Etta Lilienthal on Designing for the Theatre

Harold Pinter's "Betrayal" at Seattle Repertory Theatre, 2009
This is the first of a three-part series on the scenic design work of Etta Lilienthal. Click here for part two, or follow this link for a gallery of her work for theatre and dance.

 

Set design is one of the trickiest yet least appreciated elements of theatre production, mostly because audiences only really notice the design when it's bad. A bad set makes you aware that it's not working, and draws you away from the action. A decent design (and most design, even at the big regional theatres, is only decent) works because you don't notice it. It's a backdrop that doesn't distract, a functional space for the performance to inhabit.

A truly great design, on the other hand, is usually so integrated into the production that audiences assume that most of it is purely the director's concept. It's hard to imagine the designers, rather than the director, playing such a profound role in generating the collaborative synthesis that's determining where the actors are onstage and what they're doing, let alone to imagine, as happens from time to time, that the very concept you're seeing onstage may have been primarily the idea of the designer, who had to sell it to a skeptical director.

Etta Lilienthal is one of only a handful of scenic designers in Seattle who creates great sets. A long-time collaborator with choreographer Maureen Whiting, with whom she's done some of her best work, Lilienthal has designed sets for everything from big shows at Seattle Rep to solo performance pieces staged in little Capitol Hill theatres. She's also worked in film, serving as the production designer for both Police Beat and the ill-fated Cthulhu, and in addition to recently finishing an art design job with The Details, a Tobey Maguire movie that was filmed in Seattle, she designed the set for Seattle Rep's Opus, which opens this week.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Lilienthal at Victrola on Pine Street for a wide-ranging discussion of her work. Swiss-born but raised on Martha's Vineyard, Lilienthal has a slight build with short-cut, curly hair and a clever, knowing gaze. The daughter of a carpenter father and an artist mother, Lilienthal attended Smith College for two years, including a semester abroad studying textiles in Scotland, before transferring to CalArts, where she completed a BA in theatre and an MFA is set design.

"I don't usually say yes to a project unless I'm really interested in collaborating specifically with that director," she said of her varied work choices. "Now, that's not always the case, obviously sometimes you take work regardless."

"In general, I have a really open approach" to designing a show, she said, "and I really want to hear what they [the directors] see, and if there are really specific things that are, for them, like, 'We must have this, for this show.' Or ideas they have, very specific images. And then I read the play several times, I meet with them several times, and then I start to develop my own vision. And it's just basically images coming into my mind, and if I'm stuck, or the way that I start, is by sketching, and often by going in and flipping through books in the library, just art books—very often contemporary art books. Just to sort of spark strong spatial relationships and color relationships. Sometimes I'll fixate on a particular image that might be very realistic, or sometimes I'll see, for instance, an installation that's actually very abstract that I feel is somehow a very interesting space, and I can see the play living in that somewhat abstract space."

"Abstraction" is a good way to describe Lilienthal's work. Rather than thinking realistically ("I personally don't like to go to the theatre to see things that I see all the time," she told me, "like my kitchen or my bedroom, so I tend to design from a place that's kind of in a dream and doesn't really exist in the world"), Lilienthal tends to approach design sculpturally, as a way to engage and make use of the particular performance space.

She talks a lot about the "volume of space" to be dealt with, and about the challenges different theatres—particularly ones with large vertical areas—present. Even her more realistic sets for traditional plays often skew the vertical and horizontal perspectives. In her design for David Auburn's Proof at Madison Repertory Theatre in 2002, she set the facade of a house angling upstage-right, veering away from the audience. For Nilo Cruz's The Beauty of the Father at Seattle Rep in 2004, she raked (angled up) the stage-floor as steeply as actors' union rules allow, about two inches per foot.

"It's hard," she said of the process of making such choices, of not only finding the right angles and perspectives but actually turning them into a functional design. "I'd say mechanical drafting is not my forte, and neither is math. But I'm very interested in what people see. So often when I want to skew perspective, or shift or change it, or force it down or extend it, I actually work in model-form. So I actually make a model, maybe a quarter-inch scale, and then I adjust shapes and move them around, and change my eye-line, and play with those shapes and volumes and shift them even slightly to see what kind of different feeling it gives.

"And it really is a feeling. It's like, that feels too angry. Sometimes you can shift a perspective so much that it's very aggressive. And maybe that's good," she added. "Or that feels too soft, or that's not doing anything for me."

This last year, Lilienthal did the design for two radically different but equally well-received theatre pieces: Seattle Rep's production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, and Keith Hitchcock's mind-bending solo show Muffin Face, performed at the Balagan Theatre.

Betrayal was one of the highlights of an otherwise fairly rough season for Seattle Rep, and that came as a bit of a surprise. Betrayal is one of Pinter's mid-career plays, written after he'd given up on the avant-garde, menacing qualities of his earlier works like The Birthday Party and Homecoming. In many ways, it's a tame domestic drama, about an affair between a woman and her husband's best friend that unfolds over years. It's well-worn territory that even the best theatre artists can rarely breathe life into. But Pinter had one brilliant insight that helps make Betrayal work: the story unfolds in reverse, beginning with the devastating consequences of the affair and ending with the generally innocent beginnings.

That reversal forces the audiences to constantly reassess the narrative, since you only get the back-story to each scene after the fact. And it was this sense of reassessment and claustrophobic absorption in the story that influenced Lilienthal's set, which worked far better than even she anticipated.

The trick was simply a moving wall, that came forward about four feet at a time during the scene transitions, until by the end it's crowding the actors on the lip of the stage.

"As this wall moved, first it [just] moved, and the second time it covered a window, and then it covered another window. By the fifth time it moved, it was all the way downstage," she explained of the process. "Ninety-five percent of the audience told me they never saw the wall move, until they realized both windows were covered. Now, for me this was astonishing! And so many people stopped me and talked to me about this. They were totally stunned, and they sort of had to backtrack the entire play and re-imagine what was happening."

"I thought it would be, 'Oh wow! The wall's moving. Cool,'" she said sardonically. "Or, 'Oh interesting, the space is changing.' But I had no idea that people wouldn't notice it, and that they would be so affected by it, that it changed they way they knew and understood the characters and the space and the relationships."

Keith Hitchcock's Muffin Face is about as different from Betrayal as you can get. A surreal one-man-show in a tiny, intimate space, Muffin Face is the one show I'm positive too few people saw last season. The audience enters a theatre made up like a conference room, centered around a long table, but with numbered, assigned seats wrapping around it and seemingly inexplicable arrows drawn on the floor. Hitchcock, dressed in a gray three-piece suit and wearing a head-mic, enters and performs as something between a motivational speaker and an infomercial pitch-man, leading you through the "pre-show" to Muffin Face.

Essentially what Hitchcock does, through a variety of off-the-wall gimmicks and audience interaction, is to draw the everyday into hyper-focus for the audience when it leaves the theatre. The "pre-show" is all he gives you; Muffin Face (whatever that means) is your life afterward, and as promised, the effects of the show last until you go to sleep that night. It's akin to what it was like back in college to get high in your dorm room then stumble around campus at night, stunned by how weird everything seemed. "Profound" is perhaps too strong a word, but it was a stunning piece that did something to its audience that few works manage.

"You're coming at a space like that totally differently, because everyone is, like, two feet away from the performers," Lilienthal explained, chuckling at my reaction to the show. "That's when I like to get hyper-realistic, almost surreal. And that's what Muffin Face was for me. I was really interested in the idea of something that most people know very well—in this case, a board room or an office-style space—and making it kind of hyper, kind of extreme on that level."

But what Muffin Face really demonstrates is how a designer can play a fundamental role in crafting the overall work. I was surprised to find out from Lilienthal that there was no staging concept originally. The spoken text was all that Hitchcock prepared, while the setting—which was ultimately a huge part of the show—could have been anything, anywhere.

"I actually knew from the beginning that that was where it was going to end up at," Lilienthal commented slyly, in the one of the few moments she betrayed anything other than complete humility to the collaborative process. "But I don't get to say that to the director, and we went around and around, we went in this huge circle to get back to that. Because usually the vision I have in my head is right."

Other concepts proposed for the setting ranged from a prop warehouse to a bathroom (with Hitchcock performing in the tub) to a chemistry lab to the Bat Cave.

"All of those could actually have really worked well, and that was what was so tricky about this play," she explained. "There was a working script that was just words, nothing happens in it. It was one of the most intellectual projects I've ever worked on. Keith's an intellectual, I'm intellectual, and the two directors he worked with were very intellectual."

Ultimately, one of the biggest constraints on the design was the desire to make it tour-friendly. "From the beginning, he said, 'I want to make sure we can tour this,' so we had to pull way back, and get really, like, 'We're going to get these few items, that can come apart, fit into a car,'" Lilienthal said of the final choice. "And so it ended up going into a very simple place."

"But for me, it really preserved and hit on these really funny, key elements that even if it had been this really complicated chemistry lab...that might have even overshadowed the actual words," she continued. "He's a great writer, he's very funny, and I felt the set wasn't too overpowering, but it was strong, it was compelling. It had a strong character role that it played, but not one that was over the top of Keith. Because Keith needed to be bigger than the set, and a lot of our initial ideas were much bigger than Keith could have ever been."