment on stage, but for which hours and weeks have been spent in preparation.

These are just a few ways that details, expressed in props and set dressing, are helping to bring Daisy to life. They are an example of the elements of a production that audiences may not see and consciously recognize. But the mind processes them in the background and as a result, the audience gets a feeling from them that helps set a tone for the scene.

As you watch our production of Driving Miss Daisy, perhaps for the second or third time (hey, tickets are only $12), look closely for the details. They are there, and they are rich.

Daisy Journal: Sound Design- The Sound and the Fury

The "fury" in the title of this post has to do with my frustration over learning a new software package. In this case, it was Adobe Audition, which I am using to design the sound for Driving Miss Daisy. It was a pain in the ass, but I managed to figure it out, and as I did I learned something more than just how to use the software.

Never had I thought, even as I took on the sound design chores myself as a means to shave costs from the Daisy production budget, that sound was such an integral part to making the show come alive. I'm talking about sound in terms of sound effects and (as its referred to in plays) incidental music, not the quality of the sound or the placement of microphones and such. (In our show, the later is the job of Chris, our Sound Engineer.)

I know that may seem silly coming from the director, but it's true. As a director, you have so much to keep track of that sometimes the importance of the non-visual, non-acting aspects of the production don't get your full attention. Luckily, because I was doing it myself, that wasn't the case with Daisy's sound design.

What started out as pasting together a few pieces of music to cover the black-outs in between the many tiny scenes in the show, quickly became more akin to composing a small symphony of sound effects and music clips. (The show's licensing agreement comes with a CD of incidental music that was employed along with other pieces.) In the end I probably mixed between 150 and 200 separate sound and music clips down into (I haven't finished counting) between 50 and 60 sound tracks for use in the show. With the help of my brother John, we also added incidentals like a news broadcast, a morning DJ and a few other dialogue driven ditties.

Here's an example of what I mean. There is a scene in the show where Daisy and Hoke are driving to Mobile to visit Daisy's family. They stop on the side of the road for lunch. I wanted to have them eating lunch while watching some ducks swim in a pond just out of sight. For this scene I needed the sounds of a summer day, birds, ducks, etc. No such sound effect existed in our library, so it had to be constructed (or to continue the musical metaphor - composed). I started with ambient sounds of a summer day, which didn't have very much to it. Then I added several layers of birds chirping in the background. On top of this I added the intermittent sound of ducks quacking. A separate sound clip allowed me to add the sound of the unseen ducks splashing in the unseen pond. And of course, since they are on the side of a road, I needed road noise, so I added clips of the occasional passing car in the background. Don't forget the music. We were coming into this scene after a blackout, so I stared with the music over black and as the lights come up, the music fades into the background sounds. I mixed all these at different levels, each starting out on its own track (sometimes on several tracks to get the right effect), all down into one sound file which will be played under the scene at a very low volume. In the end, this will be heard as just very dim background noise during the scene. The real focus of the scene, of course, is the conversation between Hoke and Daisy. But its very presence in the scene adds texture to the moment. In fact the absence of sound can have an impact as well. At one point in the scene all this background sound disappears completely for a moment as Daisy is drawn into a very personal memory of her youth, returning only when she emerges from her reverie. Adding this kind of background sound helps bring the scene to life for the audience on a subconscious level. And then it's brief disappearance during Daisy's remembrance, helps to add a subtle dramatic emphasis to her story. Yes, that was another lesson I learned. Sometimes silence is the sound designers friend.

I challenge you to listen to the show as intently as you watch it. As you do, remember this. Nothing you hear is an accident.