All the world’s a stage and it’s the set that makes it look good
Theatre sets allow the audience to discover unspoken details about the character which would otherwise be a mystery
An Enemy of the People
The design of this show was very minimalist and based within the real world. Most of the show is set within the living room of the protagonist’s family, who are implied to be upper middle class within their poor town. We built the base of the living room and dressed it with simple, but relatively nice furniture, hinting at the status of the family, as well as the poverty of the town. The home is the center of the stage, and as you branch out from the living room, the world seems to dissolve with the lack of walls, the very bare trees, and the lack of actual room in the dining room. This was a strategy we used to help further the use of imagination from the audience as we wanted the story to be timeless; it wasn’t so much where or when that mattered, but the what and its morals.
Fall Play 2022
Working: A Musical
Working is a musical containing songs that tell individual stories based of off a real persons experience in the working class. For this, the set needed to shift enough to tell this stories, while also having a consistent look. To accomplish this, we decided we could emphasize the raw, inner workings of our theater to display the work itself that went into the show by drawing back all the curtains and the cyc (large white sheet, usually at the back of the stage), making the stage as large and bare as possible. We also built a plain, factory-like riser in the back of stage to go along with the labor themes in the show, while adding areas to play with levels during the musicals numbers. This riser has an open area below where the live band would play music, furthering the audiences view of all that went in to a production. Lastly, we constructed three moving pillars of different heights. Each had three sides creating an alcove in the middle where characters would stand inside depending on the setting. Each column had a different material (brick-molded ply-wood), metal, and corrugated sheet metal) covering each side so a different environment could be created depending on what story was being told. Lastly, we tied the cyc to the ceiling in order to create a large cloud where we could play with lighting design and color.
Spring Musical 2023
Secret in the Wings
Secret in the Wings is a story in which many unknown fairy tales are split up and told throughout one big play, with it all being revealed to be a dream at the end. The story started in an average basement, but throughout the show, this basement needed to host many different locations. Our production decided that the basement wouldn’t actually need to be decorated differently for each, and instead it would hide many details used to bring the characters into the main world where they would tell these stories. To start, we constructed the main platform, consisting of two levels, and on these we painted a spotted gray color to resemble old concrete. From here we added wooden stairs reaching up towards the ceiling to create the effect that the story took place at the very bottom of a house. But since we needed characters to enter and exit from these stairs that seemingly led to the rest of the house, we created escape stairs that secretly went down into the wings. To hide these we put an old wardrobe, and took out the back to make a secret entrance for fairytale characters. We made another surprising entrance from an air vent in the second platform. We dressed the set with many random odds and ends which would sometimes end up as props used by fairy tale characters. So by adding parts of the basement that would evolve into parts of the fairytales, there was no need for a set change. Because the show revolved around books, we decided to take hundreds of old books and pile them up all around the stage, almost like they upheld the basement. In general, the set looks to be very grounded in a real world which would make a stark and interesting contrast to the events within the show.
Fall Play 2023
Hamlet
Hamlet is a very popular show, as is much of Shakespeare, and because his stories are so universal, they can really be placed in any time or any place. In the Bishop’s rendition of Hamlet, we decided to place the story in a 1940s Brooklyn jazz club — and instead of a monarchy, it was more a hierarchy of bosses, owners, performers, patrons, etc. To accomplish this look, we created a stage within a stage, allowing us to play with levels as we needed to have a certain area for performance along with the “audience” and the band. Off to the sides we created rolling, semi-circle platforms which would act as settings that weren’t the main room of the jazz club, such as Gertrude’s changing room, or Claudius’ office. When these were not acting as a smaller room, we used the semi-circles as a raised seating area for more distinguished patrons of the club such as Hamlet, Gertrude, or Polonius. I should probably mention that our production used modern day songs sung in a 1940’s jazzy fashion as performances in the jazz club. Although the story was told in a more modern setting, we still wanted to maintain some of the original period within the show. In order to do this, we mimicked the structure of a traditional Shakespearean stage, using a raised platform for the main performances, lowered seating levels, and an elevated band that watches over the whole thing. The setting of this show helped us to establish a glamorous world without the obvious detail that the characters belong to a powerful monarchy, but it also provided a contrast for the corrupt and violent events that occur in Hamlet.
Spring Play 2024
