Scott Pask’s Scenic Design for The Waitress
The Tony Award-nominated musical Waitress, adapted from the film by the late actor/writer-director Adrienne Shelly, combines splashy sets and breezy music with serious themes of repression, enlightenment, and female empowerment. Jessie Mueller plays Jenna, a diner waitress who possesses a passion for making pies with exotic names that reflect real-life themes and ideas — such as Marshmallow Mermaid Pie, I Hate My Husband Pie, and Kick In The Pants Pie — but she is under the thumb of her controlling and verbally abusive boyfriend Earl. Once she learns of a pie-making contest with a nice monetary prize and also begins an affair with a handsome doctor, she begins to feel a sense of liberation that she has been craving.
Eyes on the Pies
Tony Award-winning scenic designer Scott Pask certainly had a lot of pies and pie motifs to contend with here. On either side of the proscenium arch, he designed vertical columns of pies on mirrored discs — 24 on each side, 48 in total (with three more on the piano onstage) — lined up as if they were on display in a diner. Along with the small pies actually being baked at the concession stand in the lobby, they help get people in the mood for the show.
“I often consider how a show proscenium addresses the show, but also the architecture of the theatre it’s sitting within,” explains Pask. “And I wanted the theatergoers’ first response upon seeing the pie proscenium and cherry pie lattice curtain to be a smile. What the proscenium allows us to do with the pies is to address the scale of her in the diner. We are only lighting up the lower part of it. Also in different moments in the musical numbers you can animate the entire proscenium” — different lighting, color changes, even pie disc rotation — “and turn a domestic scene into something more magical. It served the context as well as some of the bigger ideas for the show.”
LED Neon Flex lines the interior edges of the pie case portal to light them up. In order to make the pies readily visible to everyone in the audience, mirrored surfaces were utilized. “[For] each disc that the pie sits on, each bottom is mirrored, so when you get close to the proscenium, you see the tops of all the pies,” says Pask. “For people in the [normal] sightlines, it looks great, but when you’re right there under the proscenium you might see the first couple. As you look up you’re seeing the reflection as you would in a diner when they angle those mirrors in pie cases.” Given how much work and details went into the pies, he wanted the audience to appreciate them. “I didn’t want it to be just for a faraway experience, I wanted people underneath them to see the tops of them too.”
In case you’re wondering, those encased pies won’t rot and will never have to be swapped out. “There is no food element in them,” reveals Pask. “They’re purely sculpted by artists.” He adds that they were made from a litany of materials, including Styrofoam, carved foam, and baked Play-Doh. The creation of the pies required a lot of time, people, and meetings. Beyond the look of the pies, real ones are used onstage with different toppings and ingredients to match their intriguing names, with the flavor ideas stemming from Pask (serving as head baker) and book writer Jessie Nelson. “You can see on that pie special board [in the diner] that there are a ton of really specialized and almost poetically titled pies. I talked to Jessie [Nelson] about what was even going to be on the menu board. There are some specific reference ones.”
As Pask points out, the play is littered with pies. Some moments feature cast members running across the stage with fully stocked pie carts; one of them gets whipped around a lot. There are also a couple of moments when Jenna is making pies on stage.
Speaking of rolling racks, the ones that appear in the show were not simply procured from a restaurant supply outlet. They were all customized. “There was a scale issue, and I wanted to alter some to have them be a touch bigger and more roomy.” explains Pask. “They’re all based on various different ones from different aspects of research. It’s all gone through a number of filters, and it’s not like we went to a restaurant supply [store] and said let’s buy three of those.”
Pask says that there was a fine line to walk, because the aluminum racks could not overwhelm the ladies on stage, but they needed to have a bit more presence. He estimates that they are probably 12 to 16 inches taller than normal racks. “They’re not far off,” he says. “But all the dimensions are kind of pushed and pulled a bit. They also have to be spun around the stage super easily, so there were a lot of things that had to be done to be able accomplish that. In real life, they obviously do that [spin] too, but not to the degree they have to in front of an audience on stage eight nights a week.”
Scenic Contrasts
Beyond the cavalcade of pies onstage, another important aspect of Pask’s scenic design is the contrast between the drab home where Earl and Jenna live (black walls iris in to give an appropriate sense of claustrophobia) and the bright, colorful diner that is spacious and cheery, enhanced by a window wall in the background. Further, while the domestic moments with Earl are very static and confining, all of the other scenes — including the diner, the doctor’s office, and the hospital — all feature motion as people and set pieces slide and twirl on and off.
“It’s like they’re all ingredients in the story,” says Pask. “That’s why the diner elements spin on and move off, and the band is able to rotate off the stage as well. The cast and the company are spinning through this fray and rotating into the queue, and they’re all treated as though they are ingredients in the story.”
While Pask had seen the Waitress film, he did not reference it much in the show. There are notable differences, and the musical changed some elements. “You have to take the leap, and the book has some very different characters,” he notes. “Earl is different in the movie and then on our stage. We see interactions that are more musical theater. It’s a jumping-off point, for sure, as is the book. There is a place where you just put that all aside and just have to move on. I think our diner probably bears no resemblance to the diner in the film.”
The biggest challenge for Pask with Waitress was accomplishing what they did in the modestly sized Brooks Atkinson Theatre. He had faced that situation before when working on The Book Of Mormon at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. “There were conversations about other theaters, and we ended up in a very, very small house for the benefit of the show,” he recalls. “We love it. I have a great affinity for that stage size, but for me to try to clear a room and then build a diner, there’s no wing [space]. Nothing. You have to do origami tricks to make that happen. In my druthers, that window wall would’ve completely disappeared or come up from the floor, and I’d really have a blank space at the horizon line. Then this whole thing could come and build together, but it was impossible.” As it stands, the window wall does not fly in, but slides from left to right.
An Evolving Recipe
While Waitress did get a regional debut at the ART near Boston, Massachusetts last year, Pask acknowledges that that was a very different production. “We changed a lot,” he recalls. “The book changed a lot, the song order changed a lot, some were even cut.” The band and diner setup positions were also reversed, with the diner at stage left and the band at stage right in Boston. “That was a good workshop production, because we were able to look at it and go, ‘Let’s keep pushing.’ I think the thing we found was that we wanted open-air.”
Waitress has been well received by Broadway audiences and has been playing since late March. Overall, Pask found his collaborators to be inspiring. “[Songwriter/lyricist]Sara Bareilles, first and foremost,” he declares. “Sara Bareilles and Jessie Nelson are just incredibly special human beings, and I’ve had the great fortune of working with [director] Diane Paulus for many, many years. We don’t do every project together, but we’ve done a lot. Diane and I did our first show together, The Donkey Show, and some other things down at The Fringe when we both got out of grad school. To work with that powerful triumvirate was wonderful.” He also adores star Jessie Mueller. “All of those gorgeous women were so generous and gentle, and smart and brilliant at what they do. That was something I found completely inspiring.”
