Designing for the Theatre

One of the things that I feel an audience can neglect to think about is the planning and the great attention to detail that goes into creating everything that is seen on stage. Jo Mielziner's memoir about designing Death of a Salesman is an excellent example of the process of how a production is created. Jo's level of detail in his memoir really gave me a mental picture of how the stage, the props, and lighting might look for this production. I feel that minimizing props was a good decision, because it allows the audience to fill in the rest of the scene with their imaginations. The decision to get rid of the headstone was a good choice. I can imagine sitting in the audience and being distracted at the headstone coming out of nowhere and I know that I would miss some of the meaning of that final scene.

I definitely agree with Mielziner's opinion about lighting, that it has the opportunity to be flexible, yet expressive and creative. The use of leaf projections to symbolize the openness of the past I do not feel was the best option. I would have liked to see some sky blue incorporated, because I feel that trees can also act a lot like the buildings the Willy despised and cut off the house from the air and the sunlight.

Fires in the Mirror

In Fires in the Mirror, Smith uses 29 monologues from 26 different real life people to depict the crisis of the Crown Heights riots of August of 1991. A number of things in this play intrigued me. First is the concept of mirrors discussed by Aaron M. Bernstein. Bernstein talks about how mirrors relate to distortion and physics.

"if you wanna see the
stars
you make a big
reflecting mirror-
that's one of the ways-
you make a big telescope
so you can gather in a lot of light
and then it focuses at a point
and then there's always something called the circle of confusion."

According to Wikipedia, the circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source. I think that Bernstein uses this concept of mirrors as a metaphor. People are symbolized by light and since everyone has a different viewpoint there will always be some confusion about what actually happened at a certain event.

The second thing that intrigued me about this play, is that racial tensions were so high in the community of Crown Heights that a fatal car crash, even though it was just an accident resulted in days of riots, property being destroyed and stole, hundreds of injuries, and unprovoked murder. The Blacks of Crown Heights assumed that the decisions made by the police, medical response teams, and several other individuals were made showed favoritism toward the Jewish community. These assumptions, along with many others, helped increase the tension that was already building because of the number of Jewish people moving into the community.

I have read the syllabus and accept the terms of the course.