Don't Dress for Dinner. 1994

Preparations for the Don’t Dress for Dinner, a French sex farce by Marc Camoletti, began even before the first play opened.

The company producer, Dean Adams, both directed and designed the set for the play.

I met with him and discussed his ideas for the set and then drafted the working drawing.

As I worked on the drawings I would occasionally met with him to discuss building methods and materials to be used.

Lumber and other materials needed to be ordered so that we could start to build the set as soon as the first play opened.

There was little to no storage at the theatre so all of the sets were built from scratch.

For this show we had to build a box set that had exposed wooden beams both on the walls and hanging above plus a field stone wall upstage.

Fortunately I had past experiences with these elements and how to achieve the desired look.

The stone was relatively easy to make as we cut Homasote to the shapes required and then split each stone down the middle with wide-bladed putty knives.

Honestly it was a little difficult to split the larger stones but the result was well worth it as the stones looked great when painted.

Five doors were also made using 1x6 planks with two cross members and large rustic hardware.

All of the wood, both the beams and doors, were to be distressed in some manner.

Not looking forward to beating all the boards with a chain for days on end I came up with an easier solution.

When I first came into town I toured some of the local lumber and tool suppliers and I had seen a grinder wheel at a local shop that was just what we needed.

The wheel had about five chain saw type teeth on it and chewed nicely into the wood.

There was a good deal on lumber to distress, it made a big mess and it did take us a while to do.

We found that we could only work about a half an hour before our hands went numb so we had to take turns as we worked on the project.

I thought the hard work was worth it and the finished set looked very good.

At the time I felt the design of all of the sets that summer were very good and as I have recently looked back at these and other designs of the same shows I must say the sets still look good.

I feel that the set for this play and the other two shows that summer were all designed well and not only fit the needs of the plays but worked well the theatre space itself.

Yes I know I am biased, but I looked at over a dozen photos of other productions of the play and I still like this one the best.

Some of the other productions are bigger and more time and money spent on them, but the design for this production really worked for me and the others just look like “sets”.

One of the nice touches that I had forgotten about until I looked again at the photos of the show was the back stone wall.

Because the set is supposed to be an up-dated farm house, the stone pattern on the back wall had sections that were meant to show ghosts of windows that was no longer used and had been filled in.

 * * *