The recent Broadway production of Constellations, a two-person drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, seems deceptively simple: a short 70-minute play in which the duo plays a couple that meets, falls in love, then copes with insecurities, infidelity, and illness. Above them hover a group of “balloons” of varying sizes that are omnipresent as the actors play out the scenes numerous times, reciting many of the same lines but offering multiple takes on the relationship based on a “what if” premise. What if one person had reacted to or acted differently in a certain situation?
Parallel Possibilities
The static, hanging balloons and sphere-like objects help to represent the Multiverse where these parallel possibilities emerge, but they also perform a strong visual function. As the twosome goes through rapid-fire variations on a theme in each sequence, all of the globes change color configuration each time, with various LEDs inside the spheres or lights on them altering color, accompanied by equally dramatic sonic variations. The effect is akin to watching the actors move about a giant pinball machine as their movements during the transitions are quick and a little jarring when they assume new positions for the next scene or variant.
Scenic designer Tom Scutt and lighting designer Lee Curran have worked on all three incarnations of the show. It was first staged at the 90-seat Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at London’s Royal Court Theatre in early 2012 before moving to the Duke of York’s Theatre on London’s West End later in 2012. The play then opened at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in Dec. 2014. The original British shows featured Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, and the American cast did see the West End run before they performed Constellations in New York.
The British versions were different. The original featured a rectangular stage, “but the audience was seated around the stage on four sides,” recalls Scutt. “The upstairs space had a pointed ceiling that we basically filled with balloons. There were real helium balloons everywhere, and you entered through a corridor of them. We only had something like 15 [Pulsar] ChromaSpheres with lights, but you didn’t really need much more than that in a space like that. It felt like you were in the cluster, I suppose. Then the show got transferred to the West End and we had to reinvent it for a proscenium,” which was the same set-up as on Broadway. “We got to spruce it up [in NYC], perfect it, get the right numbers of things, and get the positioning neater.”
Although there were actual balloons in the original run, once the show transferred to the West End, they were not allowed to use them due to fire regulations, so more ChromaSpheres were used, made up with streamers to look like real balloons. That design stayed when it transferred across the Atlantic Ocean.
“We have some which look like balloons with the knots on the end and the ribbons from them, then we have some plain spheres to marry in with the ChromaSpheres, so it’s hard to determine whether the balloons are lighting up or the spheres are lighting up,” explains Scutt. “They all merge into one, I suppose.”
The ChromaSpheres are of different sizes — 150, 300, 400, and 500 mm — and different opacities, which offers a good visual mixture onstage. “We have a lot of really small ones which work really well for perspective and distance, and they merge in with the smaller balloons that we’ve made as well,” says Scutt. “In the Royal Court we only had a few streamers, but they were basically small because it was a small space. We had them in the West End. I was quite keen for people to identify them as balloons and not just as atoms or something, because I think the interesting thing about the design is that it sits somewhere between a scientific, stellar, cosmic kind of thing and embraces the humor somewhat as well. They’re just balloons. There’s something quite endearing about the silliness of it, and you really get a sense of that with all the ribbons coming off of them. Ultimately she has that line where she says, ‘If you give me a f**king balloon, I’ll garrote you.’ Suddenly it takes on a whole new meaning.”
Visual Collaborators
The two designers have worked well together in the past, and Scutt and director Michael Longhurst brought Curran onboard for Constellations because of his extensive work with dance pieces, especially dealing with abstract and also highly synchronized scenes. “We were fully aware of how brilliantly he can sculpt people in space and how interested he is in fine art and alternative ways of designing,” says Scutt.
“I think one of the reasons why Mike and Tom were interested in getting me on board for this was the design concept is something that is very abstract and quite different,” concurs Curran, who later received an Olivier Award for Best Lighting Design for his work on the West End production. “I’m quite comfortable with dealing with the abstracts and just bodies in space in a way that’s not so common in more traditional theater.”
Scutt originally wanted to find a way to inflate balloons and put LEDs inside them, but it would not have been practical as many would have popped and needed to be replaced, which would have disrupted the performance flow onstage. And the show is highly synchronized between sight and sound for the transitions between scenes.
“Solving the transitions was almost more important than what the scenes themselves were going to look like because you’ve got a platform for stage,” explains Curran. “Early on we had a brainstorm of all the different types of lighting transitions that we could do and how the audience would perceive them in terms of how distracting they would feel, and which ones would feel more minor, and which ones would feel more major.”
Once they get into tech, it became quickly apparent which ones would work and which were going to be too long, “because they have to fire really quickly [during all the repeated scenes],” continues Curran. “Then it became a question of finding a style for each block of scenes that we could hone in on and find little variations on that scene. We would find a transition that would work and then explore variations on that transition. It follows the same patterns as the scenes themselves. You have this scene that is repeated different times in different variations, and that’s the approach that we took with the transitions in the end.”
The ChromaSpheres have RGB LEDs inside, which Curran says have an “instant on and off” that was helpful for a lot of the fast transitions and the color variations within the different scenes. But as the RGB LEDs had an old engine, it limited their options in the West End.
“There was a scene where originally we had quite a long fade through the ChromaSpheres, but they suffer from that old LED engine problem where the last few [seconds of] dimming is very steppy,” he says. “So we had to find other ways of dealing with that. We also have LED wash lights on booms on the side of the stage, which uplight the underside of the balloons. They also help with the different color effects and are also snappy. One of the things that we were able to improve on Broadway compared to the West End show was that we had Vivids on the booms, so that when it came to this long color fade that we wanted, the ETC Vivids’ engines were capable of doing it. So we were able to reinstate that long fade without having to worry about step-step-step.”
Curran uses more traditional lighting patterns at the start of the play — blue over the balloons in the opening barbecue scene to indicate daytime, darker blue to indicate night on the first date, and then, during the infidelity scene, a very plain tone. But once the subsequent dance lesson scene turns pinkish, things shift. “That’s where you’re departing from something that’s almost a naturalistic representation,” notes the LD. “You try to expand your vocabulary a bit and make sure it doesn’t look like the same space all the time. You want to introduce a bit of variety.”
Curran acknowledges that, given the set design, a lot of common overhead lighting positions are not useful here in their normal way. “We have a lot of lights over there which you see towards the end when we have the scene before the epilogue with the “god” light,” says Curran. “We’ve got a lot of Source Four Pars up there that are just pointed straight down on the balloon cluster, and that’s what gives us the brightness coming through the cluster overhead. There are a few on a backlight bar as well. There are a few Source Fours up there which give us a little bit of blue color from a different angle, which comes in in the final sequence in Zürich. Then we have a lot of front of house and a lot of lights on the sidelight booms. We’ve got some Par Cans on there. We’ve also got some low-level sidelight, like a modern dance action shin buster position. We’ve got two different levels of cross light, all Source Four profiles as well.”
The back wall gets used for dramatic effect at the show’s climax. There is black gauze and a black RP a little way behind that. “Upstage of that, we’ve got a full ground row of Altman GC-6s and a full row of cyc battens overhead [L&E BroadCycs], all in one color, just for that transition before Zürich and one other cue,” says Curran. “We’ve also got 15 Martin Atomic Strobes back there, so when the whole RP lights up we’ve got plenty of oomph. The wall is approximately 10 feet high and about 30 feet wide. The Atomics are arranged so they are five wide by three high in a grid on three different bars.” There are some overhead strobes for transitions and six Atomics on the proscenium arch as well.
“I am a big believer in effects having more impact when they’re more sparsely used,” declares Curran. “We only flash the strobes behind the cyc a handful of times, and the ones on the proscenium arch only get flashed once in the whole show. It has a big impact when that happens. When you fire a sequencer and get the strobes on the RP and the overheads and then the walls of the proscenium, you get a sense of travel through space. I think if you overuse those kinds of effects then the audience very quickly becomes used to it and it lessens the impact.”
Sight, Sound and Set
The coordination of sight, sound, and set is critical for Constellations. While Broadway designers usually have separate desks, in the original production the composer, the sound designer, Curran and original programmer Jack Wilson all sat in a line. “With every single transition, if it originated from a lighting cue, then I had to feed the timing information to the composer and sound designer so they could shape the same cue,” says Curran. “If it originated from a moment of composition or sound, then they had to feed to me the shapes and the timings of the sound cues so I could build a lighting cue to match the dynamic of the sound cue. We were working very closely and, literally, to hundredths of a second, which is quite uncommon in theater. It was gratifying working in the room with my assistant and my programmers. It was the first time they had been working on something where the default time on the desk could quite easily be 0 seconds.” (For Broadway, his assistant was Aaron Porter and his programmers were Victor Seastone and John Wilson.)
The longest transition in Constellations is four seconds, and there is the one long crossfade that lasts four minutes. There are 53 scenes and 52 transitions in the show. Because all of the transitions have to be synced up, the sound operator’s QLab triggers the EOS console. It’s the easiest gig any lighting engineer could ask for. (Luckily nothing went haywire. That would have been a nightmare.) The final result certainly is striking on all levels.
Scutt found designing for Nick Payne’s play to be liberating since it was not meant to be designed naturalistically as “it would hamper the speed and the agility of the production if you were casting off different bits of set. Nick was deliberately doing this in writing it, enforcing a new way of thinking of how you stage a production. It really excited me because I get tired of seeing the same naturalistic thing on stage, and this play liberated you from any expectations on the designer to tell us time and place, because we jump time and place constantly. You’re talking about tone and atmosphere. In my work, I’ve never really worried about having to tell people time and place. I think people have a visual imagination that can work that out much better than we expect. It doesn’t mean I haven’t done naturalistic work, but I just known when there’s a place for it. I enjoy being able to thrash around much bigger visual ideas that make people work a little bit harder.”
