One thing I must say about being an indie theatre group without its own venue, it sure galvanizes you to get creative with set design!
To be honest, we are always looking for plays that begin with those wonderful words “ lights up on a bare stage”, and this isn’t because we’re lazy or cheap. It’s because the places we end up working in usually require that we strike our set after every performance, and that means setting the scene with no walls, no stairs, and no doors (and certainly no elevators, running water, or anything that flies). Unfortunately, plays without any set at all, or with a minimum of very portable set pieces, are not all that common (and I’d just like to urge all those gifted playwrights out there to write more wonderful plays that call for only the amount of “stuff” you could squeeze into a small station wagon or hatchback). So that leaves us with an interesting challenge: to create bedrooms and bars, front porches and windswept beaches, offices, boardrooms, graveyards and farmhouses out of almost nothing.
As we prepare for our second season, mounting two productions out of the many terrific scripts we would absolutely love to do, we find ourselves surprisingly enthusiastic about facing some of these set design difficulties. It’s scary, yes, but liberating. We simply cannot have a luxurious two-storey home onstage for our audiences to sigh over, not yet anyway. We have to sit down with the script and go over it line by line saying “is this really necessary?”,“how can we suggest this in the most pared-down way?”, and “how can we move from scene two to scene three without a blackout, with our actors moving the furniture?”. It’s hard, but it’s fun, and when you come to the process with only acting or directing skills at your disposal, it stretches you to become creative in entirely new ways. Ultimately I think we have the guts to do it because we believe that the magic really happens whether the walls (including the fourth wall) are there or not, when the actors breathe life into their characters and say the playwright’s words as if they were saying them for the very first time. Although I love a pretty box set as much as anyone, I would rather take the risk that even with nothing much to look at except the actors, we can still keep an audience captivated for a couple of hours. Will we be able to do this? We’ll be announcing our 2009/10 season any day now – why don’t you plan to come to Tsawwassen to find out?
Karen Golden
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