The Bedroom
Christopher Oram’s grand and elegant scenic design puts Brick and Maggie’s bed squarely in the middle of the semi-circular, open bedroom set that includes four sets of large doors with curtains but no walls to allow us to witness background action and furtive character movements transpiring in a nearby hallway and on the balustrade. Additionally, two staircases flanking the set lead under the stage, adding emphasis to the fact that this room is the top story of the house. It’s an interesting set variation that might actually have been more enclosed in its construction, as it was with the stylish 2008 revival. The Tony Award-winning scenic designer actually sees it differently.
“I consider what we’ve done to be an absolutely archetypal classic plantation house room,” Oram told PLSN. “It has scale, without a shadow of a doubt, and has grandeur and beauty — it’s at the heart of a 28,000-acre plantation. It’s not a suburban house in Detroit. Williams has a two-page note for the designer in the text explaining the room and explaining the characters. They obviously have resonance to him, to the writing of the play and also the characters it refers to — what they were, what they stood for and how they were at the heart of this plantation that Big Daddy then inherited.”
Oram is clearly passionate about Tennessee Williams and exuded enthusiasm when discussing this production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He mused that while many similar sets might have included a sofa, this one does not. He believes that audiences can use their imagination. “The resonance [of Cat] is what it is really about — being trapped,” he said. “Maggie refers to being in a cage, so it deliberately evokes a cage with this tall, vertical set. It’s got the huge mesh ceiling that is a spider web of traps, and they are at the heart of it. People ask why the bed is at the center of the room. Because the bed is at the heart of the play! Not the drinks cabinet, not the phone. Everyone is referring to it. Why would it not be there?”
“Fleet on its Feet”
The veteran scenic designer spent much of his early career working on thrust stages with audiences wrapped around on three sides, and what he learned in those situations is to minimize the furniture “because the minute you anchor some piece of furniture, particularly on a thrust stage, you might alienate at least a third or maybe two thirds of your audience because you’re always going to [have an actor] facing away from someone. If you’re standing up, you’re on your feet and moving around and can constantly flow and ebb, but the minute you plant a sofa on stage and sit on it, you’re sitting facing someone for sure but facing away from someone else.”
With that knowledge in mind, Oram has always felt that drama works better when it is “fleet on its feet.” He does not like the idea of placing a big sofa front and center and having actors plop down on it and deliver their lines. He likes his drama alive and alert, and Cat is a three-hour, three-act play with a lot of energy and narrative drive that he wanted to maintain. Oram stated that director Rob Ashford, whose sensibilities he feels sympathetic to and compatible with, understands the need for space, motion and energy, especially in a show like this.
Another way the scenic designer helped to generate onstage energy is by having the cast members mainly appear via the staircases, with Brick and Maggie sparingly coming and going through the bathroom entrance at stage right and characters occasionally entering from the small hallway at stage left or the balustrade at upstage center. “It’s about arrival energy,” stressed Oram. “This room is at the top of the house, and everyone who’s arrived has climbed a flight of stairs, including a [fictionally] pregnant cast member, and our younger and older cast members. It brings a different energy than just wandering in from the wings, and they’re deliberately designed not to be a grand entrance. When they’re watching fireworks, you get a sense that they’re at a higher level and get the light up from below them, which captures a sense that there’s a deeper world out there. The set runs very close to the back of the theater. It’s a shallow stage. It took a little bit of engineering downstairs, around the pillars and things like that, because you have to build a fire curtain around the bottom of the staircase with these fireproof boxes.”
Softly Framed
In terms of the feeling of the set, Oram always thought that it would be ghostly and slightly softer. He said that while Big Daddy is at the heart of the drama, this is a play of femininity, with Brick being a “slightly neutered man” and Maggie a “strong, powerful, sexual woman, so I felt that the space itself was always going to be slightly feminine, even soft features. The drapes and curtains were all going to be a part of it, both in the room and using it as a surround scape with the Spanish moss-painted drapes. That was something that hit me straight on.”
Oram appreciated having Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, which he thinks is a beautiful auditorium with a brilliant relationship to the stage. He noted the shallow and wide stage in a very wide but shallow auditorium forms “a beautiful circle. The shape of the room and the shape of the floor deliberately continues a circle of the auditorium, so if you drew a line around the seating, it would then bisect onto the stage and go around the back of the room and then pull back out again. It completes the arc, so that they are in the same circle onstage as the auditorium. They’re all part of that world. We deliberately break from the stage and don’t solidly frame it off. It’s soft framed to go out beyond that.”
The scenic designer said that the gray and mauve tones of the set are reflected in the grays of the auditorium. There is a harmony of color that connects the two spaces. Additionally, the raked stage is slightly tilted, which brings it down into the auditorium and thus brings the actors closer to the audience and vice versa. “It’s got that fantastic, steep auditorium rise, which is thrilling because it means that no one is far from the stage. They are wide across it, sure, but that was a design decision to dispense with walls so they could open up that playing area to those people that are [seated] on the sides.”
The construction of the bedroom set deliberately echoes the themes of the play. Every single floorboard is handcut, and according to Oram, they are all in different perspectives at different angles, and they’ve all been cut and laid. “They spent a good amount of time working on that,” he observed. “They all go to the same vanishing point in the center of each petal, which is slightly different from each other one, so every single one of them is hand cut to fit around that. There’s a lot of delicate joinery going on there as well, and I think if you sit upstairs you can see the petals with a bit more detail, which accentuates the heart and the bed in the center of the space.” Additionally, he chose to reinterpret a house where the characters in that room constantly feel like they are being eavesdropped on. Taking the metaphor of thin walls further, as he noted, they are not present at all here.
Oram estimated the height of the doors at 6 meters and the curtains at 10 meters. He said that the doors are nicely engineered and have “no right” to open and close, given how tall they are. He praised the construction work of ShowMotion and is thrilled with the finish on the paint.
“It looks beautiful [with] the soft branches and the Spanish moss and the slight haziness,” he declared. “I wanted to have the feeling of a daguerreotype, those old glass slides that are a bit cracked on the edge. It’s not a dead world. This is the joy of what Julie [Weiss] brought to the costuming. She understood the palette and the tone of the world and addressed it, and then when she needed to, she sharpened it so that [Gooper’s wife] Mae’s slightly acid pinks popped a little bit. She’s still harmonious with the world, but Maggie is entirely in that room with the beige dress in the beginning — which she looks fantastic in, because she has a fantastic figure — and the other dress is very sympathetic to the tones and colors of that world. I was very, very lucky because I’d not met her [Julie] before the show, and I think she’s done a beautiful job with beautiful clothes. They’re so in harmony with the space as well. It’s just so exciting for me.”
The scrim backdrop is also painted with mauves and grays, with a BP behind it with backlight coming in to make it glow during the fireworks scene. “It’s all hand painted,” stated Oram. “I believe wholly in the artistry of craftsmen and artisans. I think video as a scenic solution can work, but as a scenic cheat is not good. The same with printing and stuff like that. I would rather have a painter bring something human to one of those drops, which the guys did so beautifully. That’s a quality you would never get on a printed drop. You couldn’t have gotten a drop printed that big anyway, because it would have to have seams in it and would look ugly. I was very lucky and thrilled with it. Bill Mensching’s shop did a beautiful job.”
Completing the Picture
Oram also praised his associate scenic designer Tim Mackabee, who shepherded the show when his boss was elsewhere. “He’s been completely brilliant because he’s American and speaks American [English],” said Oram half-jokingly. “I’m pretty good these days. I know what a soft good is and what a scrim is. He’s the native speaker and understands all of these things, and he’s a brilliant collaborator.”
Further, the scenic designer was not spare in his praise for his frequent collaborators of many years, sound designer Adam Cork and lighting designer Neil Austin. “I consider my work to be incomplete without Neil and without Adam adding their layers of texture and color to it,” he declared, adding of the show: “I think Neil has designed a beautiful lightscape that charts the journey of an evening with that golden light shot through those blinds. It captures her as she looks out, and it’s absolutely rapturous and absolutely beautiful. Then it quietly, slowly shifts around slowly into the evening, and you get this little rumble of a life out of the back with the cicadas and the fireworks. And the spirituals at the end bring out this magic. Maggie lives, but she’s desperately trying to conjure and invoke that child inside her, and you get that magical realism. This is the spirit of that plantation, those two people wanting life to carry on in that room. The floor is a flower-shaped thing, and these petals are at the heart of it. It’s the energy of the room. It’s about rebirth. It’s about trying to make it work. That’s the energy of the play. Who knows what happens afterward with Brick and Maggie, but the way she gets on her knees and invokes the child as he pushes his head against her belly and enunciates it — it’s thrilling and drama at its best.”
