The Designer as Thinker

Six american designer-educators wrestle with the diverse roles stage designers must play in a changing world.

Moderated and compiled by Randy Gener

Think of it as an assemblage.

Imagine, as you leaf through this sundry collage of words and images, an impressionistic composite. Picture a young artisan at once technically proficient and intuitively creative. This storyteller must be so visually oriented as to have a strong flair for the theatrical, a detective who uncovers the clues that reveal the inner life of a play’s characters and the exterior environment in which they live. Imagine an inventor of made-up worlds so transparently constructed as to look and feel deeply real or symbolic or poetic or abstract, a communicator of clear ideas who somehow enhances the points of view of other dreamers involved in a project. If you can piece together all these facets, you will begin to discern a portrait of the stage designer as thinker.

In gathering together six current practitioners of design with varied backgrounds, we are touching on a shared experience. We have located a commonality in their training—their studies with master designer Ming Cho Lee—from which to launch a spirited, thoughtful and at times contentious discussion. The talk will take us from coast-to-coast, to graduate and undergraduate programs at CalArts of Los Angeles (Christopher Barreca), Ohio University (Ursula Belden), San Diego State University (Ralph Funicello), New York University (Susan Hilferty), Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina (Charles McClennahan) and University of Massachusetts (Miguel Romero).

And because theatre is mainly in the performance, and what’s important is the realization of design ideas, we have devoted space to an assemblage of notes, sketches, computer renderings, painted drop and photographs of models. Out of these scraps and drafts—originally intended for creation and not for reproduction—we hope to tell some stories. We wish to re-capture the thoughts and impulses of designers at play and re-trace their artistic journeys in specific collaborations. But in grasping this notion of a thinking designer as a whole, we should realize that design always gestures outside the space of two dimensions; its processes cannot be prescribed or contained. So we must construct an image that fits in a frame, but not only in its frame. — R.G.

Christopher Barreca
Head of design at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles; head of design, Center for New Theater at CalArts. A music and theatre major at the University of Connecticut, he entered Yale as a technical major. He recently designed Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour at South Coast Repertory.

Ursula Belden 
Professor of scene design and head of the production design and technology department at Ohio University’s School of Theatre. A Yale graduate, she is co-curating the American exhibit at the 2003 Prague Quadrennial International Design Exposition and designing a new Off-Broadway version of Othello for March 2004.

Ralph Funicello
Don Powell chair in set design at San Diego State University; associate artist at the Globe Theatres in San Diego. His Romeo & Juliet opens in March 2003; Three Sisters for San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater opens in May 2003; and Henry IV, starring Kevin Kline, opens at Lincoln Center Theater in fall 2003.

Susan Hilferty 
Chair of the department of design for stage and film at New York University’s School of the Arts. She has collaborated with Athol Fugard in more than 30 productions. In addition to the Broadway revival of Into the Woods, she designed costumes for Alfred Uhry’s Without Walls and Richard Nelson’s The General from America.

Charles McClennahan 
Assistant professor at Winston-Salem State University’s fine arts department and film production design instructor at University of North Carolina. With a master’s degree from Yale, he became an innovator in visualization for the theatre, designed for Spike Lee’s films and created sets for important black theatres across the U.S.

Miguel Romero 
Associate professor of scenic design at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He worked as an assistant to Ming Cho Lee for three years after earning a BFA in scenic design from NYU. He designs extensively for opera and ballet productions and recently studied puppetry and mask-making in Japan and Indonesia.

The Designer as Critic

RANDY GENER: Is there such a thing as lineage in design? Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson were mentors to Donald Oenslager and Jo Mielziner. Oenslager, who helped found the Yale School of Drama, was a mentor to Will Steven Armstrong, John Conklin, Eldon Elder, Santo Loquasto and Jean Rosenthal. Ming Cho Lee was a disciple of Mielziner, Boris Aronson and Rouben Ter-Arutunian. How important are the legendary stage designers in the training of young designers?

SUSAN HILFERTY: I am disturbed about trying to make a connection between my teaching and Ming’s teaching, or my design work and Ming’s. If this group was selected to celebrate Ming and his contributions as a teacher, I’m in all the way. As my teacher, Ming was incredibly valuable, but my work as an artist is incredibly different from his approach. Each of us has not only our own approach to training but also our own approach to design; they are probably two separate things. A teacher is absolutely an essential ingredient in terms of influencing and mentoring young artists. But I don’t see myself as training anybody to become another Susan Hilferty. My goal is to nurture whatever talents artists have and take them in whatever direction they can go, not create cookie-cutter versions of the mentor.

MIGUEL ROMERO: I think it’s important, though, to acknowledge the truly dynamic contribution—in passing on an oral tradition—that Ming is part of. The history of American theatre design goes back to Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, who made their innovations in Europe. Jones went there, brought what he saw back and used it as the foundation for defining an American "dramatic imagination." Mielziner assisted Jones and absorbed some of his creative energy impulses and passed them on to Ming, who in turn influenced each of us and gave us something to pass on to our students that isn’t in the "how to" books or theatre-history texts.

RALPH FUNICELLO: When we start teaching, the examples at our disposal are the teachers we’ve had; therefore, we start either by reacting to how we were taught, and not do what they did—or we teach using the methods we were taught. All of us, of course, have since gone into different directions, finding out over the years what works and what doesn’t.

URSULA BELDEN: That’s absolutely part of the equation, but I don’t think it is the major thrust. What I’ve discovered about my faculty members is that almost all of them start teaching not from the basis of who their mentor was, but of who they were when they were students—how they learned, how they took in information.

FUNICELLO: I had had a certain amount of training at Boston University when I arrived at New York University, where I studied with Ming, and what I really needed was to be turned upside down and shaken—that’s what NYU did for me. But I had had a certain grounding in what putting on a play was all about: I had an approach and a certain amount of summer stock work. But some of the other students in my program didn’t have an approach or experience, and they were completely at sea. Some people had a lot of trouble. I think NYU eventually found its feet, probably by the time you were there, Miguel.

ROMERO: When I was in Miami, I saw some of Ming’s works illustrated in Theatre Arts magazine and knew immediately that I wanted to go to NYU, where he was then teaching, to study with him. I arrived in 1971 to the news that he had moved to Yale, so our paths did not cross until I became his assistant in 1973. I remember my fondest memory is of being thrown into the deep end of the pool at NYU. That suited me temperamentally really well, because I paddled furiously so I wouldn’t drown. It is a way of teaching, and for me it was suitable at the time. But it would never occur to me to do to a student what was done to me at NYU.

FUNICELLO: There was great anarchy there at the time.

CHRISTOPHER BARRECA: I’ve found that my interests—and how my interests have changed over the course of my career—have affected my teaching far more, oddly enough. I love Ming, and he is definitely my mentor. I came to Yale with little experience—I was a music major who had built some scenery at a Broadway theme shop to make extra money—so I learned a lot at school. But it’s my professional work that’s influenced me more as a teacher. I’ve become much more interested in performance: having my students actually create work, and designing classes that relate to that. I don’t feel that I’m either a reaction against or a synthesis of various approaches. It’s the 20 years I’ve had since school that have fed my interest in teaching, oddly enough.

BELDEN: Having had a good 15 years as a freelance designer before I did any teaching, I would say the same thing applies for me. Of course when I walked into the classroom for the first time, much of what I did was based on the way Ming ran a class. However, the content of the teaching is probably far more shaped by what I’ve done in the intervening years.

HILFERTY: One of the things that I advise students or people applying to a program to do is to explore as many different programs as possible. I describe it as a blind date. NYU was the right one for Ralph, but it might be the wrong one for somebody else. The ingredients of a good program are reflected in who the students are, who the faculty is, how everybody works together. So even though you may have sprung from Ming’s loins—what a terrible expression that is… (Laughter) Even though we were taught by Ming at one point in time, I would imagine that our programs are completely different, and the way we teach is completely different.

CHARLES McCLENNAHAN: I must confess that, given where I’ve arrived right now, these great designers mean very little to me in terms of historical significance. I am an African American. I studied with Ming at Yale. As far as teaching is concerned, I found myself at Winston-Salem State University, where it’s predominantly black and the emphasis is put on African-American history and culture, so in a way I’ve come kind of full circle here. But a lot of these great design names—Appia, Craig, Jones, Mielziner, Oenslager—mean very little in terms of the connection with my culture and my experience as an African American. I can see the significance of these great designers, but how do I connect these names with my students and their cultural experiences? In training a crop of young black designers, I’ve had to rethink how I approach theatre, how I approach design and how I approach teaching it. I can’t teach my students the way I’d teach in a predominantly white school, where these names have made an impact.

HILFERTY: As a woman, one of the things that’s very clear to me is that while we’ve had some great role models, theatre design has been historically a white male world. Oenslager, for instance, felt that any woman in design class was taking up space that should have gone to a man. But the bigger question we’re touching on is history: How much is the historical part of design important in training a designer today? Theatre design is a living and breathing thing. The theatre is only alive at this particular moment. We may get some things from the past, but I’m not sure if theatre history is what influences my work right now.

BARRECA: In art school, art history can dictate the artworks that are produced. So in my classes, when students ask me about the history of design, I always say, "I want to find your aesthetic first." I resist this idea of studying theatre-design history when I work with young designers, because I want them to explore from the ground up.

BELDEN: I assume that they have gotten it in their theatre-history classes. I assume they can learn it on their own. I will occasionally say, "You should be aware of how Mielziner designed A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, if you’re designing this show," so that they’re aware that there is literature, that people have expectations about it—and that you can either ignore the past or pay attention to it.

McCLENNAHAN: At certain levels you understand that as you evolve as a designer, you have been influenced by these men, but that influence is not to make you become like them—it is to release you to become who you are, who you really are.

FUNICELLO: I do think, however, that all of us can trace our design history back to Robert Edmond Jones. That’s interesting and kind of wonderful. It’s a fact. It is not something one operates on as an artist; it certainly doesn’t affect me or what I teach on a day-to-day basis.

McCLENNAHAN: I’m sorry to disagree. It’s just that I can also trace my design history back to the quilt designers, during the escape of slaves from before Reconstruction, before emancipation. I can trace my design history back further than I can trace my theatre history.

BARRECA: Just to confirm what Charles is saying, I use music more in my teaching than theatre-design history. I use music theory—the structure of music—for students to understand the structure of performance, the idea of composition as an underpinning of the way our kind of visual art is different from a static form of visual art.

HILFERTY: One of the biggest problems I have with studying theatre-design history is that I actually find it leads the students in the wrong direction. I hate those books that include drawings of costume designs or set designs—they confuse the students, who think theatre design is about creating a two-dimensional thing that’s frozen in time. When they see a production on stage, they see what the design is like in three dimensions—or four dimensions, when you include the element of time. That’s when they discover what the theatrical experience is all about. But I’m constantly having to get my students to erase what they’ve learned.

ROMERO: We have to be careful when we talk about the influence of theatre history, since so much of the evidence comes through description in media other than the living theatre. It helps to be aware of historical traditions and of the spaces that dramatic literature was intended to be performed in—but I don’t think it’s essential to being a good designer.

BELDEN: Not only is the design represented in two dimensions, it’s from a particular time, so what may have been a meaningful production in 1950 would be a museum production in 2002. When I teach, I rely more on what I heard on National Public Radio that morning than on anything else, probably.

THE DESIGNER AS APPRENTICE

What is more important for young students to possess before entering a graduate design program? Is it production work, knowledge of theatre, a deep connection with literature or art-making skills?

BELDEN: A broad liberal arts education is the single most important thing. After that, a passion for theatre. Almost everything else can be taught.

ROMERO: When it comes to graduate students, I much prefer to have someone who doesn’t have a theatre background.

BELDEN: The less theatre they’ve had, the less we need to start from scratch.

BARRECA: I would look for someone who has gone through the rigors of a liberal arts education, the intellectual tradition of exploring something deeply. That can mean architectural training, for instance, or music training. At CalArts, I have struggled to create a program that is more intellectually based for the undergraduate students, but I’m afraid that they are getting the kind of production-heavy education that would make it difficult for them to get into my graduate program.

HILFERTY: The critical ingredient in a student is somebody who thinks of themselves as an artist. Knowledge of art, religion, politics, history, literature are essential ingredients to an artist’s work. I prefer a student who has taken a class on the Bible, instead of a stagecraft class. But I think that most undergraduate theatre programs that focus only on production techniques are irresponsible and, in some cases, immoral.

BELDEN: I’m looking for a connection with the world we live in, a passion for seeing that [connection] translated in visual terms. What I’m trying to train is the ability to translate text or music into meaningful images.

McCLENNAHAN: Students aren’t stupid. They find out before they even apply to colleges who teaches there, what that person would want to see, what kind of designs. They go and research that instructor’s designs. What we don’t do is train students to become independent thinkers. I don’t know how many times after leaving Ming’s class I thought, "What can I bring in that he will like?" I found out, after years of thinking about myself as a student and teaching myself how to teach, that I don’t want students to bring back and show me what they feel will satisfy me, what they think I’d find appropriate. That’s dangerous. When I go back and look at my designs that were not so successful, I begin to cherish them, because that’s who I was. That’s not what other people wanted me to be.

HILFERTY: It’s the level of our critiquing that identifies us as better teachers: finding the right ways to allow students to realize that they can improve. We have to do it in a way that doesn’t dismiss their work, so we can find their identity in their designs. The dangerous place to go to is if we try to tell somebody it’s right or wrong, or if they design something just to please us.

BARRECA: I often say to the students, "Can we get past the adjectives?" There’s a way of getting students to actually articulate what they’re seeing in their own work and in other people’s work, a way of describing their inner mental process during the act of looking. There are ways in which we can draw out a process that works for them, as opposed to imposing or laying a process on top of them.

Ming’s approach was actually a different school of teaching. His approach is a traditional one, much like Oenslager’s. What you come in contact with is a very powerful mental process—Ming’s process—and you either react strongly to it or not. Those of us who reacted strongly to Ming’s process ended up being, in some ways, the more successful people in life. There is validity to that.

What’s interesting is that we’re articulating something about our generation that is exciting, because it’s different. This is not to demean or cut down what Ming does—it’s just interesting to note how our relationship to design, to the work we have been doing over the years, and to the people we collaborate with, has led us to think in our own way—and to teach in our own way.

ROMERO: For my beginning students (theatre majors who may not think of themselves as designers), I stress the process of translating ideas into visual images before I get into any of the nitty-gritty of how you design specifically for the theatre. You have to identify the designer’s tools: shape, form, color, space, light and shadow, proportion, etc. Before I ask these students to design for the theatre, I make sure they make a drawing or model from a dream or in response to a favorite piece of music. Then we move on to doing research for a specific play: clippings, photos, art and other images that somehow capture some kernel of a response to the text. Only gradually do we get into creating an inventory of physical requirements for a specific play—storyboards and developing ground plans, and so forth.

I’m a great believer in learning by making mistakes; those are lessons you never forget. In a graduate program, the student absolutely has to learn how a show progresses from ideas, to sketches, to models, to drafts, and how it gets through the scene and paint shops and loaded onto the stage. It’s tragic to see graduate designers who only have portfolios of paper projects. But I don’t think that the relationship necessarily has to be with a professional theatre.

FUNICELLO: I don’t mind when a potential candidate knows how to build models and draft. And I’ve never found that anyone’s undergraduate training from a BFA program has ever gotten in the way of our graduate training. Sure, it takes a few weeks for them to realize that they don’t know everything, but I’ve never had that problem.

HILFERTY: I find, Ralph, that for me the loss is literally art and history. Applicants will often say to me, "I couldn’t take a drawing class, because drawing is in the fine arts department." Or many times they haven’t taken American history. I wouldn’t want to dismiss all undergraduate programs. There are certainly programs that have great strengths. I look for a real mix in my class—somebody who comes from an art background or an architecture background or a sculpture background or new media, or somebody who comes from a theatre background.

BARRECA: To second what Susan just said, I do take a mix of students, including those with BFA backgrounds. But they tend to come from schools where, oddly enough, they’ve had more contact with a liberal arts environment, and they’ve had a very powerful teacher that focused on them on some level in a different way. But when I’m recruiting for the graduate level, I’m looking at specific schools. I actually note the schools where I get interesting students. I try to make connections with those faculty members.

McCLENNAHAN: Regardless of whether you are computer savvy or media savvy, unless you have a background in drawing or visual arts, it’s going to be very difficult for you to use those tools to even articulate what you’re doing with a pencil. I just need to find an artist. If I find an artist, I’ve got a designer. It’s as simple as that.

BARRECA: I’m looking for passion. I feel that that’s really the only thing. It’s really a harsh world out there, and that’s what gets you through.

THE DESIGNER AS A WRITER IN SPACE

What about text analysis? Are visual artists better equipped to become stage designers?

HILFERTY: One of the important ingredients in the mix is text—a passion for understanding and working with text. Often I interview young, exciting students who come from an art background, and they have started to move into the idea of dimension and time in their storytelling, or they’re immersed in new media. (In my generation we were into Happenings.) So these young designers come to me to find out whether or not NYU is the appropriate place for them to go to school. And I find that, unless they are interested in exploring the relationship of text to their work, they are going to be completely unhappy in the department.

BELDEN: I do think, however, that it is possible to train young fine artists in theatre design; it’s just that the approach is different. I just spent the past spring quarter teaching on exchange at London’s Central St. Martin’s School of Art and Design, where I had 53 art students, and I found it very exciting. There were some in that group who probably don’t want to work with text in the end, but there were many who were there because they were in the performance-art program, so obviously they had chosen a program that was going to have some basis in text. Some were unhappy with text, but, by giving them a little bit of leeway, I found that the mix of students was wonderful. There was a phenomenal energy of creativity.

The main thing I found was that the art students start with a visceral gut reaction to the text. I did not choose the play to teach; I was told I had to do Miss Julie. I’d never dare to assign Miss Julie, certainly not to first-year students, because I’m afraid I would get a bunch of kitchens with all the doors in the proper place and the kitchen table in the proper place. It might have mood, it might have tone, or maybe I’d get some psychoanalysis.

But this group of artists came at it with very exciting use of images, and they showed a total disregard for the text, to begin with. So the training process was to teach them to find a way to keep what was exciting in their initial gut response and yet allow the play to happen in some way. The idea of performing Miss Julie under a bridge in the water just doesn’t come up in my theatre-design classes, but there was one art student in London who actually did that, using the text as a springboard. With my theatre-design students in Ohio, by contrast, I find that, on the whole, what I have to do is take them from a relatively narrow theatre-trained focus, make them open up visually—to get at the guts of the play and the ideas in it and explore its relationship to the world that we live in today.

HILFERTY: The spine of my department at NYU is text, which could start from a piece of music, a play or opera. It’s about incorporating all the other artists involved in a project, and their reactions to the text. I find that the students who want to be individual artists expressing themselves through these media are very different from those who want to be part of a collaborative art form. That’s really the dividing line. It’s not that these artists have ideas that are not original and exciting, but somehow they feel they’re betrayed by having to work with a director and actors in support of a specific text.

BARRECA: You don’t have a theatre designer, then—you have a fine artist. The definition of a stage designer is a member of a team. And isn’t that the most exciting thing about it?

HILFERTY: Laurie Anderson was a big influence on my work. I started at art school and then I went to theatre; Anderson’s performance art was really the result of Claes Oldenburg and Happenings. At the same time, I would never have recommended to her that she go to a theatre-design program, even though she is also a designer. It’s the same with Robert Wilson. If I had a student like Wilson or Anderson in my design program, I think I would tell them to go someplace else….

BARRECA: ….or nowhere at all.

HILFERTY: It’s not that they can’t work with design, but I think it’s a different vocabulary.

McCLENNAHAN: I don’t see theatre as strictly confined to the stage. Theatre applies to the medical industry in terms of visualization now, and to the architectural industry, because they want enhancements—they want immediacy, and they want to sell products in the same way that we are selling them visually when we look at a stage. The delineation is not so clear anymore—especially as I now interact with young designers who are going to take this industry into the future. We are poised to help define that future or we can inhibit it, as we work with new minds in our classrooms that are trained with interactive devices like video games. What we know as traditional theatre will be combined and absorbed in that industry, and the boundary lines will become artificial. And how will we deal with that?

THE DESIGNER AS DIRECTOR

One of the components of design is a sense of the theatrical event. What do we mean by "a thinking designer" or a designer who can creatively solve problems?

HILFERTY: I’ve found that I have to bring directors into the classes, and I have my designers take acting classes, get them into the rehearsal: the scariest thing is this vacuum.

BELDEN: I certainly have student directors in all my classes. Occasionally I have faculty or other guest directors come in and work with the students. And my students all take directing classes.

ROMERO: At least directing theory, if nothing else.

BELDEN: No, they take a basic directing class, at least one, in which case, at our school, they are then asked to actually do some directing. And when they’re approaching a project I also want them always to think in terms of the directorial: Why are you doing this play today? What’s the purpose? Why is this of interest to you or the audience? What about it is important today? To me the connection to the here-and-now—to the news of the day, the New York Times, NPR, Iraq, to whatever is going on—is as important as anything else when I talk about the thinking designer.

BARRECA: This idea that designers are somehow separate from actors and directors is wrong, I think. My whole process is about being in rehearsal, because the event happens in rehearsal. My ideas grow out of what I see in the rehearsal process. So when you talk about creating a thinking artist, it’s about developing the designer’s eye. A lot of my training has to do with allowing students to trust in their instincts—to discover it from the act of seeing, so they can say, "This needs to be juxtaposed to that" or "This is moving here and that isn’t"—those are similar choices an actor makes in rehearsal.

I am privileged to have many long-term creative relationships with directors and writers and to have worked with them on many new pieces: plays and adaptations, musicals and operas, pieces with and without a written text. My process morphs to fit the situation and needs of each work. I try very much to be involved in the creation of a piece from the beginning. One thing that is true about my work overall is that I am always looking for some action inside the work that will key me into an overall visual image uniquely suited to that action. This is very different from developing a "concept." I am afraid a concept often leads to illustrating the text, explaining it away. Illustrating, by definition, means to show something because you don’t believe the viewer will "get it" without it.

ROMERO: In teaching, we are so often working in a vacuum, a total vacuum. How can you think of scene design in a room full of other scenic designers? It makes absolutely no sense. The element of performance is so important that I’ve started introducing puppetry, because it’s a way of making visual theatre in a way that can be done without the whole paraphernalia of the technical world. I have always been fascinated by object theatre as a total visual theatrical medium. I do not consider myself a performer or puppeteer, but I am attracted to the potential of working in different scales and having greater control over the entire visual event, including the puppet performer. When I began teaching, I discovered that in the classroom I could communicate more about the total visual impact of theatre through practical applications in puppetry than through the traditional didactic exercises and paper projects usually associated with the scene-design curriculum. The keys to this are the all-important element of time, working in three dimensions and incorporating movement. The other tools—form, color, perspective, mass, texture—apply equally in the live actor and puppet media, but with the puppetry, the results (and the budget) are more manageable for students who don’t get the mainstage assignments.

THE DESIGNER AS ACTOR

In an intuitive sense, we all understand what the relationship between a director and a designer is like. But as theatre designers, what do you want from actors?

McCLENNAHAN: For me, a good experience for an actor is to have a set that they can look at and be creative on. When I see an actor exploring things about my set that I somehow didn’t get or didn’t see when I was designing it, that really makes me feel good. I mean, to use it almost like a jungle gym or an amusement park. That shows the actor’s inventiveness and the actor’s desire to go with the designer to wherever the set will take them.

HILFERTY: For me, it’s about the power of the imagination. When I asked James Lapine [the director of the original and the revival of Into the Woods on Broadway], I expected him to balk when I asked if we could realize Milky White, the cow, as a character in our production and not just a prop. He thrilled to the idea but insisted on finding the exact balance: neither a real cow nor a jokey version of it. We explored 30 variations until we found the right "cowness," the current one-person cow on Broadway. Standing next to real people on stage, Milky White is clearly "not real." But every night when she dies, the audience moans with pain, then cheers as she is resurrected.

BARRECA: If I relate it to my experience in jazz, people get confused. They think jazz is improvisation: You’re doing your own thing. It isn’t that at all. "Jazzing" literally means taking somebody else’s idea and riffing on it, expanding on it and getting excited about their idea. What you’re describing, Charles, is exactly that process. It was actually in the student productions that I did at Yale that I got the most out of the school, because of the fact that they leave you alone there. More and more these days I see myself being pressed by the constraints of time and resources into a role that I find very uncomfortable.

BELDEN: I’m finding the same thing in the regional theatres over the past 20 years; it’s become very much a machine rather than a place to explore. They’re on their schedule. They know exactly when they’re going to have you in town. They know just exactly how to do it. In the earlier years they were much more open to allowing more exploration.

Because of the economic pressures of the last, what, five, eight years or so, theatres have joint productions; it becomes more about solving technical things. They want their drawing six months in advance or eight months in advance, and the director is off doing something entirely different, and even getting the director’s ear or attention is a problem. It’s become very mechanized.

HILFERTY: It’s the slot syndrome. They’ve got six slots, and they’re filling those slots, as compared to really having a mission or an agenda. This is not always true, but you get that sense now.

BARRECA: I think that’s what ushers in technology, unfortunately. I mean, we love to be with people—we all have fond remembrances of sitting in coffee shops and restaurants, talking about theatre. But because people are busier, we can’t do it that way anymore. We’re on the verge of supplementing these nostalgic moments with other means—like technology. Some of those means have not come about yet, but there’s somebody busy working on how to solve these problems at regional theatres.

FUNICELLO: There have been circumstances where I’ve been able to react to what I have seen on stage or seen in rehearsals. It enabled me to change things—not necessarily the walls or the environment as it was built, but certainly the way it was dressed or used. If I had the time to do that. But often (laughs) we all must admit that the reality is: Load in on Sunday, first preview on Saturday, open the following Saturday, at most of the places where I work. You don’t have time to make enormous changes.

BARRECA: So what are we preparing young designers for? I’ve come down to saying, "Alright, you’re going to create your own theatre—but I’m also going to prepare you to do this other work." This means: I’m preparing them for what I hope they will do, and at the same time I am, in theory, giving them the skills to do what I have to do a lot of the time.

One of the major influences on me was the director Mark Lamos and the work he did with the designer John Conklin during the late ’70s and early ’80s. I noticed in John’s work—and it blew me away—that he designed the potential for change into Mark’s productions. When I started working for Mark, I realized that in order to work with him, I had to be ready to completely reinvent the piece when it got on stage. We were going to go on some journey—and who knew what it was going to become?

FUNICELLO: Well, we must admit that as the artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company he could do that. It became much more difficult when he worked as a freelancer in other places, where they’re not set up to build the set in the last two weeks of rehearsal. The reality is: I can teach people to work in the theatre as it exists today. I can hopefully prepare them to work in a theatre that I can’t even imagine yet.

HILFERTY: Part of our responsibility is to introduce young designers to ways of making their way in the new world, to introduce them to the work of contemporary artists, so that somehow they see that that could be a possibility in their own work. You can even include new media, the kind of potential that they’ll snap onto and go with.

BELDEN: The stronger designers come in with this desire to change the world, to throw out the past, to be revolutionaries. To the extent that we don’t just facilitate, we’re teaching a craft. The dreams, the essence, the ideas—those are things I don’t know whether we really teach. I hope I allow them to happen. I hope I encourage them to happen.

ROMERO: Group dynamics plays an important role in the process, and the better you are at dealing with other people, the more effective you will be at getting your ideas across and maintaining a positive collaboration. Some things you don’t have to learn; they’re just common sense. The student who can’t meet a deadline or complete an assignment correctly is going to have a hard time in the real world. While I stress portfolio presentation and project presentation with my students, I probably could do more in helping them acquire skills in listening, reaching consensus and knowing how to satisfy a client. Anyone can learn to draw well enough to be a designer. But understanding the work of one’s collaborators—lighting, costume, painting, construction—helps one be a better collaborator and ultimately a better designer.

BARRECA: If we’ve seen Expressionism, Impressionism, Modernism and Postmodernism, what is the next "ism"? Perhaps it’s "Commercialism." (Laughter) There’s no doubt there’s been commercialization, and it started with Ronald Reagan. (Laughter) It may have even started with Andy Warhol. I love Warhol, but there’s no doubt about it, that he made it okay for artists to say, "I’m a visual artist in a commercial world. This is the culture I live in. This is what I exist in. I’m in it for the commercial aspect of it."

So on one level with my students, I will say, "All mediums are there for you, and you should explore all mediums." Many of them are, quote-unquote, commercial. But the question is: What influence do we have over that? How do we influence their relationship to those media? How can they move us from commercialism to something else? If I look at the ’80s and ’90s, what was considered avant-garde was Disney. (Laughter) It’s frightening on some level to me, but the truth is that that was what was coming. Although we got into the business as artists when the work was very political—I was interested in the politics of culture and how it influenced performance—I find very little of that existing in the world today.

ROMERO: The way the greatest designers work in the theatre is to develop a method and a visual vocabulary that enable them to synthesize a wide assortment of visual influences and styles and create a design that is right for the play and the director’s approach to it. The designer Boris Aronson may have been partly a product of Russian Constructivism historically, but he would not have been the great designer he was if all he could do were set designs like Company. In fact, he was a master of creating very powerful moods within whatever style he was working. I prefer to leave it to painters, sculptors and architects to create the "isms" that I can absorb as a designer when I need them.

THE DESIGNER OF THE FUTURE

If we say that we are training designers for the theatre, do we expect them to receive training that will prepare them to work in a theatre that might exist in the future? Is it desirable, for instance, to have a virtual reality computing system where you see productions fully teched with exact staging and scene transitions on screen before you even enter the theatre?

McCLENNAHAN: I had an opportunity to go to NASA up in Langley, Va., and see what they were doing with visualization. I was quite impressed by how they were creating artificial environments to train astronauts. Theatre is a victim of technology, and it has to adapt to technology. As we all know, the early scene designers were first architects; what they did was to use architectural technology to design theatres and develop theatre machines that created the illusions that are used in on stage today. So theatre has to succumb to technology at some point or another, whether we, as traditional designers, accept it or not.

What young people are saying to us is that advanced technology exists, and they would like to explore, using theatre as a vehicle for that technology. That doesn’t mean technology is going to replace theatre. There will always be the traditional theatre; the immediacy of that cannot be replaced by anything.

HILFERTY: But technology also becomes part of our design vocabulary. When the atomic bomb went off, it changed everybody’s way of thinking and therefore affected the art. When television went into everybody’s home, not only did the technology affect artists, but its very presence affected the way artists think. What’s been happening in this last election is going to change people’s approach to their work, why they’re working, just as technology does.

McCLENNAHAN: What NASA is doing in its virtual training programs is to give astronauts virtual tools to work on shuttles before they even blast off into outer space. They can actually train for the event that’s going to happen in the future. To me, that’s theatrical, because they are rehearsing an event, they’re gearing up for something. These astronauts have the same feelings that I guess an actor would have, because they can’t make a mistake when they perform. They can’t go up on their lines. They can’t drop an instrument or drop a prop.

BARRECA: But the whole point is that there is a sense of immediacy and unpredictability in the theatre. An actor can make a mistake and make something wonderful out of that moment. That’s why I go to the theatre; there is an element of danger, which NASA is definitely trying to avoid.

I think [the use of a virtual reality computing system] is a bad idea. Virtual environments, or the artistic use of new media, is clearly becoming part of the process for my students; they’ve started to record a theatrical event and web cast it and show it in a different way. In several theatres I’ve worked for, some of the technical directors say to me, "Can’t you do your design on CAD [Computer Aided Design]? We would love it if you did it that way. This other designer put it all on CAD." I replied, "Not in a million years will you ever expect me to do that, because you are telling me that some kind of technology is going to dictate my artistic thinking process—that we’re going to design virtually on the computer and therefore it makes it faster and easier. No, [the CAD option] is not going to make the design process quicker and easier.

HILFERTY: The theatrical event itself is what matters. It only happens during the rehearsal and the technical process—what’s literally happening in that moment, responding to two actors getting together, what they’re thinking, what the designers are thinking, what the timing is. What makes us artists depends on how we make it happen in the room.

Besides, on a much more mundane level, when we talk about technology, there is the issue of money. You know, we can barely cover a stage with scenery these days. The amount of money that the technology costs in reference to what we’re doing in the theatre is unbelievable. So I agree that for NASA or for other such places, there is a potential theatricality about it—but to use technology as a way to get rid of the technical rehearsal seems to me disastrous.

McCLENNAHAN: That’s not what I was implying. What I was saying is: How do we connect what is going on in technology with what we’re doing in theatre in a way that enhances it, not gets rid of it? It is incumbent upon us as innovators to think ahead, to think of the future for our students—to be ready to have an answer if they have a question about how to deal with technology. What tools will be available for me in the future for interpreting or collaborating or producing my work? All this scientific knowledge will find its way into the theatrical world, into the film and music industries. So we have to be innovative as designers, and as educators we have to be available for the students to answer those questions.

ROMERO: There is no formula for designing any kind of theatrical event, but there is such a thing as a process by which you can allow yourself to be free, yet disciplined. Since I’ve become a teacher, I am a better designer. I am more aware of the use of technique, which used to be seen as something unconscious. I’ve benefited by taking the guidance I give students in respect to the process of designing. I am more aware of ways to tackle technical challenges, to surmount creative blocks. I’m much more analytical, and this has helped me to become more aware that there is no right way to design anything. I’ve become much more demanding of myself. I’ve become much more appreciative of good craftsmanship and less tolerant of lazy, careless workmanship. I can now enjoy being a curmudgeon.

FUNICELLO: The education of our students will really start when they leave our programs—and not while they’re there. What we prepare them for, hopefully, is for the education that they will receive, and to do that, they will have to have their eyes open. I try to remember that my students probably learn at least as much from each other as they will from their teachers. 

I also try to remember that our students, not us, will probably be the ones deciding what direction theatre design will take in the future, and that no one can predict it. I worry (but secretly hope) that they will think my work is very old fashioned. I hope that I can keep an open mind.

© - 2006 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.