When the dark terrorist satire The Lieutenant of Inishmore played on Broadway, its violent content and gory second act — literally featuring hacked bodies strewn across the stage — certainly shocked and engrossed audiences. But it played in the Lyceum Theatre with several hundred people in attendance every night, which gave those present a greater sense of safety. The recent production at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia was far different. Presented in an intimate venue with only 125 seats, it became a far more intense, in-your-face experience. Some people were so shocked that they walked out of a richly ironic story about a rogue Irish terrorist named Padric who goes ballistic on his family and friends when he discovers that his beloved cat has been killed.
Illusions and Contusions
Beyond the controversial content, it was quite a task to design a show that included a cottage set at center stage with an interior warehouse and exterior countryside set at stage right. Overall the stage was no more than 26 feet wide and 16 feet deep. Scenic designer Daniel Conway — who has worked on productions of Glengarry Glen Ross, Uncle Vanya, and Our Lady of 121st Street, among many others, estimates that the Broadway set was probably 50 percent wider and three times as deep. In tackling this scaled-down version of the acclaimed, Tony-winning Martin McDonagh play, Conway chose not to study the Broadway version too closely. He saw photographs of it but had not seen it live.
“The only thing that I had heard is that the way they dealt with the last really bloody scene was they literally had a second [cottage] set,” explains Conway. “I believe that one set rose out of the floor and one set tracked upstage. It was quite complicated. We didn't have that option because this theatre was so small. It was literally 16 feet from the edge of the stage to the back wall of the theatre and we had to get a crossover behind the cottage because of the big gun shootout scene towards the end of the play. Our interior was only 12 feet deep, so what I did was put the cottage on a slight angle and slightly raked every surface in the set. The ceiling was raked, the floor was raked, and the back wall was raked from stage right to stage left in order to give it an illusion of depth.”
Pulling it Off
Conway’s sets for Inishmore were made of Styrofoam and steel framed walls. All the stonework was carved foam. He adds that “the set had to be sealed really well because it was washed every night” to remove all of the blood poured onto it during the second act. The seasoned scenic designer admits that when we first saw the stage at the Signature, he was unsure how the company was going to pull off the show.
“I think one thing that our production did that a lot of the other regional theatre productions didn't do was not shy away from using texture in the walls of the set and the floor,” Conway remarks. “In one production it looked like there was a plastic film over the set” — undoubtedly to deal with the gallons of fake blood used every night — “and I thought it took away from the verite of the set. Unfortunately what that meant to us was that our cleanup time was so much longer. I feel bad for what we did to the run crew on the set. It was hysterical to watch it be cleaned up. They came out with shop vacs to try to clean up the blood. It was just crazy.”
Space became an issue for every aspect of the production. Conway says that there was no stage right entrance into the theatre, only an upstage left entrance. “Even the size of the bicycle was determined by how much backstage space we ended up having,” he says. “It was really trying to cram a big old play into a tiny space.”
Warehousing Torture
To handle scenes not in the central location of the cottage, a photomural of Ireland was placed on stage right, and warehouse window translucencies (not in the Broadway show) were placed behind the photomural. “Those warehouse windows were opaquely painted because the idea of Padric torturing someone in front of windows was ridiculous, but we did want to show that it was very urban, and we had to do it in the most economic of ways,” recalls Conway. “We came up with the idea of putting these warehouse windows right behind the photomural, and when we lifted them up the photomural completely disappeared, and you believed we were in a warehouse. I thought that was one of the most successful things about the design.”
The spatial issues came into play strongly when it came to arterial spray. Conway reports that there were six blood cannons placed around the set, and the biggest problem was not having blood splatter onto the expensive photomurals that were the backing of the set nor on audience members in the first row. “We had some real panic during the first tech that we did because some of the pressure in the blood cannons was a little too high, and they just blew blood everywhere,” he states. “Even into the run of the show we still had blood land from the first row of the audience to the edge of the stage. It was insane.”
In a particularly bloody moment, one character blows another’s brains out. And the onstage impact was truly visceral at one point. “The pressure was so high in the blood cannon that it blew onto the back row and spattered all the way back to the first row of the audience,” recalls Conway. “We debated pulling a Blue Man Group and giving everybody in the front row plastic to put on their laps because we were very, very worried. During the first preview we hit a woman very good with the blood, and she was not happy about it. But other people laughed off because it was totally cleanable. The whole theatre smells like chocolate right now because there is chocolate syrup in the blood to get the right thickness and to be able to wash it out.”
Cleaning up the blood took an hour and a half every night. After shop vacs were used to get most of the blood off the stage, the rest was done by hand with spray bottles. “We found out that using natural sea sponges worked really well to get the blood off the more textured plaster that we used,” divulges Conway. “It's amazing; they found blood on the ceiling. We went pretty gonzo with this production. We had a blood cannon mounted on the stage door and it was off by about two degrees on the first tech day. It splattered all over the back of the photomural, which was one of the most expensive things on the set. We immediately knew that that couldn't happen again. I'm sure that they didn’t have that kind of problem on the Broadway set.”
Looking at this production in retrospect, Conway says, “it is a very expensive show to do. I forget how many gallons of blood we went through. We had a piece of black china silk that fell down from the grid to block the audience's view of the big scene change in the end, and that's where they were found cutting up all the bodies. But before the curtain dropped, two stagehands literally dumped two five-gallon buckets of blood onto the floor. They were literally wading through blood in the last scene. When that curtain dropped and you saw these two guys with saws and axes taking those bodies apart, it was the one of the goriest scenes in theatre. It was so funny. It's like Quentin Tarantino did a stage show. You do not expect that in the theatre. It's something that film does so much better.”
Despite all of the space and blood issues, Conway savored working on The Lieutenant of Inishmore. And he was able to work things out for himself without delving deeply into the previous Broadway or even the original UK production. He admits he does not generally look at other productions of shows for which he designs.
“I try really, really hard not to look at anybody else's design,” stresses Conway. “When you get the Samuel French script, a lot of times there is a photograph in the back. I have my assistants go in there and rip that photograph out because once you get somebody else's design in your head it's really hard to get out, particularly with what I call ‘problem plays’. This is definitely a problem play. It would be wonderful to figure out how somebody else solved it, but you really can't do that or else it corrupts your thinking process.”
Conway has 15 years of scenic design in Washington, D.C. under his belt, but he has shifted during the last three years mainly to projections, including recent shows at the Asolo Theatre in Sarasota and the Kennedy Center. “Projections are becoming such an economic solution to so many things that I’m finding that I'm getting more work doing that now,” he reveals. “I am investing more time in learning more software in order to deal with that.” He adds: “Projection design is clean and simple. It was disgusting to work on this show.” But oh, so much fun.
