Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 87
as well as dramatic, characteristics: color, scale, line, balance,
harmony, punctuation, surprise. All these design
elements came into play with the first drama, and all
have even greater importance today.
The playwright creates the play’s words, and the
actors execute its actions and impersonate its characters,
but the theatre designers determine what the stage and
characters look like. Indeed, design comprises most of
what we see when we go to the theatre—and much of
what we hear. Designers, and the technicians who implement
their ideas, create what the actors wear, sit on, and
stand before. They determine how the actors are illuminated
and how they—and their environment—sound.
Sometimes they even create what we smell. Nearly
every sense in the theater has been carefully planned by
the designers; they help create the experienced world of
the play.
The Design Process
The initial framework for design is the play itself. The
action Sophocles outlined in Oedipus implies a door, so
most designers provide one. The moment also requires
a chorus and characters that enter and leave the staging
area, so suitable points of entry/exit are created as well.
Sometimes—even in ancient times—characters physically
fly through the air, so machines are designed and
built to execute these superhuman actions.
Today, of course, scenery, lighting, and costumes
can create realistic-looking environments, such as living
rooms and Roman piazzas, barrooms and butcher
shops—and imagined locales such as Satan’s Hell or the
Never Never Land of Peter Pan. They also can create
uniquely conceived visualizations that layer interpretations
and social, political, or aesthetic references upon
the scripts they accompany. Sound designs can create
scores that enhance the play’s actions with musical
themes to emphasize romance, tension, or grief.
Or sound designs can punctuate and disrupt the play’s
actions with the cacophonous noise of traffic, jungle
cries, or warfare.
The first stage in creating a play’s design is conceptual.
At this time, ideas emerge from reading the script,
researching its context, and imagining its potential
impact on the expected audience. These ideas are shared
with the play’s director (who may have initiated this
process with ideas of his or her own), playwright (if a
living playwright is part of the conceptual process), and
other designers. Although the director normally oversees
these conversations, artistic collaboration is absolutely
fundamental to this conceptual period of a play
production’s creation.
For the visual designer, conceptual ideas may be
almost instantly translated into mental images, both
general and specific. Such images may be expressed
first in words—such as “gloomy clouds,” “El Greco
blues,” “delicate archways,” “broken bottles,” “black,
black, black”—but they will soon lead to stabs at representation:
quick sketches, photos torn from magazines,
color samples and swatches. The sound designer
may likewise contemplate impressions of “medieval
chanting,” “random gunfire,” “baroque harpsichords,”
or “winds in the reeds,” and then compose or hunt
down sounds that could give others on the design/
directing team a sense of where they are heading at
this stage.
Gradually, a comprehensive design emerges that is
normally guided—with a hand that may be sometimes
quite gentle and sometimes quite firm—by the director
and, of course, the budget. For the visual designer,
a physical presentation of proposed designs normally
involves colors (primary, earthy, gloomy, pastel), textures
(rough, shiny, delicate, steely), shapes (angular, spiraling,
blockish, globular), balance (symmetrical, natural,
fractal), scale (towering, compressed, vast), style (realistic,
romantic, period, abstract, expressionist), and
levels of detail (gross, fine, delicate), as rendered in
drawings, digitized representations, three-dimensional
models, fabric samples, and other media. For the sound
designer, designs may include music underscoring
(retreating brass bands, lush violins, ominous chords),
ambient noises (distant sirens, gunfire, ocean waves),
and enhanced, reverberated, or digitally manipulated
live sounds (voices, footsteps, door slams).
All these representations are shared among the artistic
and technical staff, analyzed for cost and required
labor in construction, and evaluated for their individual
merit as well as their joint impact. How will the combination
of all these designs feel? How will it propel
the action of the play? What will it communicate to the
expected audience? How will it tie the actors to the audience,
the drama to the theatre in which it is staged, and
the play’s events to the real life that goes on outside the
theatre’s door?
Those are the questions the designer considers
from the initial moment of conception to the opening
performance.