Scenic designer Scott Pask is admittedly a perfectionist. When PLSN called him to discuss his work on the new Martin McDonagh play A Behanding in Spokane, he was examining a set piece on the new musical Promises, Promises. "I'm on stage," he reveals. "We'll talk, but I'm kind of looking at something as well. So if I break away for a second, forgive me." This is a polite but unnecessary disclaimer. It actually takes a matter of moments to work out what he is doing, and then the passionate Pask is ready to chat in-depth about Spokane. But that moment emphasizes how he is committed to his work at every phase of creation. The Philospophy of Grunge
McDonagh's latest drama is a dark and grisly play that follows in the footsteps of The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It stars Christopher Walken as a middle-aged man who has been seeking the hand that was severed during a cruel assault on train tracks nearly 50 years ago. He is confronting and holding hostage a young couple (Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazen) who claim to have found his hand but are lying about it. They are scamming him to supplement their income as drug dealers. This deception sets into motion a violent chain of events that involve a rather emotionally detached hotel employee (Sam Rockwell) who helps the characters all see the folly of their foibles. The four-person play takes place entirely in a grungy hotel room that Pask took great pains to create.
"However grubby or decrepit Behanding looks, it takes that eye for exacting details to get it that way because there's nothing general about that set," declares Pask, whose extensive credits include The Coast Of Utopia, Hair and 9 To 5. "It's all incredibly specific. There's just a lot of thought and a philosophy that goes into a set like that. It's presented in a very theatrical fashion, but once the curtain is pulled it's very real, even though it's macabre, and the whole atmosphere is heightened to give you that sense of suspense. And in a way it has a kind of Gothic quality about it."
Seeing Spokane is certainly an intense experience. The set is covered up by a tattered, battered stage curtain that is set up on a primitive looking wheel and pulley device. There is a small thrust set a few inches lower than the main stage, on which is placed a ragtag assortment footlights of different shapes and sizes. The bottom of the set is exposed to reveal the cross-section of wood beams underneath, as if the crew had ripped out this hotel room and transplanted it into the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. Before the curtain even opens it's obvious it's going to be something off-the-wall. The first image the audience sees is Walken brooding, sitting on a bed, with a closed closet rattling, as if someone is trying to get free.
"For every little detail I wanted to reinforce this macabre atmosphere, and it just all builds to the moment when the curtain is revealed and Chris is sitting there," explains Pask, who also did the costume design for the show. "There's this kind of symbiosis with him and his world. Doing the clothes as well on this one was really important to me for this one because he's such a part of the world, even though it's not his room. Those are the kind of places he's been haunting for 47 years, trying to make these deals, trying to find his hand. Some are nicer than others, but this is the kind of underbelly that he's been living with for this long, and it's just natural to him. He picks up the phone to call his mom — everything is fine, everything is the same old same old, he's waiting for his hand. But for me that curtain track in a way also represented a bit of the story, where it has its genesis in the train tracks, just that there's some reference to that. The violence that rips the hotel room out is certainly a nod to the severing of the hand, the kind of guillotine it would've taken to sever the room and have all those splinters and edges."
Tracking the Decay
A lot of work clearly went into this unglamorous set to make it look weathered and highly trafficked. While the musical Memphis also utilized cracked plaster facades for the older buildings its characters inhabit, the ominous Spokane needed to feel grittier and look grimier. "I don't like scenic decay," admits Pask, who originally studied architecture before going into theatre. "I want it to be real. There's a big difference between theatrical decay and having it look like there's literally years of use, and it's all done in an exacting, architectural way. Instead of just covering a set with willy-nilly broken plaster and whatever, I had the timeline in my head of how the decay all happened in that room. The script says it takes place in a hotel room. Actually, I think it even says motel room. There was a period of time where I had to describe to Martin that motels are this and hotels are this, and he kind of had imagined it in something more abandoned, like a bigger place. I felt that this was a Midwestern town, like Dayton or Dubuque or something with a D, that had at its city center a kind of landmark hotel that was built at the turn-of-the-century. It was probably the tallest building in town, and it had a regality about it. That's the thing that had over the years had built up the decay. The industrialization left the town, and it became more bleak and lost much of its elegance, but the detail was there — the crown moldings, the florets in the ceiling where the chandelier comes down, and now it's replaced with a pendant lamp."
Pask added in many flourishes to create a room that felt old yet minimally updated for modern use. He notes that there is 19th-century wallpaper laid beneath the renovated wallpaper the hotel put up. He adds that the closet at stage left feels shoved into the cover by the door and was added in years after the hotel was built, "modernized with a piece of drywall shoved in there." At stage right is a large window, outside of which is visible the bottom part of the exterior hotel sign to show that the room is on the third floor. The sign is visible to audience members at stage left.
The double hung sash window at stage right with panels approximately 2.5 feet by 6 inches by 3 feet – through which Walken exits early on, then comes crashing through later in the play – is made of a type of sugar glass and is replaced partway through when Rockwell comes out to deliver a monologue, and the curtain closes. This changeover happens because the sugar glass is "very, very fragile and it does break in shards," says Pask. "It was designed when I figured out the structure of the play. I knew that I could use this certain type of glass that would shatter better. Once the curtain is pulled, we replace the pane in the glass really, really quietly. It has aging on it to make it look like stains in the rain. It is a change of material that goes in every night at that moment when Sam's talking. You can't really open and close that window [with sugar glass] because it could potentially shatter. And Chris has to open the window to exit [in the first part of the play]. We really calibrated all of those little things."
Vaudeville Moment
During the monologue by Rockwell's hotel manager character, the unusual stage design is further emphasized with the odd floodlights helping to illuminate him. "I needed to do something with the stage itself, so I put in a ratty stage floor that's on a rake that we designed and built in the shop," says Pask. "We aged all the boards and painted them so they'd been salt stained and had been there forever, and I came up with the idea for all of those different footlights. They all look like they're ripped out of the hotel bathrooms in a way. They are all of these different bathroom fixtures, and we put cages on some of them. Some are little more industrial. The idea was taking elements from the hotel and of that period, when it was probably in its heyday in the 1930s or 1940s, and then array them on the floor for Sam. It becomes almost a vaudeville moment when he comes on to give us his monologue. But when we walk in the room, the thing that was really important to me was the whole idea of what's behind the curtain, and gives us a sense of atmosphere from the top, so it's not some blank house curtain. It's actually a fabric that you would never use for a curtain in the theatre, this brocade floral print in gold that looks that it's been through the war. It's more referential to the hotel's vocabulary than it is to anything else, and it is just tattered and aged and worn.
"I wanted a kind of aggressive, macabre gesture even to get the room on stage, so I almost took a chainsaw to rip it out of the building and plop it on the stage, which is why there are all those splinters on the beams and the sawdust is preserved inside the studs and everything," notes Pask. "There's actual brick that's been sawed through that make up all those walls. [For] the ceiling above, there's the carpet from the room above on top of it. Five people probably see it. There's this incredible level of detail about the room. I want it to be an absolutely real experience, but I also want the fourth wall to have a theatricality about it as well."
The Gift of Paint
Pask praises the work of painter Steve Purtee and the shop that built the set, ShowMotion, who did Hair and A Steady Rain with him. "Steve is an incredibly gifted painter, and in a way he is a hero to me," proclaims Pask. The designer wanted to give the ceiling the feeling of having years and years of paint and different finishes and rust and plaster falling. "There are hairline cracks that permeate the whole place, and even the wallpaper is curling and has water stains. The whole thing is about giving it layers and giving it life, and that's why we got this 19th-century wallpaper to put behind it in places where the new stuff had been torn away. The painters are spectacular."
Once the set was in the theatre, three painters spent a day on scaffolding, rolling around and doing another elaborate pass on the ceiling. A lot of attention was paid to those surfaces. Pask notes that there is a heat grate on the wall that looks there has been dust and dirt coming out of it for years. "In a room like that, I'm really conscious of even going around that with that suitcase stand and bashing it against the wall so it look it's been there for a while," he adds. "That's got ripped webbing on it. I also went through and scuffed walls with my shoes because behavior has happened in there. The one thing I always try to bring to the work is authenticity. With the doorknobs, there's grease [accumulated] from hands over the years from the locking and opening of it. It's not a well-maintained place, so the layers add to the detailed vision that appears once that curtain is yanked over to the side."
In the end, Pask's attention to detail paid off and added extra atmosphere to an already potent theatrical work. And it is not the first time he has tackled a work of such emotional and visual intensity. This is his third play with McDonagh, following The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. "It's been fantastic," Pask says of his collaboration with the acclaimed and controversial playwright. "I treasure the work that I get to do with Martin. It's a real dream to work with the most admired playwright, and to be a friend of his is great. I feel like I can understand what opportunity there is in the world of his storytelling, and our collaboration is one I most value. John Crowley, who I think is his most gifted interpreter and director, is so special. John is just an incredibly gifted director. It's hard to talk about it more because it is something that you can't even believe that you have, this amazing relationship.
"Cracking a play for the first time is a thrill," declares Pask. "When it's Martin's, it's like the greatest gift in the world of theatre to me."
