Hannah and the Hollow Challah is supposed to open tomorrow, but there’s this slight question of where. Apparently work on the theater means that the building will be closed tomorrow. We just found out yesterday that it might happen and today found out that it will happen. Thank heavens I built a touring set, eh? That’s right, the director found another theater and we are shifting the show over to it tomorrow.

Tomorrow should be very interesting.

One of the projects I’m working on is the set design for a new play called “Hannah and the Hollow Challah.” It takes place in Hannah’s home and then she is whisked off to Breadland by the opera singing Hollow Challah. Once there, she encounters a bajillion characters and goes to a half-dozen scenic locations.

My challenges:

• Two performers. No stage hands
• A stage with no wings, flyspace or backstage
• Must tour using the subway
• $500 budget, for materials and labor
• No more than twenty minute to setup

I asked for volunteer labor, and have been promised a carpenter and a seamstress, which eases the budget constraints considerably.

I took the train up to Princeton to deliver the set model to McCarter theater’s education department. For this project, I needed to come up with a single set that could work for eight different plays. After our last meeting, the next step was to create a set model. Since each play has a different director, we decided that the easiest thing to do would be to show a variety of possibilities with the set and let the directors decide how they were going to use them.

I’m just going to show you the same photos I showed the head of the program. Each photo uses the same elements. Two platforms that are four feet by eight feet. Two that are four by four and two that are two by eight. 2 x2 poles can peg into the decks of the platform. Spandex ribbons will add color and help define scenic locations.

I’ve been doing scenic design work for a couple of years for McCarter Theater’s education department. It’s work that I enjoy because it combines the dual challenge of making a design that fits a shows aesthetic as well as one that will tour. The current project is for their First Stages Company. It’s not a touring production, which feels like a total luxury. I mean, I don’t have to figure out how to fit the set into a van and put it up in an hour. On the other hand, the set that I design will be used by all the classes in this project, which means that eight different productions will appear on it over the course of a weekend — ranging from Hamlet to the Wiz. It has to make sense for all of them.

Today’s meeting was to introduce the design concept. I don’t have to have scale renderings or anything like that, I just had to have some drawings and an idea. Since the First Stages is made of fourth-twelfth graders, I decided to focus on the idea of raw materials. These kids are tomorrow’s adult actors, you know?

So I want to keep the wood bare and use simple shapes. I don’t want to pretend that things are finished, but I do want to surprise and delight the audience. So in the rendering that I’ve got here, what you see are three platforms, and several 2 x 2s. The 2×2s slot into the platforms, the way a square peg goes into a square hole. Spandex strips weave between them to introduce color. This one shows my idea for the yellow brick road on the way to the Emerald City. Simple, eh?

The fun thing is that all of those poles can reposition at angles to become the jungle in the Tempest, or get different, gray ribbons to become skyscrapers in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The platforms can move around becoming anything from a boat in the Odyssey to the ramparts in Hamlet. They made some suggestions, which were intelligent (part of why I like working here), but for the most part seemed enthusiastic about the design. Always a relief, I’ll tell you.

The next step, before I do anymore work, will be for them to talk to the production department to check schedule. While all of this is fairly simple, there are a couple of trick pieces (the 2×2 that breaks to form a door frame, for instance) which we need to make sure can fit into the schedule. I’ll show you other scenes and the model as the design progresses.

This is beautifully animated, but there’s one detail which makes me go a little buggy. Watch the baby’s eyes. They are so real, compared to the rest of the figure, that it edges into the uncanny valley.

This is a problem that crops up in a lot of different forms of world creation, from set design, to animation to straight puppetry. If you have one element that seems totally real, it makes everything else seem strange. But if everything is stylized in the same manner, then you accept that visual vocabulary. For instance, no one complains that they can’t see all the fur on the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. But if a real dog wandered through the scene, the entire world would look flat and the dog would look strange. It’s uncanny.

This article from the covers the production of Arabian Nights for which I did the set design.

I’ve been working on Arabian Nights design around helping out with Shimmer and am pretty pleased with what I’m doing, if I do say so myself. We’ll see what Chris and Emily say when they see the drawings.