Scenic Designer Mark Wendland on the Art of Subtle Transformations
Significant Other is an unusual Broadway comedy. What starts off as a lighthearted tale of an awkward young gay man named Jordan who is lonely in love while his group of close girlfriends start to slowly pair off leads to an existential crisis. As he approaches age 30, he realizes he does not know how to make romantic connections and is in danger of being left behind in the coupling game.
Tony Award-nominated scenic designer Mark Wendland believes that shift in tone is exactly what makes the play (written by Joshua Harmon) so touching. “The show starts off as a rom-com, but it eventually goes to a very deep and universal place,” he says. “I’m a big fan of the writing.”
Whenever Wendland begins the process of designing a show, he reads through the script then picks out key moments or scenes and makes little thumbnails to help visualize what he wants to see on stage. “It always starts with, ‘what do the people need to do in space, and what do they need to touch,’ and usually out of that, something will grow,” he explains. “We realized you could do this whole show with no scenery and a bench. The physical requirements of what the actors need as far as props and furniture is completely minimal because it’s almost as if the story is being narrated. There isn’t literally direct address, but the main character of Jordan is always relaying to his girlfriends his experience.”
One Box, Four Quadrants
What Wendland developed for Significant Other is a 30-foot-wide by 20-foot-tall box structure separated into four quadrants with a staircase splitting it down the middle. The lower stage right quadrant is the living room for Jordan’s grandmother Helene. The upper stage right quadrant features an open area used for party sequences and a bed for a romantic moment. The lower stage left quadrant is an apartment kitchen set with a table and a sink and a nearby door exiting that space (to backstage), while the upper stage left quadrant echoes the upper right. There is a coffee station at the foot of the central staircase for office sequences. A scrim curtain hangs in front of the entire structure to separate it visually from the starker foreground space.
In front of the scrim, and in front of Helene’s television room, is her living room space featuring a chair and a couch linked by a bench overlaid with framed family photos. There is an eight-inch step up to the box, and downstage in front is another eight-inch step up from the stage floor. At downstage right sits a backless chair where people often sit, and at downstage left sits a long bench where Jordan and his old college roommate Laura sometimes chat, with a nearby pendant lamp slung low on a cable next to them for lighting. The bench occasionally doubles as Jordan’s bed.
Simple and Spare
That description of the entire set may sound like a lot, but it is not overly stuffed with props; a minimal amount are used and nothing flies in. “With this show you don’t really need anything, so our strategy was to sweeten the picture with some narrative elements but keep the acting area very spare and very simple,” says Wendland. “In essence, everything that is behind the scrim is eye candy to carry you along from place to place to place, to keep the show from being so visually austere. The staging is incredibly minimalistic because you don’t want to be schlepping on a couch for the scene that Grandma’s in, and you don’t want to be schlepping on a bed for the scene where Jordan is texting in bed.”
The rule that Wendland and director Trip Cullman decided upon was to keep what the actors interact with extremely minimal. No props needed to move, but various LED lights within the structure help sculpt the look of certain scenes. Parts of the upper floor protrude to the back wall of the Booth Theatre and others just a few feet. The box is made of welded framing that is skinned, with the walls covered with MDF and canvas. The floors are covered with plywood, over which a light marley floor has been laid down.
Wendland purposely placed the scrim to separate the box structure from the downstage floor space. He felt it works to launch audiences into the space when they first sit down and see what he calls the “jungle gym” feeling of the box and try to ascertain what they will be witnessing on stage.
“You’re not confronted so baldly with this contemporary version of an urban jumble of shapes and places juxtaposed together,” elaborates Wendland. “It’s a little bit mitigated.” The show opens with Jordan and his three BFFs dancing and chatting in a nightclub for several minutes. With the backlight from rotating strip lighting and LEDs and two characters going inside to an unseen bar, one becomes aware of the large structure onstage. “But once the play begins, you stick with the actors and the words that they’re saying and don’t expend a lot of energy wondering about all those other shapes and boxes and environments back there,” says Wendland. “The scrim helps achieve that. If the scrim wasn’t there, I think all of that other narrative stuff might be a little overwhelming to those initial scenes.”
The Lighting
Installed within the box structure are two rotating light strips to the immediate right of the stairs, which provide strong, dramatic backlighting for wedding and club sequences, as well as a light box ceiling and light box walls. The LED ceiling turns blue for nighttime scenes and for romantic wedding scenes. Then the LED walls are used for two scenes at the Museum of Modern Art. There are LED panels in the floor that are used for nightclub and bar scenes. “It was built in to the rigid construction of the scenery — some gimmicks that would give a feeling of transformation without actually having to move pieces,” expounds Wendland. “You perceive the space differently depending on how you use each of those elements.”
Originally, the scenic designer wanted to include some digital images of museum artwork in the background for the MOMA scenes. “Then we just realized that just doing a light transformation where the side walls of the structure illuminate was transformation enough itself,” he says. “It helped to know that you are going to a new place, and then the text says very clearly where they are. A lot of our process was figuring out how much or in some cases how little we could get away with doing and still allow those transformations to happen.”
There are approximately three dozen different locations represented in Significant Other, and Wendland notes that the narrative changes are so seamless that the actors execute all the storytelling without needing to move scenery. Yet while the scenery remains static, some of it provides visual separation beyond the scrim. At downstage left by the bench is a pendant light huge on a long cable that seems to be a bit low in relation to the characters even though it also lights them. This was a conscious choice by Wendland that fits into his general approach to his craft.
“The thought behind a lot of the work that I do is to allow the visual life of the play to leave a little room for the audience to fill in,” he explains of his scenic stratagem. “What the set is showing you in a lot of my work is not the complete picture. It’s part of a picture that kind of gives the audience enough of an in that you understand where we are. I like it when the picture is not complete so the audience is having to piece stuff together a little bit. I find that when you have stuff that’s so minimal it’s great to have some signifiers that fill in the gaps a little bit.”
The specific choice for the low hanging pendant lamp was to try something different than using a light that sits on the floor.
“Once we put that in the scene it changed the sense of how the space was contained a little bit and actually provided a little bit of visual tension,” recalls Wendland. “Once we got on stage at our first technical rehearsal, we had to figure out how people could walk around this thing and not have it be in the way. But there’s something about the obstacle that gave those apartment scenes a kind of tension that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. Just to have those scenes in essence completely out in the open without anything to move around would have seemed too safe. It would’ve made it a little too easy, and there was something about the rigor [for the actors] of having to negotiate that space that seemed fun.”
The same idea is true for the bench with Helene’s family photos on stage right. Wendland believes that having that prop between Helene in her chair and Jordan on a nearby couch on the opposite side “gave those scenes a little bit of weight.” He adds that they contemplated removing some of the pictures because they were in the way, but he insisted that they stay. “It’s good that there’s this obstacle to negotiate something real in this very abstract space. Both sides of the stage had some version of something that grounded the visual life but was an obstacle for the actors to have to negotiate.”
Bright to Deep Tones
Wendland recalls that director Trip Cullman told him something that he felt was very smart: “He said, ‘I know from reading the script that the comedy will take care of itself. We don’t need to design for the comedy. What we need to do is design to the lyricism of the language.” That thought was the genesis for their approach to the show, which was to design for a story that initially begins as a light romantic comedy but then mines dramatic depths through its writing and performances.
“Significant Other is a comedy that ends up going someplace very deep,” says Wendland. The trick here was “figuring out how you stay honest to the depth of where the play ends up without frontloading that and broadcasting it to the audience at the beginning. To allow there to be room for the lightness and darkness all in one design. For me, that was the fun of Significant Other.”
In examining what new knowledge he gleaned from working on this production, Wendland remarks that each show he works on informs the next one. This time he noticed the difference between actors’ entrances on carpeting versus bare wood planks.
“It’s really interesting that when you get onto the carpet you can’t hear footfalls, and it really feels like people are floating,” observes Wendland. “Anytime you make an entrance upstage from the bench on the wood it’s so real. The show I’m doing now is all carpeted because I really want to retain that feeling of there being something very soft, womblike, and cocoon like. This [new] show has a lot of surprise entrances, so it totally should be carpeted.” He notes that throughout a designer’s career their identity and taste level are inherent in their work, “but there are little things that you carry from show to show to show and put in your back pocket and pull out when you need them.”
