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The Good Person of Setzuan, by Berholt Brecht
Director: Tim Vassen
Scenic Design: Stephen Gifford
Costume Design: Kirche Leigh Zeile
Sound Design: Marc Gwynn
This was my first experience with Brecht and the director, Tim Vassen, was a great resource during the process. Tim wanted to bring the audience into the space as much as possible, so the audience was set up in a three-quarter thrust with about two rows of seats all the way around, making it as intimate as possible. We didn't want to get bogged down in lengthy scene changes during this piece, so Stephen came up with a great set that had nine entrances, allowing the scenes to jump around the space as needed. As scenes switched from interior to exterior scenes rather quickly, his main idea was using corrugated tin that was painted to be possibly inside or outside. Lighting took care of the rest.
I wanted to use a simple color change to differentiate between the inside (warmer, clear light) from the exterior (cool an diffused, like a cloudy afternoon), but because the human eye adjusts to color very quickly, I could not just switch to a color and leave it there for five minutes, as the audience might forget which world we were in. The main upstage area was given a proscenium that had three large tracking doors in it, these were typically left open, working as the opposite of the current scene. If the main area was an warmer interior scene, the upstage area was lit with cool outside color to help make the main area look warm the entire scene. In addition, practicals were hung in the space that were used for interior scenes to give another visual element to help the audience. These practicals were incredibly helpful at the end of the show to destroy the theatrical world that we had created as the characters seemingly break character and talk directly to the audience. For the final scene, we used only these lights to give a completely different look that we had never seen before in the show.
Working model photos
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