Parker played the bereaved widow who had been in an extended period of mourning while her two college age sons, her aunt, their friends, and their Russian housekeeper coped with their own personal problems; among them, a quiet sibling rivalry that finally bubbled to the surface and the reality of the debt that the father left them with. Such an intense show required a striking set, and Tony Award-winning scenic designer John Lee Beatty delivered that.
Exteriors and Interiors
What immediately stood out about Beatty’s design was how the exteriors and interiors blended together by having trees planted on the far sides of the stage organically fitting into the house. It actually looked and felt very natural to have those two worlds mesh together in that fashion, especially when one or both of the house sets slid off stage to reveal the marsh and forest beyond.
“It actually started because we were all perplexed by the script because it goes so many places so quickly,” Beatty tells PLSN. “Dan Sullivan, the director, said we couldn’t do the big outdoor scene where they’re shooting geese in the marsh as a drop or anything like that. He felt that just wasn’t going to work for him, so I started that way. The backstage is very small, so I had to be very quick on my toes to figure out a scenic scheme that could get enough scenery on and off. That’s how I came up with the double jackknife instead of a revolve, because I wanted to have the illusion of an open stage for the shooting scene. I worked backwards in design. It was quite a challenge in that small space.”
Luckily for Beatty, he has done a number of shows in the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, including The Columnist and Good People. He does not think he could have pulled this staging off in a new space, especially as The Snow Geese presented many different challenges.
“The gorilla in the room is that it’s neo-Chekhovian, but of course, being American, it is a little more grounded in reality,” explains Beatty. “You can’t quite do neo-Chekhovian and have someone doing dishes in the sink, so it was Chekhovian but with a realistic American twist. It was kind of brought back from the brink from being totally Chekhovian, and I had to provide realistic elements for the actors to use, although the set evolved as we went along because the script was a little bit amorphous. Oddly, he [writer Sharr White] was quite specific about being near the pond shooting geese but not so specific about which part of the house we were in from moment to moment, although there a lot of demands including a dining table, the kitchen sink, and other things.”
Sullivan invented the gun cabinet after work started on the production. It was originally going to be a bookcase, but Beatty says they realized that they needed to get the themes of the guns and the shooting of the geese in earlier. “It’s one of the rare plays where you can actually introduce a gun early in the play, and it helps you rather than hurts you,” elaborates the designer. “The old rule [is] you don’t show a gun unless you’re going to kill someone. But in this one, the gun was so important and the symbolic shooting of the geese was so important that we had to introduce it early.”
Jackknifed House Set
Beatty cleverly used a jackknife approach for a two-pronged interior house set. The living room and kitchen were separate set pieces, and they slid in two different configurations. In the first, the living room, with its towering, standalone windows and staircase, dominated the stage after sliding on from stage right, with the adjacent kitchen visible to the side at stage left. In the second, the kitchen slid on first from stage left, followed by the adjoining living room appearing in the background at stage right, allowing us a view of both rooms while letting the kitchen be the focus.
“That was the response to the script,” remarks Beatty of his scenic plan. “The author was going to change the way we were looking at the house. It was the layering idea that in one scene we actually play it as if you could be outside in the kitchen or in the living room in different layers going back. It actually led us into some of the projection ideas as well. Dan drove the car. Once we talked about how the geese thing was being done, he wanted to go for projections, and once that was on board, the possibilities opened up. He had a very strong vision of what he thought the gathering of the geese looked like, which was a relief to me because I had only the vaguest notion. I actually heard it more than I saw it, and he definitely wanted to see it, so that brought on a projection designer.”
Projection, Lighting and Set Design
Beatty, who worked with Snow Geese projection designer Rocco DiSanti previously on The Columnist (also directed by Sullivan), learned that “unbeknownst to the director, the projection devices that we can use are a set designer’s friends in ways that the audience and the director might not know.” The duo used projections on The Columnist to boost the color of the wallpaper in certain scenes without the director even knowing it. “He wanted an intensely red room, and the room needed to be able to fade out so we could concentrate on a certain event. By having red wallpaper with a red projection, you can mask out the doors and windows so that nobody was aware a projection was on.”
For The Snow Geese, Beatty designed a field scrim backdrop of trees and woods, and then he designed an almost matching sharktooth scrim of a different pattern that went in front of it. “In between that, there were lights and some pieces of transparent fabric chopped up,” he adds. “Downstage of that, there were borders of transparent fabric. The lighting designer [Japhy Weideman] did an excellent job. I had worked with him before, and you could hardly tell what was lighting or what was scenery at a certain point. On top of that, I gave Rocco the elevation for the backdrop, and he took that and processed it himself so that in certain scenes you’re seeing the set designer, the lighting designer, and the projection designer working together, and I don’t think you can tell what’s what. I think some people thought things that were projected were indeed painted, and I think things that they thought were painted were actually projections.”
The trees themselves, whether prop or painted, also benefited from this scenic synergy. “The painted ones actually changed their nature,” reveals Beatty. “Rocco was very clever about where it stopped and started. Sometimes there was a projection that almost exactly matched the woods and had shifts of color in it. The thing I loved the most as the set designer was a product called Whirlwind. It had some sheer borders cut in tree patterns. They’re very sheer and made out of what looks like woven spider web. I had four layers of Whirlwind, which is non-woven so it doesn’t moiré as borders, because I wanted to soften the way in and out of the drops. It turns out that we could project little bits of broken up, mysterious projected things along the edges of those as well. You think it’s a projection, but it can’t be because it seems three-dimensional. It was very confusing to the eye, and that’s exactly what we wanted.”
A Touch of Mystery
The original image that inspired this tree look came from a pottery vase that Beatty’s mother bequeathed to him and which had been a wedding present to her and his father around 1911. “I used that image, which has this weird, beautiful painted glaze. It was a mysterious take on woods and marshy lakes. I wanted to keep the mystery going. The painting was mysterious in itself, but to get that funny, translucent depth of field was the whole idea to involve this three-dimensional method.”
For architectural inspiration, Beatty studied Adirondack lodges, especially as there are many found in upstate New York. He literally Googled “land north of Syracuse” since the script specified the setting as a hunting lodge in that town. “I found a picture of a state park that I burned into my own and everyone else’s memory of where it took place, and then I just put in the Adirondack architecture style from these hunting lodges all over upstate New York,” he says. “The trees themselves are three-dimensional trees that are actually made of, believe it or not, patterned coir. It’s a woven carpet that has been flecked with gold paint and different colors of paint, so the trees are not trees at all. Even the wood on stage that truly looked like grained wood was actually scene painted.” There was not a lot of actual wood onstage, except for the floor, the carved stairway railing, and the windows and cabinet, which were wood underneath and scenic-painted not stained.
Other materials used onstage included coir carpet, MDF, one by, and some metal and carved foam. “Nothing on the stage ever seemed quite what it was,” says Beatty. “Inside of the windows themselves gave the illusion of glass. We had computer printed sheer organdy printed with the tree patterns on it. It really confused the eye.”
Design Challenges
Beatty says The Snow Geese was a hard show to design. He was never quite sure where scenes took place, and the show went through a couple of versions as he and Sullivan worked out where and when scene changes transpired. The two of them went through the final set thoroughly.
The designer reports that Sullivan is a very trusting director when it comes to the largest issues, but becomes very hands on when it comes to specific details. The gun case, for example, was the director’s idea. Originally, he did not think the guns were very visible, so Beatty painted them in metallic paint to make them stand out more. But Sullivan was still unconvinced, so Beatty removed the glass from the case, then installed a light in the case and finally adding a stuffed bird and a gun atop the case.
A Quirky Space
The wing space and the offstage area in the Friedman are asymmetrical — on one side, the wall slants upstage offstage, and on the other, it slants upstage onstage.
“It has a shelf upstage so that the stage house takes a radical drop about 24 feet upstage, and there’s an alcove underneath,” describes Beatty. “The back wall is also not parallel to the footlights either. There’s a fairly short drop hanging on an angle, so you can do the math and see what masking nightmare happens. I upholstered the scenery to the offstage space that I had and made the architecture work once it got on stage. Everything was designed backwards from the wing space on stage. It’s a very difficult backstage — deep and crooked.”
While Beatty had designed a double jackknife at Lincoln Center around 20 years ago, through The Snow Geese, he learned a lot about fitting it into the space. “On the downside, we also had stuff coming up from the basement,” he recalls. “When you cut clearances that close, it’s incredibly time-consuming and frustrating work — we would miss something by an inch and then have to go back and saw it off, or chop something up a little. When you’re that close, everybody’s job gets harder. Lighting has to be more precise in where it aims, and we’re making tremendous amounts of fitting decisions all day long. It took quite a while before the show could actually function and work as effortlessly as it finally did. On the last rehearsal of the last day, we were still working on the projections.
“In a new play, you’re rewriting the play as well, so we were constantly restructuring the play,” continues Beatty. “The play that opened three weeks after the first preview was radically different than what was seen on the first night. We kept working and working the transitions to make the storytelling and the technical [aspects] all melt together.”
