Monday, June 25, 2018

Another Antigone, 1994

Our third and last show of the season was Another Antigone by A. R. Gurney.
The set was designed by Ellen W who had designed the set for the first show and because she also designed the lighting we hired an outside scene painter to help with this show.
More about the scene painter later.
The casts for the first two shows were professional actors who had been auditioned and hired out of New York City.


Another Antigone was prepared at the University of Michigan were the director and leading actor taught.
The director’s wife and brother-in-law were also in the cast along with a recent Michigan graduate.
They all came to Michigan after I had been a student there.
Like the first two plays I thought the set for this show was great.
The play is simple, a student writes a play, an updated version of Antigone, rather than the formal critical paper the teacher required and the fight over it.
There was not a classic box set with walls of the teacher’s office and other locations, but rather a minimal amount of furniture.


The office area, downstage center, was surrounded by tall Greek columns on both sides and amphitheater seating in a skeletal form upstage.
Behind all of that on the far sides and along the upstage of the acting area there were tall burlap panels hanging.
Lightly painted on the panels were buildings representing a large college campus.
By the last show my small crew and I were working well together and were ready to take on the new challenges of the show.
The large columns were not an issue as I had just ordered and used large Sonotubes for a production a few months before and knew what to look for in dealing with them.
Large foam pieces were cut and glued together then placed on top of the columns as capitals.
The burlap panels were just long fabric pieces which we hung with simple sandwich battens that offered just one problem, we had to fireproof them.
Fortunately the weather was on our side as it took several days to lay out all the fabric, spray them with the fireproofing liquid wait for them to dry, test, and then reapply.
The fireproofing liquid even came with a Bic lighter and a simple instruction sheet.
Keep applying liquid until fabric does not burn.
It took three applications.


The amphitheater seating structure gave me some difficulties at first, but after some thought I figured out what to do and we built it without any problems.
If a set does not offer some challenges then it is not enjoyable to build.
As I mentioned above that we needed to hire an outside scene painter and it became my job to find one.
I did not know where to look for scene painters in Connecticut as first but remembered that two former students were working fifty miles away at the Goodspeed Opera House.
I made a call and unfortunately one of the formers students had just left to move to California and the other was not available nor did she have any leads on another painter.


Almost giving up my assistant mentioned that another former student was working at Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck, NY which was not too far away.
Another phone call and I had a painter who was happy to come over and paint for a few days and make some extra money.
Over the years the Emelin Theatre is one of those places where I have had several former students end up working.
Although the set had a few tricky elements it ended up looking good and was fun to work on.
There was just one special scenic element that was more challenging than anything else the whole summer and I will talk about that in the next post.






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