Oklahoma--Scene Design

Show Button for Oklahoma

Oklahoma, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II was produced Spring Semester, 2007 in the Snow Drama Theatre at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Synopsis
Oklahoma is widely considered the first modern musical.  It begins with Curly singing, Oh What A Beautiful Morning as he prepares to call on Laurie.  They tease one another in their courtship ritual and Laurey ends up accepting an offer to the box social from Jud Fry, the obsessive farmhand.  She does this to spite Curly.

At the box social, there is an auction for the lunch baskets the girls have made and Curly sells his saddle, his horse and his gun to earn enough money to win Laurey's basket so she will not have to be with Jud. 

At the end of the barn raising and box social, Jud confronts Laurey and she fires him.  He threatens her but finally leaves.  Curly and Laurie marry three weeks later and Jud shows up at the wedding and attempts to kill Curly.  Jud is killed in the process and the justice of the peace who has just performed the wedding proclaims it was self defense.  Curly and Laurey ride off at the end in the pretty little surrey with the fringe on the top.

There are several sub-plots but since this is such a well known piece I will not list them here.

Concept
As the design team met together, we agreed that the concept of Oklahoma would be a hand tinted, sepia toned photograph.  I remembered as a young boy, a lady in our neighborhood, whose husband was a photographer, hand tinted black and white photographs.  I had the privilege of watching her do it one day.  She would mix paint on a dinner plate and then using her finger as a brush she would rub the paint gently on the photograph.  The photos had a soft and nostalgic quality that I have never forgotten.

That meant that the colors of the scenery, costumes and lighting would need to be dulled and faded.

As we discussed the show and the concept, I suggested we create the set in forced perspective to simulate the wide open spaces of Oklahoma.

We decided to do most of the scene changes in front of the audience and it became important to us to show the scene changes in Act I as if the audience was a camera and it was panning across Laurey's property.

To recap, the concept became:
1.  Hand Tinted Photograph
2.  Forced Perspective
3.  Scene Changes Pan

Execution
I drew a set of thumbnail sketches in 1/8" = 1'-0" scale of what I thought our production of Oklahoma ought to look like.  After they were approved, I drew them again in 1/4" = 1'-0" scale.  Because the scene changes were going to be so important, for the first time in my career I storyboarded them.

Thumbnails Act I and first scene change
Also idea for corn rig

Thumbnails showing Act I Scene 2 plus scene change
Another idea for a corn rig

More thumbnails for Acts I and II

I decided to use portals to define the space rather than just the black curtains.  I chose portals for both practical and artistic reasons.  Portals are useful in the Snow Drama Theatre because the proscenium is very wide and it is a difficult theatre to mask the backstage area from the audience.  The portals we used were eight feet wide, which we then flanked with the black curtains.

The portals were painted in a sepia tone, but the inside edges were painted in ecru and the border was painted irregularly to abstract the deckled edge of an old photograph.  Each portal was designed to be smaller than the one in front of it as well to establish the forced perspective.

In the original drawings, I had Laurey's house on stage left.  As I worked through the design, I switched it to stage right.  I felt it balanced the picture to place it stage right, plus it facilitated the panning scene changes much better.

Act I Scene 1--Laurey's house

Act I Scene 1

Laurey's house was built in two pieces.  The porch piece detached and exited between portals one and two.  The rear of the house exited behind portal three.  The window up above was practical and Laurie called to Curly from it.  The forced perspective was achieved first by the portals in descending size, and second with the corn.  We created a cornfield by covering a sheet of plywood with blue foam, carving it into rows and "planting corn" in it.  The cornfield moved by embedding inline skate wheels into the plywood to give it a very low profile.  In the back, between the cyc and the scrim we created another cornfield, but the corn on that one was much smaller to simulate that it was in the distance.  There was a small windmill behind the scrim as well.

Full size corn in foreground, small size corn and windmill in the back behind the scrim



Windmill and corn behind scrim and groundrow

The corn by the henhouse

I made the corn by gutting about thirty Tiki torches I had purchased at Big Lots for about a dollar apiece.  I walked the canals and ditches around the countryside for cattail leaves and helped my brother thin his iris and collected those leaves as well.  My students and I then attached the iris and cattail leaves up the bamboo pole with green floral tape, then we created the tassels from floral picks I bought at a Christmas clearance sale and finally painted them with Design Master spray paints.  When the corn was finished, we sleeved it into holes in the blue foam.  The ASM called the corn wagon the giant skateboard.  We happened to have a stuffed raccoon, so I placed it in the cornfield.  Why not?

Rocky Raccoon

Act I Scene 2--The Smokehouse

Act I Scene 2

The Smokehouse set was designed in more extreme forced perspective than the farmhouse.  The walls splayed and the exposed timbers up top were spread like fingers across the stage.  The lighting designer backlit this for great effect.  We covered the walls with a combination of tools and implements and cut-out girly pictures from the Police Gazette.

Because I wished to simulate the camera panning across the property for these scene changes, I designed a window on the stage right side of the smokehouse, on the same wall as Jud's bed, to suggest that Jud would try to look at Laurey's window from his.  Made him that much creepier to me. 

Act I Scene 3--The Grove

Act I Scene 3

The trees turned out to be one of my favorite scenic elements in the play.  Originally, they were supposed to track across the stage during the scene change, but that proved too costly so we flew them instead.  It proved to be a pretty scene change because we had hidden stagehands behind the smokehouse that dragged it off while the trees flew in.

I designed the trees to be flat and flown, and the trunks were two dimensional but painted to appear three dimensional.  I wished the tops of the trees to be textured to catch the light, so we purchased a great deal of silk ficus foliage and stapled it up and covered them.  The lighting designer skimmed them with sidelight and it turned out to be very beautiful.

When Laurey collapsed in the grove, the ballet began and we flew the trees out.  The ballet is a dream sequence and all went to bare stage with a lighted cyc.  At the end, Richard Clifford, the director just wanted the red rag to fly in for intermission.  I requested we add a fly cue and bring the grove back in before the rag flew to re-establish reality for Laurey.  We tried it, we liked it.  I think it was the correct choice.

The Ballet

Act II Scene 1--The Barn Raising

Act II Scene 1

At the top of the act, we saw several of the townsmen with poles, pushing the front section of the barn vertical.  I designed three barn pieces in forced perspective.  The section down front was the largest and each one was successively smaller.  We also found paper lanterns in two sizes and had a string of the larger ones on the second frame and the smaller ones on the third frame.  All contributing to the idea of forced perspective.

Using poles to raise the barn

Act II Scene 2--The Skidmore Ranch

Act II Scene 2

The Skidmore Ranch scene is where Jud swears his love to Laurey who rebuffs him.  Jud grows angry and she fires him.  Curly saves her finally confesses his love to her.  He proposes, she accepts.

This was a simple scene with a corner of the ranch house on stage right with a flower garden wagon (made the same way as the great corn skateboard), a bench and a coal fired stove.  The scene was at night and we flew in a moonbox and a star drop behind the black scrim.

Act II Scene 3--The French Scene

Act II Scene 3

The scene change between the Skidmore Ranch and Laurey's place is the most involved change in the show, and Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a delightful little scene to facilitate that change.  It involves Ado Annie, Will Parker and Ali Hakim.  It also involves a lot of kissing.

We chose to utilize the French scene as intended and dropped an act curtain in front of the scene change and placed a section of fence in front of it.  When the French scene was finished we raised the act curtain and were back at Laurey's place for the wedding, the death of Jud Fry and the grand finale.

Act II Scene 4--Back at Laurey's place

Act II Scene 4

This scene was much like the scene at the top of the show, except the cornfield was gone and there was different outdoor furniture to facilitate the wedding.  There was a table in front of Laurey's house and another makeshift table for gifts made of planks and crates.

After the death of Jud, Curly is found not guilty by a jury of his peers and he and Laurey ride off in the pretty little surrey with the fringe on the top.  I happened to have a colleague on campus who collects surreys and wagons.  He loaned us one of his for the run of the show. 

The pretty little surrey with the fringe on the top, drawn by six strong men

A few thoughts on scene changes
The original idea or concept for the scene changes was to have the scenes change in full view of the audience magically.  For example, we have a turntable on the Snow Drama Theatre stage and I originally wanted the smokehouse to be dragged into place by the turntable.  I wanted it to begin with the back of the smokehouse to the audience, be dragged into place by cables mounted on the turntable and brought to the front and turned around by the turntable. 

It would have been really spectacular if we had been able to manage that.

I also wished the grove to be dragged across the stage from stage left to stage right as if the camera had continued to pan across the property.

Both of those scene changes would have been costly to do and complicated to engineer.  Add to the fact that the sequence of scenes in act II don't lend themselves to spectacular scene changes and reality set in.  We do not have a Broadway sized budget at BYU-Idaho.

As a designer, I was faced with the decision, "Do I spend my money on the scenes or do I spend my money on the scene changes?"  The answer was obvious.

I enjoyed working on this production of Oklahoma.  We had a great design team and all of us were together on the concept.  This was a true pleasure for me.

Production Details
Directed by Richard Clifford
Scene Design by Gary Benson
Costume Design by Susan Whitfield
Lighting Design by Ray Versluys
Sound Design by Antonia Clifford
Technical Director:  Ray Versluys
Costume Shop Director:  Patty Randall

Phèdre--Costume and Lighting Design

Phèdre cast

Phèdre, by Jean Racine was produced Winter Semester, 2012 in the Snow Black Box Theatre at BYU-Idaho.  Euripedes first treated this material in his play, Hippolytus which was performed in 428 bc.  In 1677 ad, Racine wrote a neo-classical format version of the story and called it Phèdre.  His version introduced a love triangle.  In 2009 a Ted Hughes, free verse translation was produced at the Royal National Theatre in England.  This was the script we used.

Synopsis
Theseus, the king of Athens is missing and presumed dead.  His son, Hippolytus has been living in Troezen as a "jailer" to the Princess Aricia who is the last remaining heir of the royal house Theseus defeated to come to power.  Theseus will not allow her to marry because he believes she will bear a child with a claim on the throne, but he also does not wish to kill her.

Hippolytus confides to his manservant and best friend, Theramenes that he is in love with Aricia and wants to leave because it is in direct conflict with his father's order.  With his father's apparent death, though Hippolytus becomes king of Troezen and resolves to free Aricia of the barbaric law his father set.

Phèdre, enters with her bodyservant, Oenone.  She is very ill and reveals she has been slowly poisoning herself because of some sin she has committed.  Through the scene we learn the sin she is guilty of is being in love with her stepson, Hippolytus.  Oenone convinces her that now Theseus is dead, her love of his son is no longer wrong and she should confess to him.

Hippolytus confesses his love to Aricia when he frees her and tells her he will not seek to press his claim to the throne of Athens but instead would support her claim over Phèdre's son's.  Aricia has been secretly in love with Hippolytus for some time and tells her friend and confidant Ismene.  All seems to be well.

As he tries to take leave of Phèdre, she confesses her love for him and he leaves, horrified.  In the process he leaves his sword behing.  At that moment, Panope, the messenger enters and says that the dead king is not dead and has returned and will be at the palace in a short time.  Phèdre, not wishing to face her shame gives Oenone permission to tell the king whatever she will.

Theseus helm

Theseus returns to a family in disarray.  No one seems at all glad to see him.  He is perplexed and wishes he were back in the dungeon from which he escaped.  Oenone lies and tells him Hippolytus made advances on Phèdre and had attempted to dishonor him.  Her evidence is the sword that Hippolytus left behind when he fled.  Theseus is enraged.

He confronts Hippolytus, who denies any wrongdoing except that he is in love with Aricia against his father's wishes.  Theseus thinks that is a ploy to divert his guilt and calls down a curse against him from Neptune, who incidentally owes him a favor.  Hippolytus leaves.

Phèdre, upon hearing of the curse, confronts Oenone and learns what she has done and casts her out.  Oenone does what any self respecting servant would do in this situation and casts herself off a cliff into the sea.

Hippolytus and Aricia arrange to meet at a shrine later and marry in secret.  They say their goodbyes, and he leaves, resolved to honor his father with his deeds.  Theseus enters and Aricia tells him that she and Hippolytus really do love one another and he was wrong.  Theseus doesn't believe her right away but she has sown the seed of doubt.  He decides to get to the bottom of things and calls for Oenone.  Panope shows up instead and tells him of Oenone's death.

Meanwhile, Theramenes shows up and tells the king in a three page monologue how Neptune struck down his son at his request.  Theramenes is slightly disrespectful to the king and the king takes it, does nothing.  Theramenes tells him his son's last request was for him to restore all things to Aricia.

Finally Phèdre shows up, sick from poison administered by her own hand, confesses everything and dies.  Theseus mourns very loudly and decrees, in accordance with his son's dying wish that all things are restored to Aricia and he adopts her.

Concept
When the director, Hyrum Conrad and I discussed the concept of this play, he said he would really like to do the play in a straightforward way, in Greek dress.  He wanted the world of the play to be more colorful than stereotypical Greek dress.  He was very interested in deep jewel tones.  I suggested we should look to the French neo-classical painters and their conception of Greek dress, since this was a French neo-classic play.

We had just done Oedipus the summer before and Hyrum suggested that he'd like to use costumes from that production to clothe the lesser characters which meant we would build all of Phèdre's costumes, all of Theseus', all of Hippolytus and all of Aricia's costumes.  The rest I would use stock and accessorize differently than they had been used before.

Research
The basic garment worn by the Greeks was called a Chiton which is essentially a rectangular piece of linen wrapped around the body once and fastened with Fibulae (ancient Greek version of a safety pin) over the shoulders and sometimes down the side.  Often the chiton was held in place by a cord or a belt tied at the waist or under the bust.

The chiton was covered in public with a garment called a Himation which was a long rectangular piece of linen that was wrapped in a multitude of ways around the body.  The status of a person was often shown by the size and wrapping of the himation, the greater the status, the more elaborate the garment.

Greeks used to wear a garment called a Chlamys for travel.  A chlamys is a smaller rectangle or square of fabric draped either over or under one arm and fastened over the other shoulder with a fibulae.  A chlamys is kind of like a cape in modern parlance.

When I first began working on this design I remembered several images of the Emperor Napoleon by Andrea Appiani, dressed in Greek or Roman garb and I used these as my starting place.  From there I began researching French Neoclassicist painters, especially the images of what they imagined Greek life to be.  Jacques-Louis David painted many Greek scenes and I found his work very helpful in creating my aesthetic for this show.  I did not limit my research to his work, however.

Among the images I was inspired by were:

• Anger of Achilles by Jacques-Louis David, 1825
• Gold painting on red and blue chlamys'
• The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis by Jacques-Louis David, 1818
• Headband with fringe
• Gold painting or embroidery on edge of chlamys
• Fibulae down side of her chiton
• jewels stitched to her chiton
• Hairstyles
• Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces by Jacques-Louis David, 1824.
• Tassel on headband
• Gold trim on himation
• Sandals with top panel
• Paris and Helen by Jacques-Louis David, 1788
• Headband
• Tassels on himation
• Trim on edges of fabric
• Hairstyles
• Oedipus at Colonus by Jean-Antoine Theodore Giroust, 1788
• Himation draped over woman's head
• Gold trim on edge of Chiton
• Sandals
• Chlamys
• Headbands
• Allegorie Relative by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, 1783
• Headbands
• Hairstyles
• Small Chlamys
• Romulus' Victory over Acron by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1812
• Gold laurel wreath crown
• Red himation with gold trim
• Large chiton
• Armor

Execution
For some reason, I chose to work on Theseus first.  He seemed to be the character that I had the first strong impressions about.  He seemed strong but misguided.  A man prone to make snap decisions which usually works for him but in this case he errs.  I viewed him as larger than life and yet sympathetic.  This is a man who pals around with the gods.  I saw him as a man trying to emulate Heracles and Zeus.  His first entrance has Theseus returning from a 6 month adventure in which everyone thought he had perished.  I wanted to give him an almost feral look so I did a rough sketch of him with a large cat skin as a himation and showed it to Hyrum.  I didn't think he'd go for it but he did.

Quick sketch of Theseus first look

Ultimately we added leather armor, a prop helm and a laurel wreath crown for Theseus and he ended up looking like this.

Theseus first look

For his second scene Hyrum and I decided he would have shed his travelling clothes and gotten dressed in more courtly robes.  This scene is an impassioned one and I chose to make a big statement with a large red himation.  This was his Zeus look and I used the Ingres image as my primary inspiration for his costume.

Quck sketch of Theseus second look

The finished costume looked like this:

Theseus "Zeus" look

We added one more change for Theseus which was just an exchange of the red himation for a neutral one.  That was for Act V when he is in his garden away from courtly things.  I chose a neutral color because I thought it seemed more grounded, less bombastic than red.

Theseus last look

I drew a sketch of Theseus and ended up merging it with another one of Hippolytus to get Hippolytus' Act V costume.

Theseus sketch, adapted and merged with another drawing for Hippolytus

Hippolytus for Act V

The end product looked like this:

Hippolytus and Aricia, Act V

Other costumes in the show:

Hippolytus and Theramenes, Act I

Phèdre and Oenone, Act I

Aricia and Ismene, Act II

Oenone, Phèdre and Hippolytus, Act II

Oenone and Phèdre, Act III.  Phèdre's courtly himation

Panope and Theseus, Act V

Lighting Design
The lighting design for this play was fairly straightforward.  I divided the stage into five areas and four fill areas.  Each area was lit from eight directions with ETC source 4's.  For color shifts I used a combination of Seachangers and color scrollers.  I also used foliage gobos for the exterior scenes and window gobos for the interiors.  Nothing really innovative in the regular light hang.

I took a chance on the downlight, however with very satisfactory results.  We hung three ETC PARNel's above each area, each focused to the exact same spot, one gelled red, one green and one blue.  This allowed me to color mix on the stage rather than using color scrollers.  Scrollers are noisy and if your colors aren't adjacent on the scroll you have to run through colors to get to the one you really want.  That makes them unwieldy when trying to change color rapidly within a scene. 

From the three colors I was able to create white light, amber, cyan, magenta and various shades inbetween just like lighting color theory suggests.  It was a neat effect and I intend to incorporate it into future designs when appropriate.  The effect is visible to a degree in some of the photos above.

I enjoyed the design process and its results in this production.  We paid special attention to character development through costume, which I felt was successful.  I also enjoyed the grand experiment with down lighting. I will use it again.

Production Details
Directed by Hyrum Conrad
Scene Design by Hyrum Conrad
Costume Design by Gary Benson
Lighting Design by Gary Benson
Technical Director: Ray Versluys
Costume Shop Director: Patty Randall