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

88 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
Thomas Umfrid’s realistic scenery for a production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, a comedy set in a well-to-do theatrical
family’s English country home in the mid-1920s, is beautifully realized for this production at the Utah Shakespeare
Festival. Umfrid’s set forcefully projects the action of the play through a skillful arrangement of staircase, doors, and
landing. The showy flapper-age costumes were designed by Kevin Alberts, and the posh lighting was designed by
Lonnie Alcaraz. © Utah Shakespearean Festival
What Design Does
Theatrical design in the twenty-first century presents
a wide-open field for artistic creativity. While a play
normally has thousands of lines for the actors to speak
and hundreds of implicit or explicit stage directions for
the director to stage, it rarely provides more than brief
descriptions for its setting or costumes. At the beginning
of Waiting for Godot, for example, Samuel Beckett simply
writes, “A country road. A tree. Evening.” He then
launches directly into the opening dialogue, leaving us
to wonder: What sort of road should this be? What sort
of tree? Where is it in relation to the road? And how dark
an “evening” is it? Later in the play Beckett provides
another stage description: “The light suddenly fails. In
a moment it is night. The moon rises at back, mounts in
the sky, stands still, shedding a pale light on the scene.”
But how is all this accomplished? How much darker
does the stage get? What does the “moon” look like:
full? crescent? How quickly does it rise? How suddenly
does it stop? And what is it made of: projected light? a
wooden cutout on a wire? And if a wire, is it meant to
be seen or should it be invisible to the audience? Or is
the moon simply a lantern carried by an actor—as in the
“Pyramus and Thisbe” play embedded in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
And what do Godot’s actors wear? We read in the
dialogue of bowlers, boots, and coats, but what do these