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Floating set

posted by Karen McKevitt on Sat, May 19, 2012
in Our shows , Scene shop

Whenever she's working on a set for a Berkeley Rep show, Scenic Charge Artist Lisa Lazar emails awesome photos with commentary to the entire staff. Here's her step-by-step of the set for Dael Orlandersmith's Black n Blue Boys / Broken Men, which begins performances on May 25.

Here’s another glimpse into the recent activities in the scene shop. Dan Ostling’s design for Black n Blue Boys looks stark and austere, but it offers a lot of technical challenges.

The show floor will seem to float in the space, but of course, we need to build a solid understructure that will work well in the Thrust and also can be transported easily for the future life of this production.  Irregular shapes and angled scenery are just part of the fun!

The planks on this floor are built in a forced perspective, getting gradually thinner as they go upstage. 

Again, this complex layout needs to be modular, for transport. Shop foreman Sam McKnight created a very clever stenciled system for aligning the various pieces of the flooring. The blue lines will be the guidelines for installation.

Each board is custom-stained by current scenic art fellow Anya Kazimierski and former scenic art fellow Margot Leonard.  

Once the floor is stained, it needs to be aged. We want the scenery to look like it has had a long life, even if it was just recently built. 

The dark gray objects in the foreground are the stage supports featured in the very first photograph.

Here's the set installed on the Thrust Stage. Our esteemed colleagues in the scene shop have made a tricky installation look easy. The set is just floating in the space…really lovely!