Short-Order Service
“I don’t know whether it was that the money came together late or getting them all to commit to doing it came late, but we crunched out really fast,” recalls Yeargan. The design phase took three weeks, and construction took about a month. “It was really fun to do. [Director] Gregory [Mosher] said he just wanted the house, not an interpretation, so I researched it and looked at pictures from Scranton, and off we went.”
The original 1972 production — about a group of four championship high school basketball players in Pennsylvania attending their annual reunion with their proud coach, only this time to discover some uncomfortable truths about themselves and their community — was designed by Santo Loquasto — “It was very real, and the set that put Santo on the map” — but Yeargan chose not to follow the floorplan contained in the Samuel French edition of the play.
“I just went from the stage directions and read it,” the designer reveals. “I’ve been in a few houses like that, and the staircase was important. When I started researching it, I thought, ‘Boy, this is an awful fancy house for Scranton.’ Nowadays with the Internet you can look at real estate agents who are selling houses. Sure enough, there are a bunch of those houses, and the idea was that this is the coach’s mother’s house that he inherited from her, so that’s why it’s like this Victorian Queen Anne house.”
Yeargan notes that his stage design differed from what Loquasto had designed. The original production had a staircase on stage left and made a podium on stage left. In this version, the staircase was upstage center. The original production had a bay window at stage right with a window seat and a door at the upper right. This incarnation had the reverse. Additionally, Yeargan tried to inject a contemporary sensibility over the period room. And while the original script called for guns to be mounted on a gun rack on the wall, “ it feels like such a loaded prop then,” notes Yeargan, “that something is going to happen with those guns. Somehow by putting them in the gun case, it diffused that a little bit.”
Authentic Props
When PLSN got a tour of the set after one performance, we found plenty of authentic props, like issues of TV Guide and American Rifleman from the 1970s along with beer cans covered in Schlitz labels provided by the original brewer. While most people will not even notice these items onstage, Yeargan stresses that it is important the props be right for the actor and the show and help to create the right vibe onstage. The most unusual prop that people will not know about is an urn that contains the ashes of the play’s late writer Jason Miller, the father of co-star Jason Patric (who performs with the powerhouse cast of Brian Cox, Chris Noth, Jim Gaffigan and Kiefer Sutherland).
“That was quite a moment,” recalls Yeargan. “Jason is very close to this play and has sort of spearheaded the revival. At first he had some little things he wanted to put around [the set], then one day he turned up with the urn. He asked if I’d feel queasy about it, and I said, ‘No, where did he want to put it?’ Gregory said we should put it up high in the cabinet at the back, and that’s what we did. We had to be sure to tell the prop man not to throw them away at the end of the run.”
Collecting the props was a bit of a challenge as the set was being developed over the Christmas holidays and most of them came from eBay. Yeargan and his associates scrambled to get the props there because they wanted the cast to have them for the first day of rehearsal. “If you don’t get the furniture in the room while they’re rehearsing, it causes all sorts of problems when they rehearse and you give them different furniture [later], so we wanted them to have the real pieces. There were a lot of upholstery changes and things that had to happen while they were previewing. We felt there so many Catholic references — it was a Catholic school and all of that — and the final touch was to put in the calendar with all the religious holidays on it.”
A Short Commute
Yeargan, who teaches at Yale, lives up in Milford, CT, only 20 minutes from Bridgeport, CT-based Global Scenic Services, and he was able to visit frequently and check on construction of the set. “I think it took about a month to build it, including the painting and finding the period wallpaper. Fortunately there is a lot of home renovation and restoration going on that we were able to find a lot of those moldings without having to build them from scratch, which really helped a lot.” The Championship set is constructed out of wood, and the spandrel is made entirely of cherry wood, made by Vintage Woodworks.
The impressive staircase, which heads up towards stage right and seemingly into an unseen second floor, posed a quandary for one of the stars. “The big problem is that Jason has to fall down that staircase every night, so there was a lot of padding and some coats thrown over the railing that conceal more padding in case he crashes into it,” explains Yeargan. “I got a call a couple weeks ago asking if we could add another spindle on the downstage section of the stairs because his foot was going through and catching it, and they didn’t want him to break his ankle.”
Yeargan praises fight director Rick Sordelet, who offered advice on the design of the staircase. For example, there is a rubber tread that could be put on the stairs in place of a wooden tread. “There was a lot of stuff we were able to build in before even put the carpet on there to give more flex to it, which is great for Jason falling,” says Yeargan. “I don’t how he does it. He’s a pretty athletic guy, but he’s pretty banged up from falling every night. Plus he’s such a nice guy, your heart just goes out to him, but he was very appreciative and wanted it to look good. He said he could deal with it and work it out.”
One of the nice touches on the set is a small hallway in front of the staircase that leads to a door that is never used. Yeargan notes that most of those Victorian houses had a central entrance hall and stairs. “Opening off on one side is the living room, and in this case we put the dining room beyond it, so that door probably went back into a pantry and into the kitchen. I’ve been in a house that was like that. When we designed it, we thought it would be great for them to have, but it turned out they really didn’t need it. They used the dining room entrance more often because it was downstage, I suppose. It just creates a sense of a larger house.”
Muting a Scene-Stealer
When asked if he learned something new on the show, the designer immediately replied, “Never do a sofa that has a light color on stage. We found all that stuff on eBay, and when it came in we loved the color. It was kind of a dusty light blue stripe that looked terrific in the rehearsal room, and we liked the mismatched quality that it had, but when we put it on stage under these halogen lights, it was like a beacon because it was so bright. We literally had it send it out on a Sunday and got it back on a Tuesday re-covered in a darker tone, so then you could focus on the people. We found an upholstery fabric that was like a dark red. That was a big lesson for me.”
“I’ve done interiors before, but it’s been a long time because I’ve been doing musicals and operas,” admits Yeargan. “That’s the most obvious thing that should come to your mind, but it was so much fun [dealing] with ideas and figuring out who these people were. I sat in on a lot of rehearsals and listened to the play, and we talked afterwards. The trophy was a big problem, trying to find one that had a certain scale that it needed to be in and was the right style because all the trophies now feel like plastic covered with some sort of Mylar to give a shine to it. Gregory was determined that we would have that at the beginning, so we were racing around because they wanted to do a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for Vogue.”
Yeargan says he looked at every trophy place in New York City and even went online during his quest but disliked everything he saw. Then a chance visit to Brooks Brothers found him before an eye-catching trophy display. Mosher was coming to visit him, so the designer dragged the director there. They agreed that they had found what they needed, complements of Brooks Brothers.
“It’s funny that stuff like that that you think is so easy becomes the problem,” observes Yeargan. “I guess there’s no such thing as a simple show. With sets like that, even if there’s not a lot of scene changes and it’s one set, everything is there and has to be right. There’s no cheating. I think people underestimate the time it takes to do something like that.”
