What are all these buttons for?
That’s one of many questions David Zinn gets asked frequently about the sound console that stretches almost the entire length of the set he designed for “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s behind-the-scenes drama on a band’s discordant recording sessions in the 1970s.
“I I think that, he said, laughing. “What are all these buttons?
A music studio, a Harlem hair salon, a religious shrine: these are some of the worlds that Broadway audiences have been transported to this season thanks to Tony Award nominees for Best Scenic Design of a Play. Zinn received two nominations, for “Stereophonic” and “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”. Derek McLane was nominated for the cover of “Purlie Victorious.”
In its second year working on Broadway, the design collective dots (Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk and Kimie Nishikawa) was nominated twice, for “Appropriate” and “An Enemy of the People.”
Ahead of the Tony Awards on Sunday, nominees spoke about the inspirations and challenges of creating fantasy games.
It’s a cliché to say that a house is a character in a play. But that’s eerily the case in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ black comedy about the racist legacy of a white family and a large plantation that feels alive and haunted. Inhabited too, but by a dark spirit with the power to ensure that a photo album of lynching victims finds its way into the hands of the family.
When it comes to design, the devil is in the details. The picture frame wall molding does not protrude; it’s inlaid into the panels — a big ask with almost imperceptible results that Moerdyk said he and his fellow designers fought for.
“Having the panel moldings recessed instead of surface applied drove up the cost of the walls,” he said. “We had to make cuts elsewhere to keep them, and we’re glad we did.” This adds to the realistic feeling of the house, made of wood.
Throughout most of the play, which premiered at the Helen Hayes Theater before transferring to the Belasco, the house still stands, despite the verbal and physical struggles of its inhabitants. It’s in the final stretch, in a breathtaking twist, that Dots makes a horror-movie-like sensation with a revelation involving a tree. (To elaborate would spoil the surprise.)
Moerdyk said that in examining what happens when plants grow in an unnatural environment, he and his colleagues discovered research on a tree that had grown inside a house — a “long, skinny thing and unhealthy-looking,” he said, who seemed to be stretching. and aspires to the light. The same qualities define the fake dowry tree, a multi-layered metal structure made of, among other materials, moss, plaster, moss and aluminum pipe.
There’s drama in there too. “We didn’t want it to be romantic or cute,” Moerdyk said of the tree. “We wanted him to carry the weight of the moment.”
“An enemy of the people”
A small Norwegian town in the late 19th century: it’s the setting for Ibsen’s 1883 drama and Amy Herzog’s new adaptation, which centers on a doctor in tragic disagreement with his neighbors over what to do next facing a contaminated spa.
For their decor, the dots designers consulted several visual sources: a photo book titled “Living in Norway”; photographs taken by the show’s director, Sam Gold, during a trip to Norway; and the work of Harriet Backer, a 19th-century Norwegian artist whose figurative paintings “had a social realist point of view and captured light in very beautiful ways,” Moerdyk said in an interview with her two colleagues.
The Circle in the Square stage is set up in the round, leaving nowhere to hide. “Everything is very visible,” Orjuela-Laverde said. “The people are very close. »
Gold didn’t want the actors to be picked up, so points discreetly placed microphones in the corners of the ceiling. The speakers are hidden behind the column slots. Blue floral designs made in rosemaling, a Norwegian decorative painting style, are dotted around the set.
In Ibsen’s original play, the windows of the doctor’s house are shattered during an attack. But with no walls or doors on this set, the doctor, played by Jeremy Strong, instead has large quantities of ice cubes dumped on his body – a chilling allusion to broken glass that, for Dots and the prop team, came with singular concerns.
“The ice is melting,” Nishikawa said. “It was an important question: How do we keep the floor from buckling? »
The solution was water-resistant marine plywood for the flooring, with seams carefully sealed with epoxy adhesive. Crew members use a wet and dry vacuum after each performance to ensure no moisture remains.
Rehearsing with so much ice required extremely precise time management.
“When the ice order came, we had to start a timer to see how long it would take to melt,” Orjuela-Laverde said. “We had to learn the timing of the ice.”
“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”
Zinn apologized for crying as the first tear fell.
“There’s some Irish in me,” he said, “I start crying all the time, so forgive me.”
Zinn was talking about her work on Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy, which takes place over the course of a day in a Harlem braiding salon. (The Manhattan Theater Club production closed in November at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)
At the top of the show, with the help of an off-center spin, Zinn’s set came into view: a living room bathed in pink and filled with shelves of beauty products and photos of various hairstyles, as well as purple upholstered chairs where customers were having their hair done. The revelation regularly received entrance applause.
Zinn’s eyes widened as he explained how moved he was to see black audience members react not to the show, but to a pre-show curtain on stage that he had designed with collage faces and hairstyles of black women.
“When women first came into the theater and reacted the way I’m talking about, to me it was like it was over,” Zinn said, his voice breaking. “I let all these women see something they didn’t think they would see when they walked into a Broadway theater. The fact that I was a vehicle for that is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Zinn said he obtained the images of the curtains from hundreds of photographs, including from “every Yelp review of every braiding salon in the tri-state area.” It’s a custom for these salons to reuse the same photos, he says, as if there was “a magical photo shoot from, say, 2003.”
Before he started working on the series, he had never been to a braiding salon. (“I’m not a hair person, I don’t have hair,” he said.) But he said he made “a scary promise” to Bioh and Whitney White, the director from the series he would get the look and feel. from a black braiding salon on the right.
“This is not my sacred space,” he said. “But I’m a queer person, a person who has sacred spaces, and I understand how important it is that they be good.”
Ossie Davis’ 1961 comedy about Purlie, a black itinerant preacher returning to Georgia, is set on a cotton plantation in the 1950s. One of the locations is Purlie’s plantation home, a place “worn but warm, shabby but clean,” as the script describes it. There is also a commissioner and a church.
Scenic designer Derek McLane said he and show director Kenny Leon wanted the play’s first Broadway revival to have a contemporary sensibility that wasn’t weighed down by sentimentality.
“It’s a play that no one really knew about,” McLane, a two-time Tony Award winner, said in a telephone interview. “It’s been over 60 years since it was on Broadway and hasn’t been revived since. We wanted to present it as a new piece as much as possible. (The play, which had a limited run, closed at the Music Box Theater in February.)
To this end, Leon created a prologue in which the actors, led by Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, walk across a simple wooden box of a set that was empty except for a costume rack, which the actors donned before the walls came. in the space.
“It was said it would be about the power of words, argument and theater,” McLane said.
As written, the play ends with Purlie welcoming the faithful to his new church. To make it appear as if the church had always been there, furniture slides offstage and the ceiling moves back to reveal pointed rafters. A cross flew to the back of the stage and a church was built.
“It was a moment of triumph for Purlie, and that was my goal: to come up with a stage gesture that resembled what he had achieved,” McLane said.
The set was made almost entirely from raw cut wood with little ornamentation. The doors and windows were simple, as was the pulpit. McLane said the thrift let Purlie’s “spirituality and his belief in God and the Constitution” shine through.
“The play is full of idealism, and that’s one of the things I love,” McLane said. “It is about the love of law and the capacity of reason to help improve our lives. I find this very inspiring.
‘Stereophonic’
Thanks Dave Grohl for all these buttons.
In 2013, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer released “Sound City,” a documentary about the famed Los Angeles recording studio where Nirvana recorded “Nevermind” on a revered Neve mixing console (named after its inventor, Rupert Neve).
Unable to visit recording studios during the pandemic, Zinn, attached to the piece since 2017, used the documentary as one of his main sources – technical manuals were another – to design the soundboard that dominates half of its naturalistic setting. .
“I literally froze the movie,” Zinn, a two-time Tony winner, said in an interview at the John Golden Theater, where the show runs through Jan. 5. “With the right camera angles, I pieced it together.” (Zinn’s play is one of 13 Tony nominees, making it the most nominated play in Tony history.)
Zinn eventually visited Mission Sound Recording, a Brooklyn studio, to see his vintage Neve painting and ask questions: How did you do the walls? How to build a soundproof environment? How can I make the room not feel claustrophobic?
After years of observation and research, and working with the show’s sound designer, Ryan Rumery, Zinn created a realistic recording studio, including a soundproof music room at the back of the stage, where the actors perform instruments and sing songs composed by Will Butler, also a Tony nominee.
Zinn said his set is solid and carefully assembled, one reason it doesn’t move when, in the final section of the play, the action moves from a studio in Sausalito, Calif., to a studio in Los Angeles.
As for the Easter eggs, Zinn said there were stickers and a ’70s menu on set to give it an extra layer of era-appropriate naturalism. Eagle-eyed hippies might spot a crack in the verisimilitude.
“There’s a chair from Urban Outfitters up there,” he said. “I’ll let you decide which one.”