Judge me by my size do you?: Medium Specificity

For this project I chose to do a set design. Like McCloud, I grew up with one idea of what set design was. I was taught that it just looks nice, shows where the story takes place, and has levels and five “areas” where the director can have the actors move to when the scene needs it. However, McCloud uses the buying ice cream comic story to show how many different ways the same story can be told and how artistic choices made by the author/artist can create new emphasis or meanings within the same plot. Likewise, I feel that set design can do much more than look nice behind an actor.

Set design should be a physical rendering of the metaphysical concepts of the director, while also creating a comment on the action, and creating spaces for appropriate action all while being aesthetically pleasing.

My interest in the ability for theatre to explore the abstract to create incredible amounts of subtextual meaning began my freshman/sophomore year when I saw Theatre Mitu perform Death of a Salesman. The show used props and lights as metaphors for the many underlying thoughts and emotions the characters were feeling. The set design catered to that choice by creating levels and open spaces for the actors to navigate some of the larger props, and did what it could to not pull attention to itself so that the actors in costume would pull the most focus.

So with my set design I picked a script and asked my scenic design professor for a director’s concept to work with. The script is Wait Until Dark, a play about a blind woman who must save herself from an elaborate con and then outsmarts a murderer in her apartment by shutting off all the lights. The concept was that it would be pretty realistic, that the audience would feel a part of the action, and that the audience should feel like we are all blind.

To make it realistic, I had to do some script analysis and research. In order to invite the audience in, I wanted to eliminate the fourth wall. To do that I turned the set so the furthest back area is a corner. Now the audience can really only see two walls, making it unlikely that there would be a wall in-between them.

To create feelings that we are all blind, I thought about what feelings this blind lady in the show has: she feels confused, disoriented, and dependent. So I created a set that has a section set but the rest of the scene can rotate around. This is at first confusing, because the set is realistic, but it moved abstractly. It is disorienting because the audience is never quite clear on what the layout of the room is, and in many ways it is where the set is currently turned that dictates to the audience how they see the action and what angles they are able to see, much like if they were blind.