Tackling both scenic and costume design on a play is challenging enough, but when one is doing it for two productions in rep at the same theater, the stakes are raised substantially. Stephen Brimson Lewis took on those responsibilities in designing for the recent pairing of famed existential plays co-starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart (Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land).
While the thematic material of the two shows was parallel in many ways, their stories and characters were entirely different. Godot focuses on two old men who meet at night and later encounter a bizarre traveling pair while waiting for a mysterious personage they do not even know, while No Man’s Land focuses on a rich man, the stranger he has brought home from a bar, and his two thug-like servants. As Lewis observes, the latter takes place in a very naturalistic interior (an English manor), while the former resides in a poetic landscape.
The way these two plays came to be done in rep — with four shows performed of each play split between them — was that both McKellen and Stewart did Godot together in the U.K. in 2009, and then the two of them joined with Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley to do No Man’s Land in Berkeley last August. (Past Tony Award nominee Lewis worked on both productions.) Given the intellectual connections one can make between the two shows, it seemed natural to unite them on one stage with the same cast of four actors. As Lewis says, the creative team “stitched the two together to try to make them work in rep, which is no mean feat on Broadway.”
The Venue
A key factor in Lewis’ scenic design efforts for both shows at New York’s Cort Theatre were the limitations of the venue itself. He remarks that there is no wing space on stage left, while stage right has very little. The situation is in sharp contrast to the subsidized British theater companies such as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company where he frequently does work in repertory. Those theaters were specifically built with storage considerations in mind.
“From that point of view, it wasn’t an alien world to me, but trying to make that work within the constrictions of a Broadway house was quite tight really,” he explains. “Also, just working with a crew that don’t necessarily do that every day. If they work in a house where they do lots of musicals, they might be used to doing much bigger set changes from day to day, but when you work in a playhouse, it’s different. It was perhaps new territory for them.”
Lewis tells PLSN that he had seen other productions of No Man’s Land with more fully realized versions of the house, but because this rendition was being done in rep with another play, he could not go as far in showing the upstairs, the hallway outside of the door, or any of the rest of the house. “It forced us to make a much more poetic world of it, which in the end was a good circumstance to help me design the play,” he concludes.
For Waiting for Godot, Lewis and director Sean Mathias went for a sparse look for a show rich in theatrics, particularly with the influence of clowns and vaudeville on the stage banter and some of the dramatic scenarios. “I think that by trying to be closer to the language of what the play is, we were being more honest with what’s been written,” explains Lewis. “Rather than having a cloth at the back that represented a sky and a fake, textured muddy floor that might represent a road, we said, ‘Let’s just have a very empty theater in which a tree is growing through the floor,’ and then we started saying, ‘What it if was a bit beyond the next stage of that. Some event had occurred, and it looks not only derelict but almost post-apocalyptic, like some terrible event has occurred and the roof has fallen and the daylight is pouring through the roof. So when they look up at the sky in the building they can look through the rafters and see the sky above, and likewise the moonlight can pour in.’ It was really trying to serve the play without trying to be clever clever with the concept.”
One of the most striking parts of the Godot set design are the dual level faux stone facades standing at either end of the stage, through which actors make dramatic entrances and exits. When the show was done at the Haymarket Theatre location, Lewis explored “blending the cross line between what was happening on stage and was happening in the auditorium. There was a wonderful juxtaposition between the highly preserved, gorgeous, glittering gold proscenium and then suddenly going into the derelict part of the same proscenium. I tried to hint at a bit of that in the Cort Theatre. You’ll see the decoration of the boxes linked with the real boxes in the auditorium — this blurring between reality and storytelling in a way.”
Godot’s Tree
The standout scenic prop in Godot is the tree that stands partially towards stage left. It is actually a real tree. “It’s interesting, as soon as you put a real tree on stage, it ceases to be a real tree,” states Lewis. “You’ve got to preserve it and you’ve got to fireproof it. You’ve got to do things to it that you wouldn’t do with a normal tree if you just had it growing in your backyard. It already took on an odd quality by the fact that we had to pump it full of all of these chemicals to preserve it and fireproof it. But I was adamant that we weren’t going to make a fake, carved tree, and we were going to have the shape and silhouette that you would get from a natural tree. The prop buyer found a tree, we carved off the bits that we didn’t need, and we kept the rest. Even a tree that size, which isn’t particularly big at 15 feet tall, weighs a lot. It’s not something that two guys can pick up and move. I don’t know the specific figures, but it’s heavy enough and difficult enough that it requires a chain winch to lift it up and suspend it during the changeover from one play to another.”
By contrast and comparison, the scenic design for No Man’s Land focuses on a room in a rich man’s house that is not a parlor, study, or anything specifically familiar. It is a sort of no man’s land that intrigued Lewis. “It seems to be this odd reception room, totally dominated by a cabinet full of booze and not much else,” he remarks. “I was very keen that it had a slight sense of entrapment, that they were kind of held in there. So they were held in this frame of the room, and for the very last moment for the play, when in fact Spooner [played by McKellen] talks about being in no man’s land, where nothing changes and is fixed forever, I wanted just a moment where the space takes on a different quality and that there’s a strange sort of release where time almost seems to stand still.”
Solid to Ethereal
The designer wanted a surface where he could suddenly backlight and transform it “from this rigid, opaque wall into something more translucent and more ethereal, so each of those panels has a series of scrim and back projection material, and then on the back of that are the silhouettes of trees.” They originally attempted back projection — his first idea was to line up a bank of projectors to create an image. But due to the logistics of the changeover and the depth of the space available to them, this became a physically impossibility. Another obstacle — the noise that would have been generated by the projectors and the need to reset them and readjust for focus with each changeover. “We ended up doing it in a much more low-tech way, but there’s just enough of a moment when the set transforms before we go to a blackout that nods to a more poetic world and less naturalistic realism.”
In the way that Beckett was very specific about the props and costumes in Godot, Pinter was very fixed on specific props and actions in his play, such as when the character of Hirst, played by Stewart, throws a drink on the floor. “Pinter is very specific about where the whiskey is, where the bottle is, and how he throws the glass,” says Lewis. “That’s another feature of the No Man’s Land set — we knew he [Stewart] has to throw a glass and we wanted it to be a real glass and not a plastic one. You wanted to hear the sound of it chinking. He has to throw it and fall to his knees and collapse on the floor. Immediately you start to think that maybe there should be some padding under this floor, so the whole center section of the floor under the carpet has a serious amount of high-density foam rubber to cushion the impact of Patrick Stewart falling flat on his face on the floor every night and also throwing a glass every night without it breaking.”
Lewis says that it is quite fascinating to watch the crew do a changeover now that they have it down pat, especially as the floor levels change. “No Man’s Land is a raked floor, but it’s a continuous rake, whereas Godot has three separate pitches of rake,” explains the dual designer. “The floor needs lifting and propping at different angles in order to create spaces for the boy to crawl through an area and an area for Ian to climb up over the back. It’s not like you’re lifting one floor and revealing another one. The floor has a lot of elements that have to be changed in it as well. And then the bulk of the set for No Man’s Land is on chain hoists and flown high up into the grid, and thank God the grid height in the Cort Theatre is sufficiently high enough that you can get away without having any black masking borders at all for Godot. Even from the very front row, you can’t even see the bottom of the No Man’s Land set hung right up in the grid. I’m sure there aren’t many theaters you can do that in.”
Costumes, Too
Beyond his scenic work, Lewis also tackled the costumes, which is a fairly common practice among British designers. He does not tend to do both on larger musical productions, but when he is dealing with four actors in an intense world, he takes the plunge. And with these two shows, he had four experienced thespians to work with: McKellen, Stewart, Billy Crudup, and Shuler Hensley.
“It is a quite intense and drawn out process working with actors of that caliber who want to slowly develop and work out what the costumes are going to be, how they’re going to work, and how to physically make the language of them work,” admits Lewis. “That took a long time. It’s finding the precise type of clothing.” For Godot, the outfits were more vaudevillian and clownish, playing into ideas that the two main leads had about their characters’ potential acting past, while for No Man’s Land, the suits worn by the actors were more naturalistic and true to the mid-1970s era when the play was written.
“Some of it was vintage stuff that we bought in California and bought in the U.K., and some of it we made as well,” says Lewis. “It’s that process that’s the tricky thing, and making it inevitable and almost invisible so it doesn’t draw attention to itself.” In the end, I think the job of the designer is to make the choices seem so inevitable that the audience doesn’t even question them because they seem absolutely right. That’s my particular way of working.”
One costuming aspect that was very important to Lewis was to not make the ‘70s costumes too comic or exaggerated. “You could get a bit fetishistic about it where everyone’s got big lapels and huge collars and big, jazzy colored shirts and funny haircuts, and you can’t quite see through that to a real person,” he notes. “In the 1970s that was just the fashionable, right thing to wear, but if you look back at them now, they seem like the most peculiar choices. We’ve all got pictures of ourselves when we were younger and think, ‘Why did I ever think that was a good idea to wear that jacket?’ You just have to be aware of that when you’re designing a period show, unless it’s appropriate to the story and where you present it. With a piece as delicately wrought as No Man’s Land is, you have to be careful of stepping outside of it and then overly drawing attention to it.”
A Visual Link
In the end, Lewis struck a strong balance between poeticism and realism when taking on these two shows, working to bridge the differences and unite them in unexpected ways. Having the ghost of the Godot show on the outskirts of No Man’s Land with the presence of the stone facades works for people who saw both shows, but it might have puzzled those who only saw the latter play.
“We questioned that for a long while and thought how much do we present it as a double bill and accept the fact that some people are only ever going to see one play and not the other,” recalls Lewis. “I think there was enough in the crossover of the styles of the writing that gave you license to have a crossover between the visual language of one play to another. There’s a hint a bit of both worlds. I don’t think you’re doing a disservice to the writer. If you went to just see No Man’s Land and wondered what are those bits on the side, you might think that maybe it’s part of Godot, and you should go and see Godot. It’s a nice lead-in to that, if you like. It’s a visual trailer for the next show.”
