The Master Builder

At one of our weekly graduate seminars the faculty noted that no one was assigned to design the set for one of the showcase productions and asked for a volunteer.
It seemed that everyone just melted down into their seats, looked into their armpits or out the window and avoided eye contact with the faculty.
Always looking for a new challenge I raised my hand and said that I would be willing to give it a try.

Scene Design for "The Master Builder" Act I - 1980

The play was the Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama.

I had read all of Ibsen’s major plays and wrote a term paper about his design ideas for my Contemporary Drama class the year before and I had just designed the set for the play for one of my scene design class projects so I felt confident that it would be an easy job.

Needless to say it was not.

Act II

At the first design meeting the director stated that he did not to have any walls in a play about an Architect who, of course, uses walls to design his buildings.

He also had an idea that today would be very easy to do, but thirty years ago I had to come up with a workable solution.

He wanted, what in effect today would just be the effect of a simply laser pointer being wiggled on the sky drop behind the set.

I had seen a rippling water effect that used broken mirror pieces in a pan of water, a fan blowing on the water and a light reflected off of the pan onto the stage.

I replaced the mirror and water with a piece of silver Mylar that was slit, a small fan and a red light aimed up on the sky drop.

I painted two projections with translucent dyes that were used in a pair of old Linnebach projectors.

One was a stormy sky and the other a sunburst both based on paintings by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.



Act III

The set had several platform levels, two about 8’-0” x 8’-0” that played in different positions during each of the three acts.
Additional railing pieces were added to the set during the two act breaks.
Drafting tables and a desk were built specifically for the show and additional expanding foam railings were made from plaster molds.



I enjoyed working on the play and this was my last design project before the final push to finish my MFA Thesis and final summer at the University of Michigan.

 

Set Model



 

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