Broadway revivals have become so commonplace that a creative theatre team must think outside of the box and indulge in new ideas to make an old chestnut both exciting and refreshing for modern audiences. Debbie Allen’s interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — starring Terrence Howard, Anika Noni Rose, James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad — faced such a scenario. Beyond its powerhouse casting and acting and the overstated aspect of having an all-black cast, the show is a rarity these days: a three-act, three-hour show with one main set that does not change. Set designer Ray Klausen was up to the task of invigorating the look of the show to fit Williams’ cynical tale of a family whose sibling brothers — one an injured alcoholic and former athletic hero, the other a corporate lawyer — and their spouses are tussling over the inheritance of Big Daddy’s massive Southern plantation.
Originally a television set designer, two-time Emmy winner Klausen worked on seven Academy Awards shows, created the “Kennedy Center Honors look,” and also worked on a number of series before jumping into Broadway work. Along the way to the Great White Way he did a large musical number with Debbie Allen, then teamed up with her on a series of children’s musicals at the Kennedy Center. “Debbie’s really great at collaborative work,” states Klausen. “She’s a strong, strong lady. I have incredible respect for her.”
When they reunited for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Klausen and Allen had to deal with him being in New York and her situated in California, and to cope with time constraints. “It takes a long time to evolve a design and get it executed if you’re going to do right,” says Klausen. “Yes, you can do it very quickly and waste a lot of the producers’ money, but that’s not what I’m about. I’m about getting every dollar up there on the stage.”
During an hour-long meeting prefaced by plenty of research, Klausen and Allen laid out the ground plans, and he immediately set to work on them. “She went off to do other things like auditions, and my assistant and I put together a white model and came into the theatre for a survey the next morning with essentially the whole thing designed,” Klausen says. “But I knew what I wanted. I had very clear in my head the architectural style, and I knew how I wanted it to feel. I really moved quickly and had something concrete to show her and the producer, Stephen Byrd. This was his first pass at producing, so a lot of explaining of what the process is and so forth needed to be done. This man is incredible, by the way. How he pulled off this quality production as a first-time producer, I don’t know, but my hat is off to him. He’s remarkable.”
Sightlines were an issue, as the bar was all the way stage left while the dressing table was on the opposite side. They both were going to cause problems. “I got her to move the bar upstage, which freed a lot of the action, but I couldn’t talk her out of the dressing table,” recalls Klausen. “So at about 3 a.m., I thought, ‘I have the solution. I’ll make it out of Plexiglas, so people can see through this piece of furniture.’”
Klausen had free reign with the furniture because the character of Big Mama had no taste and had gone on a shopping spree. “I could just mix up styles with whatever pleased me. I picked out a couple of humdinger pieces. Chase Mishkin, who is a producer I have worked with quite a bit, went to see the show and said, ‘Ray, that is the ugliest chandelier I’ve ever seen.’ I said, ‘Yes, but it’s a Venetian glass chandelier, and it screams that they’ve been on the grand tour,’” he says.
Knowing that the famous film version with the image of Elizabeth Taylor leaning against a brass bed was ingrained into the public consciousness, he knew he had to go a different route. The bed and furniture were made of wood, and the dressing table of Plexiglas. “The only patterns on the furniture are the fabrics used on the upholstery, including the sofa, ottoman, large arm chair, and dressing table chair, all of which were different from each other, reflecting Big Mama’s tendency to buy, buy, buy,” Klausen notes.
“Interestingly enough, the wallpaper pattern took quite a lot of work to get nailed down,” he reveals. “I looked around town for a lace that would work, and I found a very romantic floral lace that was perfect, and I knew that I wanted a photographic impression onto scrim. So I bought quite a bit of yardage of this lace, then in my studio made a series of samples in various colors. Some of them were stencils, and some of them were the actual lace, in a wide variety of colors.”
After going to Los Angeles to show Allen what he had, they settled on a specific color with more of an Asian feel to it. “I have a fairly good resource library in my studio and found some wallpaper patterns, but really stencil patterns, that were Japanese and not copyrighted and we were allowed to use. It ended up being this stylized bamboo pattern. We got what we wanted. I think it took about five passes to get the color right.”
The set designer credits his “phenomenal prop man,” Emiliano Pares, for helping him locate certain pieces of furniture, including the four-poster bed that looms over the whole set. And when it came to the props, Klausen was adamant that every prop that an actor touched be present in rehearsal from day one. That way they could learn if there were any problems.
The sofa at center stage had to be remade so that the cushions were firm enough for James Earl Jones to get in and out of carefully, but not so hard that Anika Noni Rose would bruise herself when climbing all over it. “You try to find out all the problems with the props while you’re in rehearsal,” explains Klausen. “You do not one want to be dealing with those when you’re on stage. It’s just not fair to the actors. When they get onstage they’re dealing with so much adjustment that you want to have as much support there for them as possible.”
Another proven tactic that Klausen implemented was having the scenic shop set up the entire set, bring in all the major props, then walk the actors and the director through the set. This allowed the cast and director to familiarize themselves with the set, props and distances between things. “It was a tremendous help that everyone went to see the set, because when they came onstage, it was something that they had already seen and had in their mind,” Klausen says.
“I can’t recall a single problem we had with the actors once we got on stage. They happen to be a very cooperative, nice group of people, so that helps tremendously. But it was a fascinating experience, and ultimately very, very rewarding for me. I am immensely proud of the production, both from an aesthetic standpoint and a technical standpoint because one of the problems that Debbie and I had was we wanted the walls to be made of scrim. When you light them from the front they look solid, but when you light anything behind them you can see through the walls.”
The scrim walls did present a challenge for a set that has eight doors. Any time someone slams a door with a fabric wall, it will shake or ripple. “Fortunately I had Hudson Scenic building the set, and they were able to make every door and door frame independent of the walls,” says Klausen. “They look like they’re all attached, but in fact there’s about a quarter of an inch space between the two objects. If you slam a door, even though the doorframe moves a little bit, it doesn’t affect the walls.”
Another challenge that Klausen and Allen faced was when the drop had to be redone. Originally encompassing sky and many trees, Allen decided she wanted it to show more sky and fewer trees, which also would allow the fireworks sequence, which was done by slides, to have more space. “Drops like this are painted on the floor, and what they had to do was scrub all the paint off, then mask off all the trees and repaint the sky,” remarks Klausen. “The frightening thing was that they couldn’t guarantee me that it would work. They were 90 to 95 percent sure it would work, but there’s that 5 to 10 percent that really eats into your sleeping hours. Fortunately it worked great, and we were able to see more of the fireworks and not have them go off in the trees.”
Klausen ultimately took it all in stride. “It’s really important that a designer be supportive of the rest of the creative team because you don’t always nail it right the first time. You think you have, but then someone comes up with an idea that makes it better.”
The designer recalls being in the masters program for set design at Yale and having a fellow student tell him, “It’s all about scale.” That stuck with him, and he believes good design is a key element in a show. “When you look at that set, you have to feel that this is a grand old house that’s been around much longer than the characters who are currently living in it, and what that brings to the story.”
When it came to the architectural style of the plantation and house, Klausen went through all his research and picked out the elements he liked. He made sure the doorknobs were correct. He and Allen brought in French doors. The ones facing the patio had folding shutters to cover them. The only unsolvable problem that they had was the inability to slam two French doors at the same time without them possibly bouncing back, so Allen accepted that fact, and the actors had to avoid this action.
“Bless her, if you explain something to her clearly, with logic and with honesty, she gets it and moves on,” Klausen reports of Allen. “She’s not one of these people who nags you and drives you crazy, because some directors can do that. As much as I loved working with her at the Kennedy Center, I adore her now. I would do anything that she does now because I gained so much respect for her as a director and her abilities. And because she’s a choreographer, she used every square inch of that set. There’s not a part that isn’t used, whereas a regular director might not take advantage of a certain space. She has people bouncing all over that set, and I love her for it.”
Ultimately Klausen created a set that he loved and which fit the show and its story. But it certainly took a lot of time and toil to get right. “You don’t get a designer much more fussy than I am,” asserts Klausen. “One of my big problems is that because I’m so meticulous, when I get through with a production, I usually have this gut feeling that I could’ve done it better. This is one of those rare instances where there’s not a thing I would change about it. I am really, really pleased with how it turned out and proud of the end result.”
