On Poor Set Design

One of the most unfortunate things about Word for Word's production of Sonny's Blues is the set design. It's worth mentioning because the way a stage looks is one of the most important elements of a production and at the same time, one of hardest things to complain about. This is due to the widely held (and mistaken) belief that you have to have a lot of money to make a set look right, and money, as everyone knows, is something that very few theatre companies beyond Broadway and the largest regional houses have in abundance. As a result, audiences and critics often avoid mentioning a crap-looking set in order not to appear rude (or, in the case of reviewers, they conveniently run out of space.) Frequently, people block the set out completely and concentrate on the words and acting instead.

In a good production, the set is an actor. It can communicate the atmosphere of the scene and often conveys some symbolic meaning too. Working in combination with the lights, sound and costumes, the set design is what throws us into the world of the play as soon as the curtain rises.

One of the most evocative -- if extreme -- sets I've seen since moving to San Francisco just over seven years ago, was Killing My Lobster's design for its Circus of Failure sketch comedy show of 2002. Upon entering the theatre, our eyes were greeted by colorfully-painted, extravagantly-detailed panels depicting circus big tops and side show acts. The first thing that happened as soon as the lights went down was that the set completely self-destructed. The panels crashed to the floor and the actors performed the rest of the show clambering all over the back of them. What a brilliant and theatrical way to get across the idea of the circus as a metaphor for a madcap, but not inconceivable world, where city supervisors have shiny green skin and antennae and George Foreman grills sell out at the local Walmart.

I'm not suggesting that a set design has to walk about the stage or fall flat on its face to be effective. But the set design for Sonny's Blues fails because it's so inert. By "inert," I mean that it doesn't behave like an actor. Besides the lush lighting which hits a backdrop mottled with what looks like the windows of a tenement building to create different "moods" for scenes , we don't learn much about the play from the visual design. It makes the production look like something a bunch of high-school kids produced in a rough workshop production rather than the work of a professional theatre company. (Two professional companies, as a matter of fact: Word for Word produced the show in collaboration with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.)

A high chain link fence stuck haphazardly in a back corner of the stage serves multiple purposes from the edge of a schoolyard to the wall of a jazz club, but it constrains a lot of the action to one area of the stage. It further doesn't help that director Margo Hall blocks one of the most dramatic scenes in the production behind the fence, thus diffusing the impact of the story of the narrator's uncle's death at the hands of some drunk-driving white men. A few tufts of random foliage adorn the rafters here are there like hairs sticking out of an old man's nose. I have no idea what they're for. Most annoying of all is a scraggy-looking table which gets carted on and off throughout the play. I can just about put up with it being used as a table, but when a rectangular box is stuck on top and the actor playing Sonny sits behind it and pretends to play it like a piano, I can barely watch. Neither resembling a real musical instrument nor abstract enough to carry some symbolic value, this cloodgy, half-hearted bit of stage furniture is totally pathetic. In short, this kind of design reflects very badly on the production as a whole.

Creating sharp, engrossing visual images doesn't have to cost a lot of money. In fact, bundles of cash can be detrimental to the look of a production, as flashily-designed but inexpert productions like 2005's Broadway non-starter Lennon the Musical and ACT's After the War proved. Bare stages are great if they fit with the director's vision for the production -- but the blocking, writing and acting had better be engrossing to make up for the lack of other visual signs.

Whatever the design, it must be meaningful. In other words, the "student workshop production" look doesn't go over unless there's something specifically about the play that warrants this aesthetic. As far as Sonny's Blues goes, I say out with the chain link fence and leafy fronds and in with a real, beat-up, upright piano. A few relatively small and inexpensive changes would help our ability to immerse ourselves in the story immensely.

Like all of Word for Word's productions, Sonny's Blues isn't a genuine play but a piece of staged prose lifted from a short story (in this case, by James Baldwin.) As such, the actors speak the lines of the text exactly as they were written by the author with all the "he saids", "she saids" and visual descriptions intact. How ironic that a company that takes such a literal approach to theatre should abandon the actors and audience to grapple listlessly with a couple of cheap wooden boxes in place of a piano.