Scenic designer Peter J. Davison brings new angle to classical approach
The persepective of the set plays a role in Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, shown here with, L-R, Norbert Leo Putz, Michael McGrath, Jeremy Bobb and Tom Alan Robbins.
Scenic designer Peter J. Davison has worked on many different types of productions — straight plays, musicals, operas — and while he certainly can make sets “move around just like everybody else” on large musical productions, when it comes to dramas, perspective is the name of the game. He likes dramatically angled sets that allow the eye to roam as much as the characters have room to traipse through the scenery.
In recent Broadway plays Democracy, Deuce and the Mark Twain farce Is He Dead?, Davison has created striking set pieces that add to the drama in each show. It should come as no surprise, then, that when PLSN tracked Davison down he was in Venice, Italy. “I’m in the land of perspective right now,” he quips, speaking at midnight after another hard day working on a production of Puccini’s La Rodine at the Gran Teatro La Fenice.
Davison has been a scenic designer since 1988. He studied education, specializing in theatre, drama, and English at Middlesex Polytechnic (now called Middlesex University) in England. After college he worked as an assistant designer at the Royal Opera House for ten years, “so I sort of did a long apprenticeship,” he says.
He has since worked on Broadway shows as diverse as revivals of Medea and Jesus Christ Superstar and original shows like Deuce and Democracy. His latest effort, the comedic Is He Dead?, was discovered by Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin among the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Being a true period piece resurrected from the past, the show itself presented some unusual challenges, staged by a modern group of people with no connection to the original author. But Davison took it all in stride.
“I’ve worked with Michael Blakemore a lot, so I know him pretty well,” Davison says, of the director for Is He Dead?. “He’s very good at knowing how to stage a farce, which is essentially what it is. The first thing we had to establish is where we were going to put the doors to make the comedy work. It was like doing geography first, then we worked out what the spaces should be.”
The set piece in the first act is the humble loft of French artist Jean-François Millet, a starving artist with immense talent whose debts threaten to ruin his career. In real-life Millet was perennially poor, and his work only gained increased monetary value after his death. In Twain’s play, he is given the chance to fake his own fatal illness and masquerade as the widowed twin sister who will inherit his growing fortunes. “It’s very, very loosely based on Millet’s life, just taking tiny little essences of it, really,” observes Davison, “but I think that the audience gets the irony of it.”
Set in the first act reflects Millet’s poor financial standing. While the ceilings and windows are high, the furnishings are modest and the construction basic, with paintings covering much of the wall space. There is one door on stage right with heavy foot traffic and another center rear for the unseen bedroom. “I was determined to try and trick the audience into thinking that the first act is all they were going to get,” Davison says. “I wanted to make it very solid looking, so when we end up in the second act, it was a complete surprise.”
The scenery in the second act offers a radical transformation. The pristine white walls of an opulent palatial setting, complete with a spacious couch and a large mirror at stage right, lofty French doors at stage left, and four other doorways leading to other chambers, show that Millet’s deception is certainly reaping nice dividends. The charades reach a fever pitch during the second act, when Millet’s “funeral” and an empty coffin force further deceit, with characters running in and out of rooms in screwball comedy fashion.
Interestingly, the perspective in the palatial set is almost reversed from that of the loft. “I was trying out a little new idea that I was dreaming up for how to make it interesting,” Davison says. “Instead of using one vanishing point, I used three on the second act. It creates nightmares in the corners,” he laughs. “In fact, there was a moment in the workshop when they were building the corners on the stage left side, and they were trying to make it meet the back wall. They were having a huge problem with it, but eventually we worked it out.”
The genuine gasps of surprise emanating from the audience prove that the difference between the sets hammers home the evolution of the story without further exposition required. “The first act is all about the paintings,” notes Davison, “but the second act has nothing to do with the paintings, which have disappeared out of the story. It’s about the relationships.”
In terms of finding inspiration and providing authenticity for Is He Dead?, Davison studied numerous “18th-century French references of rooms, and I did look very closely at the original studio of Millet. Once we look at that closely, then we did what we liked, but we started there to get the feel of it. For the palatial set, I just looked at classical 18th-century French rooms, just to give it grandeur and to show the difference between the country setting and the Paris setting, which was a much grander place.”
There was one special consideration that Davison needed to acknowledge when designing the sets for the show, and that was the front door of the loft in the first scene, which was not just placed strategically in terms of the action but also in terms of the audience’s vantage point. “I had to try to get it so that everyone could see it because the sight lines are very wide in that theatre,” he remarks of the Lyceum.
Davison is no stranger to technical challenges. In last year’s Deuce, which co-starred Angela Lansbury as a retired tennis star watching two young wunderkinds battle it out on the court, he created a stadium set with numerous elements. There were the seats where the protagonists sat, a commentator’s booth above and behind them, not to mention video projections of other spectators shown on two separate scrims. There was also a TV video feed, each placed at slightly different angles. It was Davison’s idea to bring in video designer Sven Ortel.
“I had just worked with him on Rebecca” — a production at the Raimund Theater in Vienna with director Francesca Zambello — “which is how we first worked together, so I dragged him in on Deuce because we wanted some way of representing the full stadium, which was the challenge of it,” Davison explains. “It was so tricky, and I thought that Sven might be able to help us on that. It worked out pretty well.”
For Blakemore’s political production Democracy a year earlier, which dealt with German intrigue at the start of the 1970s during the Cold War, particularly the complex relationship between West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and his assistant, confidante and secret East German spy Günter Guillaume, Davison designed a two-level set that had a claustrophobic, bureaucratic feeling on its first floor, with a more spacious second floor often used for scenes of outdoor speechmaking and public appearances.
“With Democracy I was trying to solve quite a lot of problems,” recalls Davison. “Michael was determined to not have any set changes, so the whole thing had to solve the problem of portraying the East German/West German idea. And in the dialogue, they kept saying, ‘I went upstairs.’ You knew you had to solve that problem, so the space evolved. I’m about to do a new Michael Frayn play at the National Theatre, which also has a lot of different locations, so we have the same problems coming up.”
When working on straight plays, Davison says that he likes to “create good spaces that I feel are appropriate to get the feel of the play.” For him, scenic design works best “when it helps the play to be presented in the best possible form.” He is also aware of technology’s benefits, and of the risk that it be overused.
“You just have to embrace it, don’t you?” says Davison. “You’ve got to learn as much about it as you can and try to integrate it into the piece. Sometimes it’s appropriate, and sometimes it isn’t. I think you can’t necessarily always have projection or whatever. When it works, it’s fantastic.”
With Is He Dead?, Davison has proven that a stripped-down, classical approach to theatrical set design can be just as effective as sounding all the bell and whistles, and it can be another effective character in the story.
