On Site

Figures

Figure 1.

Blithedale: A Virtual Utopia at HERE (1998). Written and adapted by Elizabeth Banks, David Latham, and Ruth Margraff. Directed by Tim Maner. Photograph courtesy of Kyle Chepulis.

Figure 2.

Charles L. Mee's Orestes, En Garde Arts, 59th St. and 12th Ave. (1993). Photograph courtesy of Kyle Chepulis.

Figure 3.

Mac Wellman's Bad Penny En Garde Arts, Central Park (1989). Directed by Jim Simpson. Photograph courtesy of Kyle Chepulis.

Figure 4.

Mac Wellman's Second-Hand Smoke at Primary Stages (1997). Photograph courtesy of Kyle Chepulis.

Figure 5.

Reza Abdoh and Mira-Lani Oglesby's Father Was a Peculiar Man, En Garde Arts, 9th Ave. and W. 12th St. (1990). Directed by Reza Abdoh. Photograph courtesy of Kyle Chepulis.

Figure 6.

Orestes, En Garde Arts. Photograph courtesy of Kyle Chepulis.

JONATHAN SHANDELL You started out as a technical director. When did you first get the chance to design your own set?

KYLE CHEPULIS The first was Mac Wellman’s Cellophane at BACA, a little theater in Brooklyn that no longer exists. I was the technical director when Greta Gunderson, the artistic director, said, “We want to use you to design Mac’s show.”

Your long collaboration with Mac Wellman has been extremely productive. Is it something about his writing?

Mac likes my work because I respond to what I imagine the play is, instead of reading and analyzing it conventionally. Something Mac and I have talked about is reversing the design process. I’ll create a set, and a world, and Mac will then write a play for it. That’s always jogged around our minds. But we haven’t done it yet. It’s hard. With no boundaries, I’m scared about creating it.

I need to know where a show is going to be. I need to go hang out in that place. I incorporate the room as much as I can. You’ve got to make the audience, and how they interact with the space, as important as what is on stage. I always try to break the separation between the audience in their chairs and the play on the stage.

Most designers have been taught to work in a proscenium theater, with tall ceilings and fly space and all that. If I had a Broadway show, I wouldn’t know how to do it, because I work within limitations—budgets, spaces, or whatever—and do a lot with them. When the limitations go away, it might be harder. Working in the downtown market, even off Broadway, you’re not in ideal spaces. The first thing I think is, “Oh, where are we?”

Which less-than-ideal space has presented the greatest challenge for you?

Primary Stages, where I did Second-Hand Smoke. It takes place in an office, on a roof, and in an unknown other area. It was hard to create those definitions in a really small theater. First, we showed the back wall of the theater, painted black, with an office desk. Next, we had to be in a little weird area, so the floor, the whole width of the space, lifted up. The desk went up with it, and the floor became a white wall. There was a little entr’acte, and then we had to be on the roof—another floor picked up to the angle of a roof, and a window popped out from it. It was fun.

The actors were a little annoying. I gave them a walkway that was perfectly safe, but they went to the union. They wanted to get hazard pay. Although I keep the actors in mind, I’m pretty well known at this point for not making actor-friendly sets. I never put an actor in any danger, but my way clashes with what they’re used to.

What are actors used to?

When Brian Aldous designed lights for Jennifer McDowell’s Recriminal Minds, he had a lot of difficulty. I would say to him, “Brian, you can’t see the surfaces in the back.” He’d say, “Yeah, but you can see the actors.” My approach is: light the set, not the actors. I try to create a whole world. Lighting the actors is secondary.

Is there too much separation between set design and lighting design in theater today?

College is where you are taught that lighting is only supposed to serve the sets and the director. Since I wasn’t formally trained, I don’t know what the right or wrong thing is. Here’s an example of the problem I have with theater education: When I was an apprentice out in Aspen, I worked with a woman who had a B.A. and had spent six years learning lighting. But I had dealt with it from the equipment end. I really knew what the equipment could do and could work the big dimmers and the repatching. She didn’t. I always tell people who want to design lighting for theater: “Don’t go to college.”

Don’t these programs teach anything worthwhile and useful?

I kick myself for not learning how to do lighting and set drawings, or how to do renderings. I can’t render to save my life, so I don’t even try it. When I have to produce drawings, I call Brian and ask him, “What is a lighting drawing supposed to look like? What does the rest of the world expect from me?”

But I didn’t get it beat into my head what design should be. I look at everything as possible. I haven’t learned what you shouldn’t do. If I light a show completely with five-thousand-watt lightbulbs, that’s strange to a lot of people. I was never told that I couldn’t do that. So I always look for new and interesting ways. If I had to work the same way as a regular lighting designer, I wouldn’t actually know how to do it. Since I have no formal training, I gravitate towards the alternative.

You’ve founded a company, Technical Artistry, dedicated to solving technical problems in alternative, creative ways.

We try to bring new technology to theaters. Lately, we have moved into new lighting designs for museums. In the Hall of Biodiversity at the Natural History Museum, other companies did the track lighting, but they needed unique lighting for a rain forest reconstruction, in which every little nut and branch is an exact replica.

We used a new technology called fusion, in which a small round bulb contains pure sulfur, and a focused beam of microwaves turns that sulfur into plasma. It burns very bright, with a near-sunlight look. We had eighteen of these fusion lights, and found a way to transmit the light over the rain forest using a pipe made from 3M optical lighting film. Fiber-optic tunnels created little spotlights—for a bird over here, or whatever. When we first put it in, another designer said he thought someone had cut a hole in the ceiling and let sunlight in.

Technical Artistry also tries to work with energy-efficient fixtures and very low-maintenance lights. A museum cannot change a bulb every week, so this exhibit has long intervals between maintenance times, something like fifty thousand hours. Bulbs almost never burn out, and when they do, they are all where you can get to them.

How do you approach a given location in your site-specific design?

With Annie Hamburger’s En Garde Arts shows, I respond to the site first, and then the play, and then the director. That’s why some directors I’ve worked with do not want to work with me again, like Tina Landau. We did Charles L. Mee’s Orestes, down at the piers. She did a great job with the show, but she and I didn’t see eye to eye. To her, we were in a theater, and she wanted to create a stage set. But I said, “No. We’re at a pier on the Hudson River, and I want to design the show based on the fact that we are at this site. Why are we having this play happen here?” She wanted to pretend we’re in a big, dark room and here’s the set. But whether I’m at the Victory Theater or MCC or Primary Stages, everything is a site-specific piece to me.

What about when those locations change? In 1990, you designed Mac Wellman’s Crowbar at a run-down Victory Theater. Have you seen Disney’s New Victory Theater?

I have seen it. Part of me really loved how horrible 42nd Street was, with old, abandoned buildings. It was the gritty part of the city. There’s something I miss now that New York is getting so cleaned up.

Does that space, the New Victory, hold any possibilities for you anymore?

No. It’s a regular theater now. There’s nothing I could do in there.

What has your role been in helping to shape the Bat Theater?

Jim Simpson and the architect and I worked on different ideas for creating a comfortable space. My approach to the theater was with the audience. I want the audience to be so amazingly comfortable. We didn’t put as many seats in there as we could possibly force in. And I wanted each row to be four feet wide. We even spent a decent amount on the chairs. In a lot of these theaters, audiences are herded around like cattle. Jim and I want the experience to start from when you first approach and see the building from down the street. We’ve got to take care of you from that point in the visual experience, to when you start to walk in, until you sit down, even to the bathrooms. Most producers, writers, and directors just care about what’s on stage. The audience will fit in whatever space is left over. I don’t design that way. I don’t care if you go into a space and see a wonderful show; the whole atmosphere affects you in some way.

Jim wanted to do the same thing for the actors, to create really comfortable dressing rooms because the actors, in some of these little theaters, are in horrible dressing rooms, one on top of the other. He wanted the experience for the actors to be something special, because we can’t afford to pay them a lot of money.

Mike Nolan and I also wanted the space to be different technically, to find a different approach for downtown. Mike’s got a computerized mixing board—Mac’s Girl Gone is run off one computer, which can send sound to any speaker anywhere.

We know you can do technical stuff without spending a lot of money. We’re really trying to bring efficient technology to off-off-off-Broadway theater, or however many offs we are here.

What happened when you first opened the Flea, with Karen Finley’s Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman?

It was the first thing in our space—the space isn’t even finished now—but how the audience viewed it and the people in it was very important to me. They wanted projected video in the show, so we projected something the size of an entire wall. We didn’t have power, we had nothing up there, so I decided to light the whole thing with about eight moving lights. The entire acting space was within scaffolding. I wanted that because I wanted the audience to interact with our space as a space that wasn’t done. The acting space was within scaffolding, and the spectators were seated on buckets, wherever they could fit. It worked fairly successfully.