After yesterday’s post about the Massacre at Thessalonica, it seems like a good time to talk about something a little lighter. Learning about set design, the hard way.
But why stop there? Since this blog post is going to be dedicated to a funny story that happened along the way, feel free to share your own stories in the comments! We could all use a laugh.
This story goes back
to 2005, and our staging of The Rite of Luna.
We invested
some time in planned how the set would be constructed. A pair of
matching obelisks had been donated to us early on in the process, and
we eventually used them in every Rite. In the Rite of Luna, we
imagined them as the twin pillars that flank the High Priestess in
standard Tarot decks and painted them accordingly.
In addition, since we didn’t want the invocations being directed toward Luna at the back of the theater (which would involve the audience looking at the backside of the performers for the entire Rite), we flipped the stage. We thought ourselves oh, so clever as we placed Luna at the back of the audience, so all the invocations would go through the crowd!
The stage also included an altar, which we imagined as a fountain carved from stone. This, then, was upstage, and served as a central point around which to block the action and iconography.
Not knowing how to make such a structure, we did a little trial and error. We started by buying a fiberglass fountain. This was easy. Then, we did some research on how we could make a fake stone, that looked real, and that a human could stand on. We found an internet article on how to make “Hypertufa”.
Hypertufa is a
mixture of water, cement, pearlite and peat that cures overnight. And
to make a form for it, you can simply dig the shape you want out of
the earth. So that is what we did. We dug a hole the shape of the
rock we wanted, jammed the fountain in it upside down (wrapped in a
trash bag), and then began to mix batch after batch of hypertufa in a
5 gallon bucket. We also bought a couple sheets of rigid foam
insulation to take up space and make the giant mass lighter. And it
worked. A rock the size we created might have weighed 1600 pounds.
Ours was only about 400 pounds!
Nevertheless, it suited
our purpose. Moving it was a hassle, but we were sure we could
manage. And we did. We even took the fountain to Portland, Oregon for
our premiere performance on April 15th, 2005. It road in a
van with two of the cast members, who noticed another trait of
hypertufa. Apparently, it smells like a dirty hamster cage. But the
set was complete. And despite the faint odor of minuscule mammal, and
the backbreaking weight, we were pleased with it.
The performance at
Sekhet-Maat Lodge in Portland went well, in terms of staging, and we
were excited for our Seattle debut at the Richard Hugo House.
We
took 4 days to set up the theater, focus the lights, get our stage
dressed just as we wanted, and rip the seats out of the back row of
the theater to make space for the throne of Luna.
And the impact of this configuration was far beyond all that we imagined!
As it came to pass, unbeknownst to us, a member of one of our first Seattle audiences decided that attending Aleister Crowley’s The Rite of Luna, a rock opera of heroic amounts of LSD was just what she was in the mood for on a Saturday night. This attendee then seated herself at the back of the house, right in front of the throne of Luna.
As a result, every word directed at the throne, every invocation, every petition, every raging cry seemed to be personally directed at this young woman, as she grew more and more concerned that these actors were trying to draw her into madness!
On the whole, the
Rite of Luna was very moving for her. As the performance ended, she
bolted from the theater and locked herself in the bathroom off the
lobby. It took her friends 45 minutes to talk her down through the
door. We had to pay the theater staff to stay late.
Nevertheless,
our set design was effective in ways we never imagined!
How
about you all? Any unintended consequences you want to share? Any
wisdom you acquired that involved the baptism of Bactine? Let us know
in the comments!
