Broadway By Design: APPROPRIATE

In Broadway by Design, BroadwayWorld is shining a spotlight on the stellar designs of this Broadway season, show by show. Today, we continue with the creatives from the eight-time Tony-nominated Appropriate- Scenic Designers dots, Lighting Designer Jane Cox, and Sound Designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens.

It's summer, the cicadas are singing, and the Lafayette family has returned to their late patriarch's  Arkansas home to deal with the remains of his estate. Toni, the eldest daughter, hopes they'll  spend the weekend remembering and reconnecting over their beloved father. Bo, her brother, wants to recoup some of the funds he spent caring for Dad at the end of his life. But things take a turn  when their estranged brother, Franz, appears late one night, and mysterious objects are  discovered among the clutter. Suddenly, long-hidden secrets and buried resentments can't be contained,  and the family is forced to face the ghosts of their past. 

Where did the design process begin? For dots, it was with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' script. "Our biggest inspiration for the design of the Lafayette family's house really came from Branden's phenomenal script. His writing contains incredibly detailed and evocative stage directions that imply so much about the house's spatial relationships in terms of how they function in the play and how they impact the behaviour of the characters as well as their relationships with each other," explained the design collective.

"Along with Lila Neugebauer, we really scrutinized every entrance, mentions of the way the stairs creak and the unexplained sounds that we hear off stage, and where objects appear from and disappear to. The action of the play is so specifically tied to the house that we needed to understand and design the layout of the entire house, including the parts that you dont see on stage as well as the outside of the house and its surroundings in order for it to feel like a fully realized place.

"The house is really a major character in this story and is the cause of so much of the family's crises as they discover truths about their history and learn exactly how much they don't know about their father and who he was before he died.  In our very early conversations with Lila we really committed to the project of realising everything as was written on the page.  This founding principal was our North Star in terms of the design of the house itself as well as the epilogue of the play - we really went through the script beat by beat and asked ourselves, 'What if we really committed to putting that on stage? What is this scripted moment intended to make us feel and what design gestures can we place in 3 dimensional space that can help us realize that intention?'"

Lighting designer Jane Cox ran with dots' design. "It's hard to get light into this house, which is a wonderful metaphor for this play. We wanted you to feel the dark corners inside, and the shadows in the space, and know that outside is oppressively hot and bright. Also, the story of the play is so exciting and keeps the audience guessing every step of the way - I love how fast the play moves and how brilliant the mind of the playwright is," Cox explained. "The play is intended to be hilarious and also to make the audience really uncomfortable - the lighting tries to support that tension, using contrast and darkness as well as intense brightness to modulate the audience mood. Much of the play is set at night, listening to the sounds of cicadas outside; it was a delight to use all the different apertures to the dark box of the space to get directional light in, and to try to light scenes with the light of candles or a single lamp. I really enjoyed finding ways to get the audience to really listen - from the careful use of darkness to subtle "close-up" lighting that really focuses on actors' faces in the most intensely personal moments." 

"In a sense, the biggest inspiration and the biggest challenge were the same: The stage directions and the words of play, explained sound desigers Will Pickens and Bray Poor. From the opening Stage Direction Branden writes:

Light abandons us and a darkness replaces it.

Instantly, a billion cicadas begin trilling in the dense, vel-vetyvoid-loudly, insistently, without pause-before hopefully, at some point, becoming the void.

The insect song fills and sweeps the theater in pulsing pitch-black waves, over and beyond the stage-washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you.

It is touching you.

This goes on and on and on and on and on until the same thought occurs in every head:

"Is this it?"

"Is this the whole show?"

"Branden throws down a real gauntlet to a sound designer with this opening stage direction. His description of the cicadas in the preshow is both a “restriction” and a “bottomless well”. It’s one of those stage directions that is “aspirational”  You can’t actually do it. But the friction, the ambition to meet it, keeps you up at night, and so you push to get as close as one can.

"For each scene transition, Branden calls for cicadas, not “music”, but cicadas.Then for the epilogue, as the house begins to “return to nature”, abandoned, the cicadas are again ever present. So we have this very explicit framework for the beginning, middle, and end, all involving the cicadas. 

"For us, once we had these big tent pole cues, we had to figure out how to keep the idea of the natural world alive outside of the house, during the scenes and under the dialogue. There is sound running for every minute of this production. And we used the principles of composition to structure the cues: Dynamic range, pulse, intensity, tension and release. In a sense, the entire play is thru-scored.

"Bray did a lot of research and talked to some specialized entomologists to get recordings of not only broods of cicadas, but also single cicadas.  These recordings helped us create a palette for the transitions and the underscore of the show."

"One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to cue the show with the eight moving lights that we were able to get in over the stage," added Cox. "Our programmer Kelley Shih had her work cut out for her to use just eight lights for all the backlight and most of the sidelight. Additionally, we were working with quite a lot of older tungsten halogen equipment, and one challenge was to get the photographic snap at the end of each scene, and the filmic jumpcuts that we used at the end of the show, which can really only be done with LED equipment (the tungsten lights have a slower fade to black). My brilliant associate Bailey Costa helped us to move around alot of LED gear originally intended to light the drops to the apertures of the doors and windows to create these jumpcut effects effectively.”

dots' biggest challenge was perhaps not what audiences might expect.

"The assumption is that the epilogue sequence would have been the biggest challenge. Those 5 or so minutes of stage time were, of course, an incredibly exciting challenge presented by the script - making a house deteriorate in real time in front of an audience is not an easy task at all! The entire creative team really came together to unpack how to achieve what was written in a poetic and impactful way, within the limitations of the realities of theater (budget, personel, space, physics etc) and the result that you see on stage is really the product of a collaborative process that designers dream of.  It's really such a gift for the design elements of a production to physically perform the ending of play and we are so thankful for the opportunity to have been able to work through such a satisfying process.  We at dots are obviously big proponents of teamwork so the level of artistic collaboration for the epilogue really made what could have been a massive challenge into what we experienced as one of the most satisfying and meaningful collaborations of our career to date, and we are so thrilled at how audiences have received and been touched by the ending of the show.

"As for the actual biggest challenge of the project, (which is a massive undertaking that has been executed so seamlessly and efficiently by the crews at both the Helen Hayes and the Belasco that it goes mostly unnoticed) is the transition from Act 1 to Act 2 as well as the re-set of the house for the top of show every day," they explained. "That entire house-worth of accrual is struck from the stage and reorganized into the family's attempt at an estate sale set up, 8 times a week by a team of 3 phenomenally dedicated and smart stage crew.  The logistics of how to quickly and efficiently strike, store and reset all of that set dressing with a 15 minute time limit was without a doubt the biggest challenge of the show and we were truly humbled by the care and attention that was given to this operation by the crew of the show.  They managed to make what initially took 45 minutes at our first run through into a process which now takes less than 15 minutes. We wish the audiences could also witness the intricate choreography of the crew as they execute that change over, but it's also so special to have some parts of a show that only the team get to see.”

Appropriate is running on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre.