This entry SHOULD have been posted over a month ago. In my defense, as I was designing set, lights AND sound, and thus was rather actively BUSY during tech, I think I could be forgiven for not posting AS IT WAS HAPPENING, but as there’s been over a month since… I have little recourse but to flog myself with the nearest wet noodle.
This one was an interesting show, and one of the strongest I’ve seen here at University of Chicago where I teach. It’s…
SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO by David Mamet
Directed by Audrey Francis
Set, lights and sound by Yours Truly
Costumes by Nate Rohr
THE STORY: Told in very quick rapid-fire-dialogue scenes (there are 37 scenes and the show is less than 80 minutes long), and set in Chicago in 1976, a young office-worker guy who has a misogynistic alpha-type co-worker, meets, falls in love, moves in with, fights with and ultimately splits from a nice young independent girl who has an equally caustic friend of her own. Depending on how you choose to stage it, it can be an indictment of “sleep with them first, ask questions later” mentality of the younger generation before the AIDS scare changed the social landscape, or it can be a simple story of two who begin to find love only to be driven apart by the negativity of those around them. There are a myriad other legitimate interpretations, but that’s how I choose to read it. The show was revolutionary when it premiered as it uses a lot of “bad language” and talks about sex, a LOT, and it was early in Mamet’s rapid-fire dialogue that has since made him famous.
THE DESIGN: since there are so many scenes, and the shows keeps coming back around to a bar and a bed, we stripped away any of the architectural necessities and decided to stage it IN THE ROUND (otherwise known as an ARENA arrangement, meaning that the audience is on all four sides of the playing space, and that actors. This necessitates that there be no doors/walls/windows and that space is defined by lighting, sound and the usage of the stage by the director and actors. In other words, simplicity rules.
As I was doing so much myself, it was necessary to keep things simple as well. The hardest thing on this show for me was painting the floor, which took about 3 days and nearly 2000 running feet of masking tape. By using the color scheme that was prevalent in the 70s. it gives a FEELING of the time of the play without being slavish. The design in based, somewhat, on a painting by Sol LeWitt, a fairly well known artist that came of age in the POP Art movement of the 60’s. In an arena set-up, the FLOOR becomes incredibly important as its’ the major architectural force that the audience has to help them visually. The furniture was designed to withstand abuse, and to be used around the department for years to come… it’s purposely skeletal and basic. The lighting, too was fairly straightforward, with only small tonal shifts at key moments.
Sound was particularly fun to work on as I got to go back in the mid 70s and dig up all kinds of things that were popular then… getting to discern the real difference between funk and soul, look at the differences between early punk and glam rock, was a lot of fun to explore. And as a scenic designer, it was exciting to see how sound could help sculpt the space and the world of the play. The muzak rendition of GIRL FROM IMPANEMA during the department store scene, made the crew and cast burst out laughing the first time they heard it during tech… in part because it was simply so WRONG and yet so RIGHT. The bar, the office, and perhaps everyone’s favorite sound cue… the porn movie the two guys sit through one night. It was built of several different parts in Pro-tools (a computerized sound editing program), including a very instrumental heavy cover of Kool and the Gang’s JUNGLE BOOGIE, setting a bass line for the heavy breathing and … dare I say it…. Sex noises….
Sometime’s it’s fun to step outside your “norm” and stretch….
