To put on a play, you’ve gotta have…

A SET!!!

Check out these wise words from Allison, and pssssst… you have to see the other post for the corresponding images…

We just went into rehearsals for As Is yesterday! With the show now only a month away, we’re putting the final touches on the design of the production. It’s always a challenge doing off-off-Broadway, in that you typically don’t get to spend a lot of time in your performance space — so the more preparation, the better. Our set designer, Nikki Egana Stadler, did these very cool, to-scale drawings of the set’s basic scheme to give us a better idea of how we’ll eventually fit into The Studio Theatre at Theatre Row.

1. Bird’s Eye View
The play moves fluidly from place to place, jumping from a dive bar to a community support group to an AIDS hotline center. But at least for the play’s first half, the action returns to the New York City apartment of the central characters, Rich and Saul. In the drawing, we’ve got a couch on stage right and a home bar upstage, and enough space surrounding for little details to be filled in later. The lines at the bottom of the drawing are, in fact, the first rows of the audience. We chose the space for its warm feel and its intimacy — and indeed, it’ll be quite intimate.

2. The second half of the play is set in a hospital room, with much of the action surrounding a hospital bed. Nikki suggested that we build a set piece that could be a bar for the first half and transform into a hospital bed for the second half. We eventually had to nix the idea, but it’s still pretty clever.

3. These schematic drawings are meant to preemptively solve any problems that could arise in the theater space. Nikki discovered that, with the hospital bed center stage and rolled out to its full length, it’ll be very close to the audience… perhaps a little too close…

Wanna find out what the set will look like eventually? Well, you’ll just have to come and see it.

21 September 2010 ·