Scenic design is a theatrical discipline requiring a delicate balance of vision, intelligence and a willingness to serve the narrative without overwhelming it. Tony Award-winning scenic designer Beowulf Boritt zeroes in on what’s most important: the tale being told. “What it looks like is less important to me than what it means,” Boritt tells PLSN. “Obviously, what it looks like is important — that’s what I’m doing, putting visuals on stage — but trying to make those visuals meaningful and relate to the story and scenes and not get in the way of story and scene is really the most important thing.”
Theatergoers have undoubtedly seen Boritt’s work. Beyond his regional theater and opera productions and some costume design on a handful of shows, Boritt has created wild, impressive sets for Broadway, like the interior and exterior sets for Thérèse Raquin, the latter featuring a river onstage where a murder takes place, as well as the incredible three-story, rotating turntable piece for Act One. On the flip side, he has done simpler shows like Bronx Bombers, which simply had ‘70s style furniture on stage, and Scottsboro Boys, which was mostly chairs and a couple of drops.
“You know what’s interesting? I am honestly always striving for simple, and in a weird way, even Act One or Thérèse Raquin, which had these very elaborate elements to them, were shooting for simplicity,” muses Boritt. “What I would say about Act One is that each of the locations were relatively simple, there were just so many of them that it added up to a lot. We didn’t do realistic interiors in that show. It was a very skeletal set with window frames and a couple pieces of furniture. Each location was as simple as I could make it, but [director] James [Lapine] wrote it with 35 locations, and all of that added up to a very elaborate set.”
When he worked on Act One, Lincoln Center told him that it was the biggest turntable ever done on Broadway, yet even now he does not want to make that a definitive statement.
“I hesitate to say I’m doing anything for the first time, because I figure someone must have done it somewhere, but I’d never seen anything like that before,” admits Boritt. “When I had the idea, I was really excited about it and couldn’t believe that Lincoln Center would let us do it and pay for it. And also that James was willing to go for it, because it was a tough set to direct on. Ultimately, it was great for the show, but it was a huge leap of faith because he didn’t have all those pieces until we were tech’ing the show. So he had a stage in his imagination in the rehearsal room, and then assembled it all on stage once we got the sets put together.”
Searching for the Proper Scale
When asked which is harder, going big or scaling back, Boritt picks the latter. He believes that it is easier to take the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach and cram plenty onstage rather than cutting things down to their essence. It may be a couple of more steps to whittle down from a lot to a little, but that can be done in a smart way in finding the crucial elements that will help effectively tell the story. It is what he always strives for.
“I feel like if I can push a couple of details of a mansion on stage and let the audience imagine the rest of it, it is going to be a more elaborate mansion because your imagination is going to be more elaborate,” asserts Boritt. “It’s more attuned to what you like than whatever choice I make. That was what we tried to do with the George Kaufman mansion in Act One. It obviously was a big space, but it was the outline with a couple of windows and a little bit of furniture. The audience filled in the rest and imagined this big, elaborate thing. Part of the testament to that is that people always thought that it wasn’t there in the first act, and in fact it was on stage the entire time and you could plainly see it you knew what you were looking for. There wasn’t light on it, and we didn’t draw any focus to it, so when it suddenly rolled down stage in Act II, everyone was shocked about where this thing came from.”
Making something quietly dazzling is also a tricky maneuver. Boritt created a “river” that ran along the upstage half in Thérèse Raquin. While more easily visible from the balcony seats, it was not readily discernible in closer orchestra seats because of shifting scenery and blocking that changed audience focus. By the end of Act I it was clearly there, but it was gone by Act II. One imagines drainage was the key issue, but evidently it was not.
“If the water stays in there, it’s like a swimming pool — it’s heated and runs through filters so that it stays clean — but the trick with water is it’s very heavy, and if there’s the tiniest pinhole it will get out,” explains Boritt. “When you do something with a fight scene in the water, it means that the liner that is holding that water has to be especially solid. On Thérèse Raquin, we did a rubber liner with a layer of steel underneath it and another rubber liner under that, so we had a layer of armor between our waterproofing.”
A Fine Line between Durability and Calamity
Working out the details of a complicated set can be nerve-wracking. The scenic designer recalls being terrified working on Act One until a few days into tech, when it became clear that the massive set would perform properly. “There were a lot of things to solve, but we could tell the basic thing was going to work,” he recalls. “We were petrified, because if something wasn’t working, there was no way to fix it at that point.”
Not everything turns out so smoothly. Boritt recalls working on Little Dancer at the Kennedy Center with a very complicated, fast-moving set made up of numerous pieces of scenery that could collide and potentially injure cast members. One night he went up to the back of the second balcony to watch the show from the worst seat in the house, as far from the stage as he could possibly get.
“There was a transition where a piano got caught between two pieces of scenery,” says Boritt. “For some reason, it slid off the turntable by an inch or something. It was just enough to make it hit something and there was this horrible, crunching, shattering wood sound. You could see the piano pushing through the wall of the flat, and I don’t think the audience knew what was going on, but I knew instantly that it had happened. I made it from the back row of the balcony to the backstage before
[director Susan] Stroman’s assistant did. Apparently, from the front, it looked really crazy because the scenery was all kerflooey and hanging at weird angles, and these ballet dancers just came out and danced across the stage. It screwed up the automation and was a huge mess. The shop came in and fixed it, but the next night we put locks on the piano so it wouldn’t slide that dangerous inch anymore. It was one of those things that had never been a problem before. Who knows what happened that night, but it went wrong.”
Boritt confesses that whenever he does a complicated set, he is a little relieved when the show actually closes, because then nothing will go wrong. “With Scottsboro Boys, you wouldn’t think there were technical problems in the show, but the guy who made the train cars had wooden tracks made of aluminum trusses,” he says. “Every night we had six big guys hopping around on them, and every night I would just cringe, waiting for one of them to break. It never did, and was made really well, but I remember they bounced anytime the guys walked on them. Every night I was terrified that something would go a little bit wrong and break and these guys were all going to fall on the floor.”
Igniting a Passion
Scenic design has been a long-term passion for Boritt, who first learned about his future career while doing summer stock as a high school intern at a small Pennsylvania theater. When he was eight, his mother, a choral singer for the Memphis Opera at the time, took him to a production of Verdi’s Macbeth. She brought him backstage at a dress rehearsal where he witnessed a set change during which a man “pushed this big Stonehenge rock across the stage” that looked like a 12-foot boulder. “I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was seeing, but I think that was the first time I remember being aware of the magic of set design.”
After getting a liberal arts degree at Vassar, where he was a theater major with a focus on design, he attended NYU and then planted himself in Manhattan. He recalls then-NYU professor Eduardo Sicangco being a big influence on his work and career.
“He never became super famous, but [he]was a fabulous designer and was very smart about decorative early design,” explains Boritt. “In those days, I was very artsy. I didn’t want to do musicals, and I didn’t want to do silly theater. I remember him saying to me in class that just because it’s Hello, Dolly doesn’t mean there can’t be a concept behind it, and in a weird way that really opened doors for me. It taught me how to approach more decorative, more beautiful design from a conceptual angle. I owe him a lot because of that. My bread and butter is musicals these days, and he really opened up a new world for me. I think it’s what allowed me to do stuff like Scottsboro Boys, to be able to approach musical material from an intellectual standpoint. All the stuff I’ve done with Hal Prince has very much been influenced by that. And Lapine, frankly. They are all people who go at musicals from a more intellectual angle.”
A younger Boritt befriended Prince during his NYU days and stayed in touch with him. Prince eventually referred the budding designer to his daughter for work and later hired Boritt himself. They have been working together ever since. Beyond Prince, another professional mentor was James Lapine. “He gave me my first Broadway show, and some of my best design work period is stuff I’ve done for him,” says Boritt. “He’s super rigorous and super tough to work with and always pushes me to do more than I would come up with on my own.”
Boritt concedes that the line between friendship and professional acquaintances is a tricky one, and he is not sure he ever knows where it is. Since he has little time for a social life beyond his professional endeavors, some of his best friends tend to be his work associates. “My assistant is going to be my best friend,” he says. “The people I keep around for years and years are people that I like being with. I need qualified assistants too, but if you are a really qualified assistant and I didn’t like you, I probably wouldn’t keep you around. People like Hal Prince and James Lapine are all my friends, but it’s not like we go on vacation together or hang out together when we’re not working. They’re professional friendships.”
Next up for Boritt is A Bronx Tale, which opens on Broadway in December. When asked what keeps his passion for theater burning after all these years, the designer says it’s the newness of it. He feels that every show is different and that he always finds something new and exciting in them. “And if I don’t, then maybe you don’t do the show, but I find I learn so much doing a show because you start researching whatever that show is about and you start learning new things,” he explains. “It’s always different challenges. As much [as] the players are the same, the dynamic changes from show to show. I think the best description of a career in theater is what the props master at the Ford Theatre said to me a couple of years ago. She said, ‘I’m always overworked, underpaid, and exhausted, but I’m never bored.’ I think that’s what keeps a lot of us going is the novelty of it. It keeps you from getting bored.”
