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The Search for a Shape

Posted by DCA Theater on June 4, 2011 in January-June 2011 Season, Lighthousekeeping

by Michelle Lilly, a part of the production ensemble of New Leaf Theatre and Scenic Designer for Lighthousekeeping

One of my favorite parts of any design process is the shape search.  This typically takes place once the basic storytelling concepts are down, but we’re still looking for the specifics of what the world of the play looks, sounds, and feels like.

The first thing I’m usually thinking about is the basic presence of the set in relation to the story we’re telling and how we’re telling it.  Is it looming?  Is it sensual?  Is it quiet and unassuming?  Audacious?  Commanding?  What role does the environment play in getting this story across to the audience?  How do the characters interact with it?  How do they feel about it?  When asking these questions, I find myself searching for its shape in everything; obviously in my research, but also while I’m commuting, while I’m at work, while I’m watching a movie, or walking around Home Depot.  When I’m in this stage, I look at everything to see its shape and line first.  I stare at the way the sun hits the bricks on a building on Grand Avenue.  I look at bikes, trains, a pile of trash, trees, mailboxes, searching for the shadowy shape I’m looking for.  Sometimes I don’t know what it is, but I know I’ll know it when I see it.

Every design is like a puzzle.  It’s often like a Nick Bantock puzzle, which takes days and maybe weeks to crack, but the answer is there if you stay with it long enough.  I have to push and work at it, and eventually I get so frustrated that I almost give up, and then my mind relaxes, and a large part of the solution suddenly surfaces.  A lot of times I’ve found the answer, or the key to the series of rooms that leads to the answer, in completely unexpected places.

I recently visited the architecture exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and as architecture is tough to present in a gallery, what they presented instead was process pieces.  This was completely awesome.  Crayon sketches by Mies van der Rohe, huge scale models of commercial buildings, sketches of suggestions for the new World Trade Center Memorial building, scribbles and hand-scrawled notes.  There was a model of the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart, Germany, and there were process sketches in which the architect is clearly trying to find the unique shape that the museum eventually takes.  There are sketches, paper cutouts, and finally a white dinner plate drawn on with a black marker.  The dinner plate captures the curves the architect was looking for. And they hung it on a museum wall.

Lighthousekeeping has been an especially challenging shape search. What is the shape of loss?  What is the shape of fear?  What is the physical appearance of being completely and suddenly unmoored?  What is the shape of love?  Which of these shapes do I show, and which do I let the audience find on their own?