In what is evidently the first major Emo musical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson deconstructs our concept of the first Democratic President of the United States. It revisits his legacy of uniting and dividing while utilizing modern slang and rock songs to portray a pivotal point in history – particularly his decimation of the Native American population – while connecting it to modern political conflicts and agendas. The irreverent show at the Public Theater has generated some controversy, particularly in its depiction of Jackson's treatment of American Indians. But it is definitely a conversation piece, and it features both a snarky sense of humor and a striking stage set that marries the austerity of "modern" Washington (circa early to mid-1800s) and the wildness of the American frontier. BBAJ traces Jackson's rise to power from his frontier childhood through his Oval Office reign.
"It's a history lesson, but it serves as a vehicle to discuss the things that are happening in our political landscape," says scenic designer Donyale Werle. "We were using Jackson because he was a really interesting personality, and a lot of things were happened right at that point [in history]." She believes that director Alex Timbers is turning a mirror onto our political discourse and onto us. In some ways, this fictionalized Jackson becomes a bizarre Bush/Obama composite in his striving to achieve his ideals while coping with the will of the people. The show is laced with irony. "As Alex says, it's so ironic that it turns back upon itself and becomes sincere," observes Werle. "What's really interesting about this is the idea that our heroes and our monsters can be the exact same person."
Arcing Through Contradictions
The contradictions inherent in BBAJ found their way into the set design as well. Werle – who has designed for numerous off-Broadway shows and was an associate designer on High Fidelity and In the Heights – notes that while Timbers never told his team exactly what to do, "we tried to create these arcs with our work through these contradictions, if that makes sense," she says. "Part of it doesn't make sense, and that's part of the process. We take a lot of juxtaposing ideas and mash things together, and in that process it becomes a third thing, which is what is interesting. And that starts a conversation."
Ben Brantley of The New York Times described the set design of the show thusly: "Designer Donyale Werle has filled the stage of the Public's Newman Theatre, which is awash in red neon lighting, with the debris of history, portraits of vaguely historical figures and a parade of stuffed animals, including a moose head."
Shallow Stage, Deep Subject
The set for BBAJ is shallow; Werle estimates it at 28 feet wide and 13 feet 9 inches deep, with the backstage area being only five feet deep. And it is very presentational, facing directly out to the audience. "We wanted a very flat plane that was wide, very similar to the Western landscape. It's very forward. We tried to get the energy out to the people as much as we possibly could. Depth was our enemy in this show. Most everything is staged in a very presentational way, facing the audience. This is a show that could not be played in the round; it's flat without too many angles. We have wallpaper of rocks, wallpaper of wood and wood paneling. It's all about that fake real thing. The deck is wood, but a lot of the other wood is just wallpaper that looks like wood or fake paneling, which is hard to find these days. I grew up in the South where everybody had it, but not anymore."
BBAJ's set features a raised platform at stage right for the drummer and occasionally an actor or two, such as when Jackson and his future wife share their blood in a bonding ritual also meant to send up Emo's over-the-top sense of high school romantic tragedy, while there is a foot-high platform at stage left for the pianist. Actors take up the guitar and bass during the show when needed. At center stage is a mantelpiece for scenes that take place inside the corridors of power in Washington. Interestingly enough, unlike other parts of the stage, there is no landscape or portrait painting about it; simply red and gold pattern wallpaper.
"At one point, we had a painting in front of that [the mantelpiece] but it did not work," recalls Werle. "The red and the gold gave us the central focus. It's hard to describe, but when you took it away [the open space] it was a totally different show and not good." The look of that part of the stage was inspired by The Killers video for "Mr. Brightside," which featured the band on "an elevated platform with red velvet and a lot of lights. At some point, you got the sense of the entire room opening up and light shooting out towards you. We watched that video so many times, and it just felt that that is what we wanted to capture. We didn't copy it, but we captured the feeling of that video. Alex is a YouTube freak, and he constantly sent me videos capturing the spirit of rock shows."
That framed red and gold space also serves another purpose. At one point, it slides away to reveal a small performance space fit for a rock star, with plenty of backlighting to help Jackson make flashy presentations during and after his election in the show. An "A/J" logo, done in the style of the AC/DC font, also slides into place following his election into the White House. And one other picture frame to the right of it (at stage left) becomes transparent at one point to allow a singer to be seen during the show.
"Dead White Guys"
The rest of the stage is peppered with a cornucopia of items that one might find in museums, political offices and bars – everything from taxidermy to paintings to a dartboard. "During our research, we looked at a lot of modern bars, hipster bars and guy bars, and then we looked at pictures of the White House and pictures of a lot of turn-of-the-century formal rooms, Victorian rooms," explains Werle. "We made the connections between the two. A lot of modern aesthetics [like Goth and steampunk] steal from other eras [such as Victorian], so we pretty much did the same thing, except we tried to make direct correlations between patterns, shapes and textures. All the wood had to be this super old wood so we could draw those lines easier. We did so much research for the show and took hundreds and hundreds of pages and spread them all out and constantly worked from research. We didn't make a lot of stuff up. We created a lot of things and juxtaposed a lot of things to create new objects, but it was all research-based. It's just that the research was very fast."
Lining the aisles of the theatre are "portraits of dead white guys." They are not U.S. presidents but public figures who were influential in their time. Werle says putting up portraits of past Presidents would have been too obvious, and that the musical is "not really about Presidents, it's about leaders – whoever groups of people follow. That was the idea. Certain people are elevated, and we believe them for whatever reason, whether it's their charisma, their intelligence or their lack of intelligence. We tend to follow those people. We're definitely looking at the design of that area as being a national portrait gallery with these great figures that we look up to in American history."
In her design, Werle took the idea of frontier life and added modern touches. But she also tried to break free from the stereotypes of historical representation. "One part of our research was natural history museums," the designer explains. "History is given to us in a prepackaged version. We read in books and learn about it at school, which is very similar to the way we are presented history in natural history museums where there are animals and Indians composed behind these Plexiglas boxes. People go to the tags first. So there is this very preserved vision of what we think our history is, particularly with the animals [in the show]. We covered as many as we could with plastic, in that same sense of this preserved, crusted over, old… History is put up on a shelf, and the stage is about breaking through that. History is really messy. There's nothing pretty about history. [In our show] it's the real history versus our preserved vision of history, which is neatly kept in containers or boxes or plastic. The plastic throws us toward the oppressive qualities of what physically happened with the Trail Of Tears."
Dada, Ooo La La
The designer states that they were trying to establish aesthetic ideas through Impressionism, particularly through onstage art mash ups. Werle comes from an art history background, and she saw how Timbers copped many ideas from the Dadaist movement. "We have some Dadaist and neo-Dadaist references. We had Ernst, Duchamp and Rauschenberg," she says. "Those guys did so much with animals – animals roaming out West. We copied the art and then twisted it our way. We also took modern artists who were recreating Dadaist stuff" as with the duct-taped horse at the side of the stage.
Another nice touch is the Christmas lights that snake around the rafters above the audience. Evidently there are "hundreds and hundreds of strings" with blue, purple and red lights. While the red ones burned bright at the start of the show, the cold blue ones manifested themselves during the show's somber dénouement, which featured actors in the space behind the mantelpiece posing to emulate a painting/diorama of the Trail Of Tears.
Biting comedy and tragedy certainly intertwine in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Reflecting the machismo and male anger portrayed through Jackson's onstage representation, Werle and her teams also displayed a cheeky sense of humor in utilizing many male phallic symbols throughout the set – hot dogs and sausages, with coconuts and marbles – as well as pornography under the stage that is only visible to audience members in the first two or three rows. "We also have piles of porn kind of off on the side. Andrew Jackson, at least our Andrew Jackson, would have porn," asserts Werle. "It's very male aggressive, garage band [type of image]. We have a lot of half eaten sandwiches and a lot of real food on stage. There's popcorn everywhere and tons and tons of beer. With Alex, it's high art/low art – it's as high as we can go and as low as we can go. We think that there is a great art in between there. It's messy, but it's very specific. It's not like we leave things up to chance; we literally think of every single detail. We always tried to ride the line between high art and low art."
