Spinning Into Butter--Scene Design

Scene from Spinning Into Butter

Spinning Into Butter by Rebecca Gilman was produced Fall Semester, 2004 in the Kirkham Arena Theatre at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Synopsis
Sarah Daniels is the dean of students at a mostly white, fictitious private university in Vermont.  One of the African American students has been targeted for hate crimes.  He has received threatening letters addressed to "Little Black Sambo."  It is Sarah's responsibility to get to the bottom of it and punish the perpetrators.

In the meantime, one of the white student body officers comes to her to propose a seminar against racism for the student body.  They hold the seminar and the black students find it patronizing and demeaning since none of them are really invited to participate and it ends up being a bunch of privileged white kids saying we shouldn't be racist etc...

Sarah works hard to do her job to ease racial tensions, but in the meantime we learn that when she was hired to be the dean of students, the university had been under fire for having an all white faculty and administration.  Sarah had been working at an all black university in Chicago and the administration hired her without an interview, thinking she was black.  They were all surprised when she showed up as white.  This caused some consternation among the other administrators.  They felt lied to even though she hadn't lied.  They assumed she was black.

In a moment of honesty and clarity, Sarah confides to her one friend on the faculty that she left Chicago to come to Vermont to get away from black people.  She loathed herself because she was a closeted racist.  She tells him when she rode the bus she'd first look for a white person to sit by.  If one wasn't available she'd look for a yellow one.  She'd stand rather than sit next to a black person.  She wrote some of this down on a notebook and then they left to get dinner.  While they are away, one of the administrators who disliked her entered her office and snooped through her stuff and found the incriminating evidence.  Confronted with this evidence Sarah decided to resign.

In the meantime it is discovered that the black kid who received the threatening notes had written them himself.  He claimed to have been out of his body while he saw himself writing the notes and tying them to the brick and hurling it through his window.  Because of this, he is expelled.

While she is packing up her office, Sarah tells her friend the story of Little Black Sambo.  The story goes that Little Black Sambo was walking through the forest in his finest clothes.  A tiger saw him and threatened to eat him.  Little Black Sambo gave the tiger his fine new coat in exchange for a promise not to eat him.  The tiger went on his way thinking he was the most fabulous tiger in the forest.  Little Black Sambo encountered another tiger with a similar result.  This happens over and over until Little Black Sambo is left only in his underwear.  Meanwhile, the tigers all encounter each other and each thinks he's the most fabulous tiger in the forest.  They are all jealous of each other and start clawing at one another.  As the fight, they start spinning around in a circle and the spin faster and faster until they spin themselves into butter.  At that point, Little Black Sambo collects his clothes and puts them back on and scoops up a bunch of butter and takes it home.  His mother makes pancakes for the family and they spread the tiger butter that Little Black Sambo has collected.

Sarah and her friend realize that the black student who wrote the note was manipulating the administration, causing them to spin themselves into a frenzy.  As she leaves, she makes contact with the black student and tells him not to be so hard on himself.  As a result of her being there, things actually got better, and because of her confession, she felt cleansed.  We get the sense that even though she is going away, Sarah Daniels will be okay and will be less racist.

The play takes place entirely in her office.

A Note About Little Black Sambo
When I was a boy in the 1960's, there was a restaurant chain called "Sambo's."  It was a pancake house.  Every time I went to Utah with my family and spent the night, we'd get up the next morning and eat at Sambo's.  I remember they had good pancakes.  There was a wallpaper frieze in the restaurant that told the story of Little Black Sambo and the tigers, and you could purchase the children's book from them.  It was a different time, I was just a little boy and had no conception of what all of that meant.  It was just a story to me.  I liked to go there because of the good food.  All but one of the Sambo's restaurants have either been sold to other chains, had the name changed, or closed for good.

Concept
As I read this script, on about page thirty I had a very clear image of what this set should look like.  I continued to read and the further into it, particularly when Sarah reveals her inner racist I knew that my inclination was correct.  I read it again and could see the play done in no other way.

I phoned the director, Hyrum Conrad and asked to come to his house and talk about the play.  It was a Saturday.  That's how excited I was by this concept.  It was very early in the process.  We had just barely received our perusal copy of the script and Hyrum had not yet created a production concept.  I told Hyrum how I felt about the show and how I felt it should be done.

I thought we should actually build her office on the Kirkham Arena Theatre stage.  All four walls with two doors.  A front door and a back door.  I though there should be a wainscot and a crown moulding around the top.  Where the walls should be, between the wainscot and the crown moulding would be gone.

Hyrum didn't bite immediately, instead he asked me to justify and intellectualize my feelings.  Up until that time, my thoughts on this show and this design were just feelings.  Hyrum often wants to hear from a designer's creative side and intellectual side.  If those two aspects of the personality can come to agreement, it's often right.

From an intellectual point of view, I decided we needed a barrier between us and Sarah.  I wanted each audience member to have an individual response to this play, even though they may be sitting next to their spouse or best friend or a boy or girl they were trying to impress.  I coined the term in that meeting, "Audience as Voyeur."

I wanted every audience member, as Sarah talked about not wanting to ride the bus next to a black person, to ask themselves, "Have I ever done that?" or "Would I ever do that?"  I wanted the audience members to confront whatever demons they had inside of them on this issue.  I felt that placing the barrier between them and the actors would help them do just that.

I also wanted the audience to look across the set and see the other audience members, like a mirror.  Sarah says some very regrettable things about herself.  I thought the audience needed to feel like they were looking through a keyhole or listening in on a conversation they shouldn't be and feeling a little guilty about it but not turning away.

Hyrum agreed and we went ahead with the concept.  This is one of only a handful of times in my career where I came to a production concept ahead of the director.  Typically the director comes up with it and the designers design within it.  Hyrum had just started working with this script and hadn't come up with the production concept.  That was the first and only time while working with Hyrum that I came up with a concept before he did.

Execution
I built a white model for this play.  Sadly, none of the pieces of that model exist anymore.  When I took it to the meeting, I brought along a pair of scissors, an exacto knife and some masking tape.  It was a very nice white model.  Hyrum and I and the other designers had been working with this material for awhile and we had agreed on things in principle, but this was the first time anyone had seen it in three dimensions.

I could tell that Hyrum was hem-hawing about something on the set, but because it was a pretty model, he seemed reluctant to say anything negative about it.  This was in a production meeting with all of the faculty, not just the ones working on the show.  Finally I asked him, "If there was one thing on here that you would change, what would it be?"  With that invitation, Hyrum mentioned something at the top of the set that he thought shouldn't be there.

With that, I reached into my back pocket, grabbed the scissors and hacked it off.  One of the other faculty members threw himself across the table trying to stop me from hacking it up.  He was too late.  It was pretty funny.  He appeared to me to be in slow motion, shouting (also in slow motion) "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Once the model had been desecrated, we were then able to go to work.  I got out the tape and the scissors and the knife and made it available to Hyrum and the two of us hacked and taped and worked over the model together.  I love working in this way.

When we had the design the way we wanted it, I then drafted it and made a painted model of it.  Here are some images of the painted model.  This was many years ago and many of the model pieces no longer exist.  All that is left of this one is the skeleton.  Still, it shows the concept we were working with pretty well.

Model for Spinning Into Butter

From another angle

And another

And another

Detail of the door

The idea of the barrier was visceral, but we also wanted to treat this in a very realistic way, so I had to justify and rationalize everything in it.  In addition to the basic set design, Hyrum suggested that there be an indication of tiger stripes here and there.  I decided that all of the paneling in the office should be painted to look like crotch figure mahogany.  That particular woodgrain has inherent tiger stripes.  In addition I painted a marble floor with burnt orange veins, also to represent tiger stripes.

As far as the room went, I decided that this was a building that was more than a hundred years old, in the east, and one that was built before central heating, plumbing and electricity.  As a result, I had a two inch water pipe in one corner, and a raised wooden dais in a different corner with a heating vent in the middle of it.  There was also a long unused fireplace in another corner.  These signified that they were placed here after the fact, after the building had been built.  Retro-fitted if you will.  We wanted this to be old.  An old place with old ideas.

The dais with the heat vent in the front of it where the desk sat

The water pipe in the corner

Tiger striped panel in the crotch figure mahogany

The marble floor

The fireplace

I don't remember why I painted it green and black marble but I do remember I wanted it stripey

The door with vinyl letters on bubbled plexi-glas

Sarah was the dean of students but it was well known to her and the administration that she was supposed to be the dean of ethnic students.  They were trying to shed the allegations of racism at their university.  Trying to shed it without actually trying to make inner changes.  There was a certain hypocrisy among the administrators as well as within Sarah.  Because of this, I coined another term called "ethnic chic."  I decided all the set dressing should appear to be from other countries, particularly Africa, Asia and Australia, but if you looked on the back you'd still see the Pier 1 Imports price tag.  I also placed some National Geographic Magazines on the fireplace and found one with Bengal Tigers on the cover.  That one went on top.

Ethnic Chic.  To show that she didn't get it, I added a "Cigar Store Indian" to her office

Ethnic Chic.  Indonesian basket in front of fireplace.  African masks and National Geographic Magazines on top of the fireplace

The set from one direction

From another direction

And another

And another

The cast of Spinning Into Butter

A Concluding Thought
One of our colleagues did not like this set design.  He told Hyrum, "I would never let Gary do THAT to me!"  Hyrum asked him what he meant by that, and he said his students told him that the set made them uncomfortable, like they were Peeping Tom's.  They told him how they felt ashamed when certain lines were said and that they didn't feel a group dynamic with the rest of the audience.  Hyrum said, "Oh, that is exactly what we were going for."  The other colleague seemed disappointed by that.  I felt vindicated.  I always try as a designer to help to tell the story, rather than just creating an environment where the story can be told.  I feel that I succeeded on this one.  I loved this play, I loved our cast, I loved this design.  This was a good experience for me.

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

The Spitfire Grill--Scene Design

The Spitfire Grill

The Spitfire Grill, the musical by James Valcq and Fred Alley, was produced in the Kirkham Arena Theatre at Brigham Young University-Idaho, Fall Semester, 2006.

Synopsis
Percy Talbott is a young woman, just released from prison looking for a fresh start.  During her incarceration she clipped a picture of Gilead, Wisconsin from a travel magazine and has determined she will move there.  When she arrives, she is met with suspicion from all she meets.  The sheriff, Joe Sutter, convinces the owner of The Spitfire Grill, Hannah Ferguson to give her a job.

Things don't go so well at first but finally the women settle into a tenuous truce.  Hannah has a bad fall in which she breaks her leg and Percy is left to take care of the grill and it's patrons by herself.  Hannah asks Percy to leave a wrapped loaf of bread by an old stump behind the diner.

Percy is useless in the kitchen and is joined by Shelby, the wife of Caleb, Hannah's nephew.  Together they make sense of the business and in the process become close friends.  Caleb is unhappy with this situation.

The three women, Hannah, Percy and Shelby become very close and Hannah tells them she has been trying unsuccessfully to sell the grill.  Percy comes up with an idea to raffle off the grill with an essay contest.  One hundred dollars to enter, best essay wins the grill.  Caleb, a real estate agent who has had the grill listed for ten years is upset by this plan and feels he is losing control of everything around him.  He decides to investigate Percy.

Percy confides in Shelby why she was in prison.  Her stepfather raped her and when she became pregnant, he beat her repeatedly until she miscarried the baby.  Then he raped her again and when he fell asleep she slit his throat with a straight razor.  It seems that almost everyone has forgiven Percy but she cannot forgive herself.

The advertisement for the raffle is a huge success and letters from all over the country come pouring in.  Everyone in town gets caught up in the excitement.  Everyone except Caleb.  New life comes to Gilead.

All through this, Percy keeps leaving the loaf of bread at the stump and we meet Eli, Hannah's son who deserted from the army during the Viet Nam War.  He is homeless and a vagrant.  Living on the bread left by his mother.  He leads Percy to the mountain top where she finally learns to forgive herself. 

Percy helps to reunite Hannah and Eli and everyone is reconciled.  Hannah gives the grill to Percy and Shelby as there advertisement was the best essay about the place.

Great script, wonderful production. 

Concept
The director, Roger Merrill wanted us as a design team to explore the idea that this was a town in limbo, a stagnant, static place.  He also wanted a unit set without scene changes.  The challenge for this was the fact that the play begins in prison, goes to the exterior of Gilead to the interior of the grill, then behind the grill to the woodpile.  There's a scene in several locations in the town and finally to the mountaintop.

As Roger was talking about what he wanted to say with the show, I kept having images of octagons moving through my mind.  I didn't understand at first why octagons, but I went with them.  I sketched up several thumbnail groundplans that involved octagonal decks and showed them to Roger.  I was unsatisfied with not knowing why octagons and began to intellectualize my choice.  I determined that this was a play about halted progression, and that octagons were the international shape of the stop sign.  The important thing about stop signs is that they are only temporary and progression can begin again, which is also a theme in this play.

Thumbnail groundplans

Thumbnail groundplan

Execution
Since this was a unit set, we knew we were going to change locations with lighting for many of the scenes.  The Kirkham Arena Theatre was a found space theatre without a fly loft.  I decided to add a cyclorama to the back of the set to facilitate lighting shifts.  It also helped to create a kind of limbo in which to tell the story of the play.  We didn't want the cyc to be lit all of the time, so I placed a poorman's scrim three feet in front of it.  The poorman's scrim was created with brown tricot stretched tightly on a frame.  I had already used tricot in this fashion before in my career and knew it would work.

There was a serendipitous effect when Richard Clifford, the lighting designer focused a source four with a cloud gobo on the scrim and it ghosted through to the cyc which gave us a double image of the clouds.  I used that effect a few years later on my lighting design of Oedipus.  It was stunning.

Percy and Shelby in front of the dark scrim

Clouds ghosting on the scrim and cyc. Effy, Shelby, Joe and Caleb

Nighttime on the cyc, Percy and Eli

As I designed the set, I chose to use two octagons to symbolize the interior of the grill.  Since the majority of the play took place in the two rooms of the diner, I added much more detail on those two platforms.  The upper platform was the kitchen and had a refrigerator, a counter, a stove and a backsplash.  The lower platform was the dining area and had a wainscot and a couple of tables and some chairs.

Downstage left I designed a lower, smaller octagonal platform to be the entrance to the grill and downstage right I designed another octagonal platform that functioned as the back porch.  Outside of the porch I dressed the set with a stump and an axe and a pile of wood.

Upstage right I designed a half octagon platform that was much higher and was at the level of the top of the backsplash.  This platform functioned as both the prison and the mountaintop.  It gave the sense of coming full circle.

Hannah on the upper octagonal platform, the kitchen

Caleb on the lower octagonal platform, the dining room

Percy, Joe, Shelby and Hannah on the dining room deck reading the raffle entries

Percy and Joe on the small exterior platform DSL

Shelby and Percy on the back porch

Percy and Hannah with the loaf of bread on the stump behind the grill

Three non-descript locations somewhere in Gilead

The half octagon as the prison, with Percy

The half octagon as the mountaintop, with Eli and Percy

Octagons, with Percy and Joe

I enjoyed working on this show very much.  I felt that the scene, lighting and costume designs all came together to fulfill the director's vision of The Spitfire Grill.  This is a great script and it is almost impossible to exit the theatre without having an emotional experience with the material.  I'm glad I had the opportunity to work on it.

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

You're a Good Man Charlie Brown--Scene Design

You're a Good Man Charlie Brown

You're a Good Man Charlie Brown was produced Spring Semester, 2006 in the Kirkaham Arena Theatre at Brigham Young University-Idaho

Synopsis
This play is a series of vignettes to illustrate a day in the life of Charlie Brown and the other characters in Charles M. Schulz world of Peanuts. 

Each vignette is supported by a song and all of them are directly based on moments from the award winning comic strip.  The play begins with each of the characters talking about Charlie Brown and giving their opinions of him.

Charlie Brown is unable to talk to the "cute little red-headed girl", he is unable to fly a kite, he loses the baseball game, doesn't get a valentine and yet in the end he is still optomistic and full of hope.  His sister Sally is upset because of the poor grades her teacher gives her.  Lucy wishes to be queen, acts as a psychiatrist, and tries in vain to get Schroeder to confess his love for her.  Linus suffers separation anxiety from his blanket and Snoopy entertains by being a vulture, a WWI pilot and dances for his supper.

The play ends, nicely bookended with everyone confessing that Charlie Brown is a good man.

Concept
I had seen a particularly bad production of You're a Good Man Charlie Brown in the early 1970's and when Justin Bates told me he wanted to do this play I was less than enthusiastic.  We discussed it over lunch and he told me how he felt about the play and it's message of hopefullness.  He told me that Schulz had been criticized for penning the strip about a perennial loser like Charlie Brown and Schulz responded by saying Charlie Brown was not a loser because no matter what happens, he never gives up.  This is the idea that Justin wanted to communicate to the audience.  A message of hopefulness.  I began to look at the material in a different way and started to find it endearing.  I had always liked Peanuts when I was young.

Justin said he wanted a unit set with an area set aside for each character to have individual moments in.  He also wanted to have several levels but was very clear that they couldn't impede the action.  He also said he wanted  the look of the show to mimic the look of the Sunday color edition of the strip.  He wanted to pay homage to Charles M. Schulz.  I had a clear idea of where to begin.

Execution
I picked up a few books with reprints of Peanuts comic strips, particularly the ones with the Sunday editions and began to study them.  I found that often Schulz would use a single, flat color for the sky and a different color for the ground.  His sky wasn't always blue and his grass wasn't always green.  The background was merely there to provide an environment for his characters to exist in.  Every now and then, when it was necessary he'd add a wall or the corner of a house or some of the props that were important to the world of Peanuts.

Schulz had a very loose line style which was mirrored in Vince Gauldi's jazz theme for the television specials.  Most of the time all that separated the sky from the ground would be quick pen strokes that communicated grass simply and elegantly. 

I designed a series of levels, all curved and all painted in colors I had seen in the Sunday strip to create the different areas for each of the characters.  Each of the levels were six inches above the one below so the actors could move up and down with grace and ease.  There was also a ramp between levels where the height was greater than six inches.

Levels for characters

To acheive the different colors in the sky from the script, I decided the easiest way to accomplish that would be to hang a cyc in the Kirkham Arena Theatre.  A cyclorama is not traditionally used in a black box theatre but it is not completely unheard of.  Between the upper platform and the cyc I designed a Charles M. Schulz style ground row with blades of grass and a couple of trees.

Elizabeth House, our charge artist at the time captured the essence of Schulz's line work very well in the painting of the trees and groundrow, as well as all the other props.  Each surface was to be painted a flat color first and the linework to be added after with Van Dyke brown instead of black.  I like Van Dyke brown because it is so dark and yet it gives a little back whereas black just absorbs the light and appears to be a void on the stage.  Van Dyke also gave us the appearance of India Ink which I think emulated the style of the cartoonist better than black would have.  Elizabeth also played the part of Lucy in this production, by the way.

Cyc

Cyc

Linework in grass, tree and doghouse

After the deck and the groundrow, all that was left were the special props and set pieces.  These needed to be oversized so our adult actors would appear to be children in scale to the props.  I studied the original Schulz drawings and I also measured my own furniture against my children so I could get an idea of the scale we'd have to use.

Schroeder and Lucy at the piano

Linus and Lucy on oversized sofa

No Valentines for Charlie Brown

The Doctor is in

Lucy and Schoeder at the wall

Snoopy with bullet hole decals on doghouse

Oversize baseball gloves made by

Fire hydrant

Since this is a musical, I had to make room for the orchestra, which in this case was a band.  I located the band on an elevated platform at the rear of the theatre so they could have a clear view of the stage and the performers.

The band

I was grateful that Justin cajoled me into taking this script seriously.  I had developed a bias toward the material because of a bad production.  I found this particular production of You're a Good Man Charlie Brown to be compelling and inspiring.  I credit the director for that.

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