82 • August 2015 • Lighting&Sound America

TECHNICAL FOCUS: SCENERY

It takes a lot of work to create an empty stage—or at leastthe appearance of one—to facilitate the “story theatre” ofRick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher at the Shaw Festivalthis season.

Working on what seems at first to be a bare stage, savefor a ghost light and a couple of trunks, and using the the-

atre’s rigging gear, ropes, and a few simple props pickedfrom whatever is lying around, a dozen actors appear toimprovise the story of how Peter became Pan, in a spacethat morphs into many other spaces though their imagina-tion and creativity.

The play is in repertory with two other shows, however—

Designing an Empty Stagefor Peter and theStarcatcherBy: Alan Hardiman

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www.lightingandsoundamerica.com • August 2015 • 83

George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell and MichelMarc Bouchard’s The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt—and so its theatre-within-a-theatre had to be painstakinglybuilt from scratch to allow for an efficient 45-minutechangeover. As the designer Judith Bowden puts it, “Youhave to build a monumental set to make it look like there’sno set.”

That gave Bowden and director Jackie Maxwell a goldenopportunity to turn the stage of the 313-seat Royal GeorgeTheatre into just about anything they wanted. Given theplay’s late 19th-century setting, they decided to create this“space of possibility” as an old theatre, a hemp houseresembling a wooden ship complete with ladders, lanterns,and windlasses.

“I started looking at a couple of old theatres that arebeing taken apart, the Harold Pinter Theatre in London anda Baroque theatre in a castle in the Czech Republic,”Bowden says. “Our windlasses are a direct reference to theones that were up in the grid in the Pinter. Given that all thetechnology that was first used in theatre comes from shiprigging, I also looked at the Victorian Ropery in Chatham,England, where ropes for the British navy have been madesince 1618. Since this piece is a prequel to Peter Pan, and alot of the action takes place on ships, we thought, Why notjust take both—the old theatre and the idea of the ship rig-ging—and put them together?”

The result is a spectacular amalgam of a century-old the-atre, the deck of a three-master, and a shipbuilding dock-yard, the latter suggested by the gentle 5° lean of the sidewalls and of the ladders stationed left and right on theupstage wall. Finished in wood, faux brick, and a smatteringof barnacles over a steel infrastructure, each of the wall sec-tions is built on a 1/8" steel plate, forming a truck that rollsinto position on concealed air wheels. Once in place, theyare spiked with cane bolts, the air is released, and thetrucks gently drop about an inch onto the deck, the steelplate blending in with the matching floor.

“It’s like a jungle gym,” says Lesslie Tunmer, the head ofscenic construction. “The actors climb on the set, theyswing on the bars, and they even use the ladders in a joust.We built it early in order to bring it onstage in the off-seasonso that they could get a feel for it as they were workshop-ping the play.”

Some of the rigging is anchored directly to the structuralgrid of the Royal George, including three blue aerial silksthat are used for acrobatics and for suggesting the rollingwaves of the sea. The silks drop down through narrowhoops attached to a bumper bar, “so that when the actorsswing upstage and downstage, they don’t clean out theelectrics,” says technical director Craig Putt.

Other elements are rigged to the theatre-within-the-the-atre. The ladders roll sideways on a pair of 4" wheels, their

The basic set for Peter and the Starcatcher.Pho

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TECHNICAL FOCUS: SCENERY

upper ends clipped into Harken cars that roll in a trackacross the upstage wall. More ladders roll across a triangu-lar truss spanning center stage.

“When the truss comes in to trim height, the actors bringout the ladders that have been leaning on the side walls,and clip them quickly into the Harken cars,” Tunmer says.“They slide left, then right, disconnect, and run away.Because it’s actors doing it live, it’s tricky, and we have tobe safe. I painted the Harken cars white to make them easi-ly visible, and fitted the ladder with a single-pull quick

release for the disconnect.” “The workshopping helped us come up with safe ways of

dealing with these sorts of things and finding out whichactor was most comfortable doing it,” Bowden adds. In anunusually long schedule, she began discussing the designwith Maxwell in June 2014 and, by August, was meetingwith Tunmer and Putt every Friday to refine the design sothe actors could begin workshopping the play well inadvance of rehearsals.

One result of weekly consultations was that parts of the

Windlasses and rigging. Detail of ladder and Harken car track.

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set underwent an extensive iterative design process. Theladders, for example, were developed through 12 iterationsin CAD. Tunmer built several prototypes, and Maxwell andmovement director Valerie Moore then determined whichmodel would best serve their vision for action involving aship’s brig, gangways, and a full-cast fight sequence.

“We proceeded with the caveat that if the workshoppingindicated a need for other ladder shapes, we would just goahead and construct more of them,” Tunmer says. “Wecouldn’t do that with everything because of the scale and

the cost, but the more we were able to discuss, the morewe were able to integrate their developing ideas into theshow.”

Bowden agrees. “I really enjoyed this experience, beingable to spend time with these guys figuring all this out,which you don’t usually get to do. It’s unique—and that’sunfortunate,” she says.

When it came to the windlasses, Bowden had in mind adefinitive image from the fly of the Pinter Theatre. She madea sketch for Tunmer, who translated it into a CAD drawing,

The shadow screen revealed. Plinths on steel plates conceal the air wheels.

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and had the four windlasses for the setmanufactured via CNC router. “Welove the windlasses, and kept trying toput more of them into the design,”Bowden laughs. “At one point, weeven considered making one largeenough to support a person.”

This would have been a relativelyeasy task, Tunmer adds: “CNC cer-tainly helps with some aspects ofscenery construction. If you want onemore of something, or if you want toscale it up or down, it’s not a bigdeal.”

The illusion that the actors areworking on an empty stage isstrengthened by the fact that they stayonstage for much of the duration. “Allthat we would normally consider exe-cuted backstage is being done onstage, such as the truss comingdown,” Bowden explains. An actorcalls it in, another hauls on a dummyrope looped through a pulley on theset’s side wall, and even though theRaynok motion control automationsystem is doing the work, it looks to allintents and purposes as if the actors

are making it happen as they “impro-vise” the action.

That illusion extends to the play’spoignant shadow puppet sequence.Peter places a lantern downstage,then casually sits in its beam. His sil-houette is cast on a circular cottonscreen revealed behind retractableslats in the upstage wall; at centerstage, an actor positions a stick with acardboard cutout of a mother holdingup her baby boy. In shadow, the moth-er and baby stand on Peter’s out-stretched palm—a lost boy wistfullyrecalls shadows of a happier time.

Needless to say, the positions ofthe lantern, actors, and cutout havebeen precisely choreographed.Bowden and lighting designer KevinLamotte experimented with variousinstruments, cut-out sizes, and shad-ow sizes to achieve the optimumeffect. “We found that the [ETC]Source Four Mini with tungsten MR16bulb made the best shadow. We triedthe LED but we just couldn’t get thepunch,” Putt says. The Source FourMini is built into a ship’s lantern, and iscontrolled via RC4 Wireless DMX.

“The cutouts have a deliberatelydesigned crudeness to them,”Bowden says. “We found that if theywere too finessed, it took away fromthe Victorian-theatre feel, and it startedlooking like we should be running filmor using a projector. But we wanted tosee sticks and hands because of thenature of the piece.”

In his rave review, The Globe andMail theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruckwas impressed by what he describedas “the mostly empty space—given anautical feel by designer JudithBowden.” A fitting testament, indeed,to the magnificent illusion created byher monumental set.

Peter and the Starcatcher runsthrough November 1 at the ShawFestival in Niagara-on-the-Lake,Ontario.

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