Interview: Kevin Rigdon Talks Renovation and Design at the Alley Theatre

World-renowned scenic and lighting designer Kevin Rigdon began his response to at least two of my questions with the phrase "life evolves." I loved it's near-koan-ness. If life progresses, whether you like it or not, contentedness seems to be the path to happiness, no? Then again, "life evolves" was also his response when I asked him how he ascended from a scrappy upstart with fire in his belly, a high school diploma, one semester of college, and a pure love of the game-theatre not dope-to Tony Award nominated designer, Alley Theatre Associate Director for Design, head of MFA Design & Technology at the University of Houston, and Distinguished Professor.

And in addition to his many titles, Rigdon was integral to the Alley Theatre's recent $46.5 million renovation. If that is how life evolves, please god, let it evolve that way for all of us.

In this interview, he tells us a little about the renovation and, of course, how life evolves.

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Let's start with the renovation because everyone is really excited about it. What was your involvement?

On a very basic level, I drew it. I birthed the plan.

What was the gestation period?

Over the course of more than 10 years we've looked at how to renovate this theater. At one point, we had several different plans. But at the end of the day, none of them were really working for us. They were different but they weren't really an improvement. And part of [the difficulty] was that we didn't have the luxury of starting over. You had a building that you had to work with. Trying to find a way to get that building to play nice has been the real trick.

How did you make it work?

It wasn't until a few years ago. I was sitting at my studio at home frustrated because I just wasn't able to make [the Alley design plan] be better working on a different show. I was looking across the room at the drawing of a different theater when I thought, "Wait a minute-this [theater] is very similar to the Alley building." I quickly pulled a bunch of drawings from different theaters that I'd worked in-the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, The Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York, etc. I did quick sketches, copied those drawings, and did overlays of them. Then I realized that all these theaters fit inside the shell of the Alley. In other words, they were very close to each other in terms of audience/stage relationship. I started working through the structure with that idea and everything started to fall into place. The volume of the space and the layout of the space started to work in our favor.

What other factors do you consider when you're crafting your designs? In an earlier response, you talked about the relationship between the audience and the stage.

We create a relationship every night between the performer and the audience. As an audience member, you need to be close. You need to feel and see what those actors are doing. So it starts from that relationship. If you don't get that right, the rest of it doesn't matter.

In the old Alley Theatre, everybody looked down onto the actors. So the key here was [to] get the actor eye-to-eye with the audience. Obviously, you can't do that for every row. But if I figured out that the eyes of the audience were in the middle of the theatre, well, I'd draw a straight line. And that's where the actors' eyes should be onstage.

Could you tell me a little about the research you engaged in?

It was really about being a part of that company for so many years. We're building a theatre for a specific group, a specific company of actors. That's a very different task than building a theatre in Houston that's there for anybody to use. We had real purpose in what we were doing. This was a theatre for the Alley.

The research was [asking the group of actors], what is your wish list? What is it that you want to do? What do you want to be able to do in this space? I wanted to have a space where the actors could exercise all their tools-their voice, their body, their mind. You want to get rid of as many impediments to the process of making theatre as you can.

You've been a part of the company for nearly 20 years. How did that come to pass? By that I mean, how did you become Kevin Rigdon, Associate Director for Design at the Alley Theatre? Were you always drawn to design?

As a kid, I was drawn to creating. I was drawn to performing. I was drawn to art. Theatre was the place were everything that I love came together.

What do you love?

Performing arts, visual arts, literature, creating, inventing-that wonderful world [of theater]. You're not an architect, but you understand and employ architecture. You're not an inventor, but you're inventing things, creating worlds, and solving problems. It's engineering, but you're not an engineer. It's painting, but you're not a portrait artist. It's all those things but not any one exclusively.

What is your educational background?

I went to high school. I spent one semester in college. And I'm a tenured full professor with an endowed chair. [Laughs]

Where does that place you in the great debate-school for theatre and performing arts or straight to the working world?

Life just evolves. I spent one semester in college. Then I got an offer to go to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and work there as a design intern. I spent a season at the Guthrie Theater then ended up coming back to Chicago to do Steppenwolf Theatre full-time. I spent 20 years as the resident designer at Steppenwolf Theatre. Then I received an offer from Artistic Director of the Alley Gregory Boyd, a friend and colleague of mine-he and I had worked together off and on over the years. The University of Houston had an open position for faculty, he said. And if I got the job, he would make me Associate Director.

Wow!

So I jumped! I jumped into an opportunity to teach full-time and to be Associate Director/Design at the Alley. It put me in a position to be part of the artistic management of a major regional theatre, which was fun. And teaching was fun.

Has teaching informed your design?

The process of teaching made me a better designer. Students ask all kinds of crazy questions of you. And you have to tell them why. "Why did you do this?" "What were you thinking?" Typically, when you're working professionally or commercially, nobody ever asks you, "Why?" You just do it. But the cool thing is, if you can answer the class question-"Why"- you're in control of those answers. You're in control of your destiny, which makes you a better artist.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

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The Alley Theatre's currently staged production, ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS, runs through November 1 at the newly renovated Alley Theatre (615 Texas Avenue). For more information, please visit https://www.alleytheatre.org/.

Photo credit: Bill Saltzstein, Empty Space Images with Paul Butzi.

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