 Mother's copy of the Kamasutra. And then I did the center for Iowa last year. What? Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. Iowa. And the patrons say to the seed monsters and David greens bands go back to where you are. One reason? And Washburn and the Pl Yemen. And thank you all for joining us. We opened the show a couple of weeks ago ... A couple weeks ago? Um. So everyone's live. Everybody has already moved on to at least three other projects each. So it's really a lot you guys should also make yourselves available to talk about this Saturday afternoon, the first Saturday afternoon, the first warm one we've had. I thought that the right way to approach talking about the design process would be to do it chronologically from the very beginning of the creation of the play through rehearsals, into tech rehearsals, into previews, and then into opening. It seemed like the right way to kind of, a way, a way to organize it really. So I guess I want to sort of start off by asking all of you, well I guess it's the place it starts with, and writes a play. So I guess I would say, and I'm like, what's, you're writing a play, and what are you thinking about design-wise? How much of it is, how much of it is clear in your head when you're writing, and what is the playwright's relationship to designing a play? Oh, God. It changes through your writing life. I think a lot of writers begin in the design, role of designing their head is either very timid or very extraordinary. And as you have more plays produced and you come to have a sense of both what are the limitations of design, but also the possibilities it opens up, you start to trust designers more, I think in your writing. So I don't remember the specific process of thinking of design in this play, but I know that I have a great love for, I have a great love for what design can do, and the sort of immersive quality it can bring to a play, the extraordinary world it can create. And it was a play which was, for me, felt very sensory as I was writing it. So I know there was this whole sense of, these are sort of laying out things which I hope would be opportunities for people to do very cool things, which they then Clinton did, which was lovely. Were there specific things that you knew about the design when you were writing it? Were there things in the way it's all actually happened now that you sort of, that are true to, if you can remember back to when you were writing the play, that are true to the way that you were imagining it? Right, well I had, I mean this is also something I think Rachel will talk about more. I had some very specific ideas which did not at all happen in the way that I had conceived. Some of it happened in a way which was better and actually ended up feeling all like what I had specifically thought of originally. This play was set in a specific location where I wrote it in my head, but knowing that it had to, that would have to shift when we actually get a stage. But for example, I had imagined a concrete floor and that specified in the stage directions. When it came to the star scene, I sort of thought, well, they have those great little lighting grids that they can do. I'm sure somebody will do something like that. And that would be really pretty. And that's not what happened and what happened was much more amazing. I knew that sound had to be heightened and sort of very intimate. And songs are important to the play. So I sort of had those things in mind. I mean, I think one thing it's worth talking about before giving it over to these guys, just in terms of what the playwright's role is with design. An American playwright has a lot of, has a lot of, not control exactly, but in terms of choosing collaborators, generally a playwright can choose or have a heavy role in the selection of the director, which is, of course, the major, major decision. The playwright has a huge role in the casting and actually theoretically has final say. So in those areas, I am and expect to be heavily, heavily involved. I am not, in terms of bringing in designers, I am not because that is so much about, that is the director's prerogative because the director is the person who is involved in the very intimate conversation with them. So that's something I can sort of have opinions about and feelings about and hope about. These are all people, Dan and I worked together six years ago on a production in DC. I've known me for a long time, I've never been able to work with her. I have been wanting to, got to, I've been wanting to work with Rachel for ages, I've been wanting to work with Dan again for ages, but it doesn't necessarily, for me, it's sort of about the director and his, in this case, his or her relationship with designers and just as a tiny sidebar, I will say as a playwright, I generally, in most processes, I generally have great love for the lighting design and the sound design. I have sometimes had great oppositional feelings which I've generally had to suppress about set design and costume design, that's because those visual elements really, the visual is dramaturgical in a play and if the set or costume designer made visual choices which do not jive with your feeling of the thing of the play, I mean A, those are huge and B, things have already, by the time you see everything up and assembled, things have been purchased and often they can't be changed. Whereas the great thing about lighting and sound is that they are, they can be changed without cost generally. As the play goes on, those can be ongoing discussions till the word go, whereas once the set is up, the degree to which it can be changed depends hugely on materials and time and labor. So just to say that those are all from a clarity perspective. Right. And so you guys, so then you guys are sitting at your home patiently waiting for the phone to ring. You guys get a call and say, we'd like to offer you a design job to work on this show. What are the, and then you read the play, presumably, what are the things that are thinking, like why do you say yes to a play, what are the factors to choose to design a play? And what are the things that you might encounter that would make you decide not to design a play? I got, well, this, I'm gonna admit some things slightly scandalous, which is that I got this offer via e-mail. Yes, that's the word I know, I'm stuck in the 80s. And it was Ann's play and Ken, the brilliant Ken Rushmore directing, I have wanted to work so desperately with them both. I'm such a ridiculous fan of Ann's. And I believe I accepted this job within eight minutes without reading the play. And then I read the play and I think I saw you the night I read it and was just in love with it. And I knew I would be, I'm fascinated by Ann's work and how she thinks and what she's looking at. I know your relationship to visual design and I was excited to fold, to make sure that you were a huge part of that. But I was mostly excited about the beauty and the lyricism of the text and what it was asking for visually. On top of, of course, the story points of it, which are always first and foremost. I'll second that about the personnel. You know? Like the decision to engage in a month-long, messy, co-operative attempt to make something with other people is like mostly, you can often be wrong about what you think a piece is going to be, but I'm pretty attracted to... There's, I really don't care, I estimate the importance of chemistry with the director. So, because there's so much trust involved in the long days of working and the risks that you have to take with your imagination. So, I'll essentially do almost anything I can with Ken. Ken Rush-Mall, who is the director, who unfortunately couldn't be here today for mysterious reasons. No, I think he's in Philadelphia, working directors of the show. And... Yeah, I feel, I mean... Sam desired. Yeah. There you go. I feel the same way about Ken, who I have worked with many times before and although I hadn't worked with Ann before, I was really excited to get the opportunity. I think that when you're coming into a situation, you have to know, kind of I'm always looking at who the other designers are on board, if they're on board and usually by the time sound gets involved, they are on board and that makes a big difference. So, I would extend that circle of collaborators. Also, I kind of know that if a script comes from playwrights, it generally can be a really strong piece of work and so that's exciting as well. And then of course, there's the stage of reading a text and Ann was so keyed in to sound and that was so clear for reading the text that it made it really exciting for me because I kind of immediately understood, oh, this is kind of what... This is kind of the vocabulary of the way that sound works in this world and that seemed like a really exciting world to me. There was a point of, sometimes there is a sound designer and the composer are the same person. What were some of the factors into why we... Because pretty early on we decided it was actually two people for this play. What were some of the factors into that conversation? I mean, as somebody who does both jobs other times, I'll say like there's a type of work where the music that you're gonna use in the sound design where basically the relationship between making music and queuing it is really integrated and sometimes just easier to do by yourself because your right hand knows what your left hand is doing. But I mean, in this piece, there were such like specific and in ways unrelated workflows that needed to happen with the development of the songs and sort of staggering amount of voiceover work. So it just, I don't know, I think like the way in which that's two different sets of tasks is sort of... Clear. Yeah. Yeah, I really came on to the project through Dan because he was gonna do both. And then you and Ken sort of came to a decision. It seemed done wise. Yeah. It made a lot of sense to me from sitting in the office and I heard that was happening. I was like, oh yeah, of course, because it's so nuanced. So you want the sound to be, like the both the sound and the music to be so, it's so exacting what the play asks for. And it does seem like you want to be able to give, if your focus is on the composition, you want to be able to just focus on the composition. And if your focus is on the sound, you want your focus to just be on the sound. And what was the very first thing? So then you say yes to the job. And what are the very first things that you guys do? Like what are the first conversations you have? I mean really the first person who has to turn in their work is the set designer always. Because it takes the longest to build and for a lot of reasons. But like, so what are the first things that you do? Like what are the, what's that early process like? It's lovely because it's when everything is possible, right? So generally what happens for me is I read the play a couple of times, but I don't do any further work until I've had a chance to sit down and talk to the director. Because this is always true. No matter what the stage direction's saying, no matter how specific they are, there are 500 different ways that you can honor them faithfully. And I don't want to really begin to think in a full way until I know what is exciting to the director. And hopefully the playwright, if the playwright is available to be part of those early conversations. So I read the play and then I wait until we talk. And in this case, almost all of our early conversations, we had one terrific conversation where it was us and Tyler Miklou, who's our amazing lighting designer on this. Who's on vacation? Who's on vacation? And Ken in a bar somewhere in the lobby of CSC I think. And we had a great, we had a really great full conversation about this. And then generally what happens is I'll go away and do pretty extensive visual research to make sure I know, even if the play is going to be abstracted to a very extreme extent, I need to know what that place is to figure out how to abstract it. And in this case, because it was a specific place and the play was written very specifically to take place where it was written, the research was almost exclusively photographs of that place, although we did do some further research on other places that are similar in Texas, what kind of scrub, what kind of play, what's the thing that's going to tell you what that place is, particularly with something this minimal, which we always knew it would be from the stage directions. We always knew it would be as, you're very clear in what you wanted to be here. And it was very focused. So we actually look at, what does the first stage direction actually say, just so we can look at where we were, what exactly, where you started. The set, a granite kitchen island, face front stools, floor of polished concrete, upstage the trunk and lower branches of a massive pecan tree. And that's all you got. That's all we got. And everything else that informs the set, how it breathes, how it moves, how it sounds is from the text itself. There are small stage directions throughout. I was just going back to look and see what you had given us and what you hadn't given us, which was really fun. Mostly we followed the instructions, mostly. But all of those initial design meetings, it was amazing because it was Ken and Tyler and I because the lighting in this, particularly how that dance happens around this to have the benefit of the three of us meeting together was remarkable. What were some of the specific challenges or the hardest things to figure out in those early meetings? It seems to me like the star effect is in a lot of ways was sort of like the organizing principle in some ways of what the floor plan at least of what the set is. It wasn't. It wasn't. No. I knew very early how I wanted to do that. I didn't in my wildest dreams imagine we would be able to so fully realize that. But the organizing principle was absolutely how do we frame and place this space to allow for the action of the play. I mean like what kind of a world is it within a concrete floor and a grand encounter and avoid with nothing but the tree? How do we hold the play so that in a way that facilitates the speed of the entrances and the exits in a way that gives us the breath of an expanse of the landscape where this is. I mean when you read the play, the most specific directions throughout the text are about the sound throughout the play. And you can hear, because it was written, or do you talk about this? It was written on a silent retreat. So you can hear how much Anne was aware of the sounds around her. It's woven. It's integral to the text, which is why their work is like, everything has to make space for the sound. So the sound that these objects make is essential. But the first time we follow the instructions we round up with a set that was like the German version of this. It was cold, cold, cold. And it didn't allow the play to breathe. But it was like trying to create a void in a room that has an 11-foot ceiling is tricky, right? It's 12 feet from the dirt to those pipes. That's it. So to make it feel vast, that was the organizing principle of the design. For sure, uh-huh, for sure. And so the idea of having it be like the kitchen counter and the simplicity of that, is that one idea that comes from Ken? Or did you guys both sort of have the idea together? It comes from Anne. It comes from Anne. It comes from Anne. And it comes from Ken always knew that he wanted all of the traffic to go upstage, downstage. He did not want any left, right exits, which is good, because you'll see where the sidewall of the theater is, right? So you can't go that way. So there was a real dynamic push that he knew was gonna be essential to the drive of the play. And the sort of interesting and slightly abstracted choice of the show deck, meaning that we obviously honored the concrete deck. It's the, you know, when you look at images of the space, you can see why it's important, but we also, so the concrete deck is here. But we discovered we needed a kind of warmth, and that's where we went to all of this wood. But, you know, the organizing principle of stepping off in a way the performance deck down and out to a space that is still a performance space. And the sort of interesting, amazing choice, which is yours, that we would create a kitchen without ever seeing the refrigerator, the pantry. Like, how do you keep that full in breathing? How do you have the sense of all this food coming, but there's no, you know, and they're cooking and cooking and cooking, but there's no oven. I added the sink. We had many discussions. I was adamant to concrete floor only. We looked at the original little set models that it did look like a cell. So then this would, and you should talk about this wood and what this wood is, because it's brilliant. Yeah, I was adamant no sink. A sink came in, and then that, of course, was great. I was adamant no rest of the kitchen. We talked about the rest of the kitchen. We did sort of toggle with the idea of the rest of the kitchen. And then, yeah, kept it obeyed. I guess like the purity of the surface, the purity of the preparation, but it ended up, again, it was too German. Do you want to talk a little, because those were originally very German, those guys over there. Very German. At the beginning of the tech, it was a very German set of stiff room like, which looked great in a sense. And then over the course of tech in the first week of preview, fascinatingly, they got broken up and scrubbier. And all of those little guys in there are plastic. Every weed is a little intricate plastic weed. And I would come in and Rachel would be sort of stomping on the weeds to make them throw their beets down and waggling at the things and trimming things. I mean, that was, was that, did you always know that what happened was that intuitive process once you got involved? No, I always knew that would happen. Because I knew that, you know, the aggressive weeds were gonna be too much. They had to be what the trees do. You know, they had to be sort of siblings that way. Like the tree, the sort of way that they suggest something without being the thing. They needed to do that. But this like, I mean, I have to go back a second to say, like in one of those meetings that you weren't at, we secretly designed the whole kitchen. I knew it. I knew it. And we put it all in and we looked at it because we were really struggling with how to play through the action of the play without that stuff. And like, really, the refrigerator's gonna be really? And then we, so we did a whole version where that was there. And we were like, no, she's right. And we took it away. But it was in a way that helped us understand what the space was. And I think in this silent retreat, the playwrights are not meant to ever use any of their technology. But of course, everyone seems to have some stolen photographs of this space. So the silent treat is like, it's in Texas. And it's a 10, it's like a 10 day? A 10 day. Eric N is this amazing playwright educator. He runs the program at Brown. He runs the program at Brown. And he has this amazing silent retreat for playwrights which he runs you through. And it's 10 days in a remote location. And for a number of years, a family who loves theater has donated us their ranch in Texas and the Hill Country of Texas for a period of up to 10 days. So it's 10 days during the course of which you write a play. You come in not knowing what play you're gonna write. You're silent the entire time. You're off internet the entire time, at least in theory. And so it was very much about, it was when you're writing a play exactly from scratch, your environment gets pulled in often in ways you don't expect. And so I had a very concrete notion of where this place was set and what the place was like. And the place had a concrete floor which was lovely. It's very hot, the concrete floor is very cool. And then of course you're looking at these sets of windows into this expansive Texas countryside. You come into a space like this, you put in a concrete floor, you don't have the expansive set of windows and it does become a cell. There's no, the beams are true to the lodge but in the lodge they're spaced out once every eight feet or something. So Rachel did this kind of truncating perspective thing which gives you the feeling of a vast room in a very economical way. That was something which just appeared one day and seemed quite brilliant. I mean that, so that among some of the stolen photographs and gave us as research a picture of a tree outside and a picture of the island. They were very efficient photographs that were provided of the space. And so I secretly wrote to my, well do with your permission if I'm not so secret. I wrote to Madeline George who is a wonderful playwright who you know from her work downstairs and who is also a terrific photographer and she had captured the place in a different way. And she had a photograph that showed me this and the minute I saw those beams I knew what it was because the thing that the beams do is they embrace this space, right? So what Anne knew is the economy of what was on stage and how the play breathes and then in shifting and exactly as you say without the real expanse outside the inside needed to do what the outside would have done if you were there. So we switched the texture a little bit and what I added was the wood and the dirt to give you a sense of because that sense of the flat, hot Texas dirt. And I feel like that in the beams, that's all I did. And then find a way to let the, to find a way to in a way frame the space so that it felt like you were seeing a corner of a much bigger thing. So like these are the low offshoots of a much bigger tree and how you technically make that and how you decide to do that, you know, that's, those are all projects. We've all seen a lot of pretty bad trees on stage. That's always the anxiety when you design a tree. It's like, how are you going to actually make it in a way that it actually feels like you need it to feel? So we did a hilarious series of early tests of, I mean, these are all in video and they are hilarious. How do you make the wind move through the trees? How do you make the grass move? How do you, so we, you know, downstairs on top of your Marjorie Prime set, like ridiculous, you know, every me and Tyler with fans and you know. We actually got a, we got a grant to basically start working on the design process before earlier than normal because we knew that was going to be, it was going to be specifically uniquely nuanced show. So we were able to actually bring Tyler and Rachel in to work with our production, with some members of our production staff to look at the trees and discuss the thing. But also to look at, I think, I think you were testing out the star. We were, we tested out the star effect very early. To make sure that that was going to work. Do, so what was the question about the star effects? What were you trying to figure out, what was how it was going to work? We needed to figure out how we could hide them and embed them in the wall so that you would never see them coming. We needed to figure out what, and we, what size fibers to use. So those are fiber optics that are embedded in a plaster wall. And what we wanted the audience to feel was in a way, like they have, this was just, those black walls are intended to be like a theater wall, right? So they're void, but they also have texture on them because if they didn't, you would see all the little pinprits, right? But if you plaster something and then paint it black and then drill a hole in it to put a fiber from the back, then you see the white plaster you just drilled through. So it was like a little pimply wall. All right, that didn't work. So there's a series of trial and error and in the end we wound up tinting the plaster black so that if you drilled a hole in it, it would still be black all the way through. And then painting it with a very fancy theater paint which is called black velour paint which is the most light absorbent black paint that is manufactured so that whatever is on those walls, right? Sassy, right? So that whatever light does spill on those walls, it just sort of helps them disappear more in the original goal of creating a void around this which is the heart of this play. I mean, the thing about the displays, it needs to feel warmth and beautiful and you can't know where it's going both in terms of the star effects and the ultimate end story points of this play. You don't want to know, it doesn't want to feel haunted, it doesn't want to, it wants to feel warm and magical and like it's this reunion of these friends and you don't, and so the, we need to go to a couple other locations but they're in the middle of the night. So all those questions about how you answer those locations without trapping yourself and letting the play breathe which is in this play essential in all plays but that's where the structure of the play. So maybe this is a good time and then we'll move on to talking about sound a little bit after this but like I think maybe it's a good time to actually look at the effect and then maybe turn on the works. Yeah, this will be like me standing here with my pants down but if you want to understand what in particular when a lighting designer does we should turn on the work lights for you. Do you want to do that first? So we do that first and then look at the effects. Let's turn on the work lights. Let's reveal the nakedness and then make the mouth. Okay, can we turn the work lights on? And the stage lights off. So I'm gonna have to point out which one I'm gonna be cutting out soon. Reid, do I really have to point out what's the most ugly? I mean, all right, so in this light what you can see is how our limited success with hiding seams in the walls, right? The fact that you don't see any of this that you don't see the actual structure and framing of the walls, that's Tyler, that's Tyler. I would also point out that one of the ways that we helped the room feel taller is the minute these beams entered the design I, and he was like, huh. So this remarkable choice, this remarkable design choice of the parts that lie in the room, that's Tyler's sort of finding a way to give the space both, that's a stylized choice, you as an audience member can see those and are very aware of those, but what they do to the presence of the world and how it changes the world. And then the way that you take something like this and change it to take the journey, the emotional journey that these play takes, that is the great art of lighting design mixed with the incredible art of what these guys are doing so that the world changes shape. But this is the raw, Tyler and I talk about all the things and all of the ways to make that possible. So we're like siblings, but his work on this is stunning and he snuck in some lights over the island, which was probably good. Yeah, so you can see like, I don't know if you can, I can see it from where I'm standing, but you can see the little dots in the walls when it's being lit this way. So one of the things happening is that when you, it seems to me like when I look at the lights in the air, I noticed this during previous ones that there's very few lights actually above me when I'm sitting in the audience. Like oftentimes when we see a show in the Sharp, there's a bunch of lights plugged into that grid up there. But in this case, he really brought all the front lighting really kind of up close. And my theory on that, and I don't know if I'm right in this, is that it's because he didn't want any light to get spilled onto the wall. It's a huge conversation. And one of the things that happens when you point lights at the audience is it really obscures whatever is behind it because your eye is slightly blinded by the light that's coming at you. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book. And so that's part of the reason that he did this with the lights was to create the void because it really erases the structure that's behind it. One of the things that we did, you know, I mean, this helps you understand what the tree is, this magical, magical, magical giant tree is, right? It's brand, I mean, these are long big branches, right? Gathered in February, which I might point out is the time when there are no leaves on them. They're actually cherry branches. We sent a truck out down to, I think, North Carolina where somebody had family. They went and got us these branches. They brought back a number of branches for me to choose from. And then a really remarkable woman sat in the lobby for days and days and days and put these leaves on here. And we looked at a series of leaves and chose this shape. They don't actually make an artificial pecan leaf. It is not in large demand, it turns out. So we chose these because of the texture of them and that they're a little bit smaller than they should be. But this thing of placing the leaves on the branch in a natural way is a real art. And I've seen it go very, very wrong. And so to have the right person on that task. And we also had this hilarious game, a remarkable, remarkable prop master on the show. And we bought as many leaves as we could afford and then you have to spread them out. And once they're gone, they're gone. So the certain, how they are dispersed, where they're used, where you feel a hole as opposed to where there actually is a hole over the course of the journey of the play. All of that sculpture part of this evolves over the course of tax. And you know, they're a remarkable way they are interwoven with the roof beams and the way that the actors frame themselves within the negative space that those branches create. That's all stuff we find together. So maybe, so let's actually bring the stage lights back up then so you can see all the beauty return. And maybe we can go straight into the star effect just to sort of, for the satisfaction of that. The thing I didn't point out when those work lights were up are all of the places that we invented speakers because the sound is such a massive design element. So there are speakers cut into these walls throughout the space so that the sound can travel. Good reviews for the stars. I think you take out the house lights as well. Yeah, I think people can really enjoy the glory of the stars. These stars were, there are 2,000 fiber optic points in this wall. I did a technical drawing that shows where every single one of them goes. And the enomatica is up here. But the truth of it is, of course, the crew in being able to work with this got very close to what we had originally from those drawings. But that's not the important thing once they got into it. What was important is the essential distribution of them. You can see, it's interesting to me, so these back walls here all the way around you can see the way we erased the door frames because the flats that are behind the door frames have stars in them. It's the reason there's no trim on the doors is because, so that all that structure disappears in this moment. This wall, and I did this to myself, this wall we have no access to the back of this wall. So we built it in the theater, we put all the stars in place, and we put the wall in place, and then I could never move a star. So you can see where the crew actually started putting all the stars in the room is down here in this downstage eight feet of the wall. And then you can see where they were like, oh my God, there's a lot of stars left. And you can sort of see where, it's like somebody literally drilling holes and placing things everywhere else in the wall. They placed all these stars, and then we were able to turn the stars on and literally move them so that you don't see things like straight lines, lots of straight lines, which feel random when you're drilling them, but then they are actually less random in reality. The other thing about these stars is there are multiple, multiple, multiple circuits. So meaning, within the stars that make the back wall, there are, and I'm not gonna get these numbers right, but what I called for were three different circuits for each wall, which is why over the course of a 12 page scene, which is a very long time to be embedded in the sort of magic of this, that the stars can do that thing that stars do, which is not necessarily twinkle, but shift. So what we were so aware of is the journey of what Anne asks for so clearly, which is that they are in the text. I mean, again, we just follow the instructions, right? But they come outside, you've been in dark for a long time, so your eyes as an audience member have adjusted. And then as we come outside with the characters, the stars just start to appear. The longer you're outside, the more stars you can see, and then a surreal moment happens on top of that. So that's the build of that. You are not making it up. They do breathe and change. There are lighting cues in which the stars shift their balance over the course of four minutes. And that's all, because if they just came on like this and stayed like this in a static way, they wouldn't capture your heart in the same way that stars do outside. And of course we can't ever get to that, but we tried. This is great. Great. Was the story the regular cube? The regular cube? The white cube? I also just want to say, just in terms of your relationship with Tyler, which was immensely collaborative and immensely supportive and immensely creative, that that's not always the case with the set and lighting designer. And as far as Leah's discussion, you got to sort of see who was already on board by the time you decided to join. I have talked with lighting designers who will sometimes, when they find out who the set designer is, won't take a job, because they feel that's a person they have a hard time working with, or they feel that person design sets, that they themselves have a hard time lighting. Like there is the collaboration between these two departments is especially intense and sometimes quite fraught, not always as beautiful as this collaboration was. It's deeply interwoven, but I have to say, I mean, as a segue, I'm turning this over to you guys. I mean, this place all starts to feel magical, but with between the set and the lights, but it doesn't come alive, it doesn't really come alive until these guys get in the room. And then you know where you are, and you can just sort of slip into another place. I mean, you're more of a system. At what point in the process did then you guys the sound and composition enter the conversation? Was the set basically already kind of more or less designed by the time you were discussing, or did you guys have meetings earlier than that? What was the very first thing you did? It was more or less designed by the time I came out to this project, but I came out to this project relatively late. I think that you were, I don't remember what it was. I mean, the conceptual architecture of what the room is gonna be is clear from the text, such that I guess when we first started talking about it, there was a question of like, okay, so in the text it says you're never gonna meet this person, you're only gonna hear their voice, or this scene you're only gonna hear and you won't see it, but it doesn't say what you are going to see. So my personal taste is I'm really interested in radio plays and I think we hear better when we're not looking at anything. And so I thought, okay, great, blackouts. And Ken said, no, no, no, we're gonna be looking at an empty stage and there's actually some counterpoint between what you're hearing and what you're seeing or not seeing, it's not just, it's not just a blackout. So that was kind of laid out from the beginning, that there had to be some sort of like counterpoint between what you're hearing and what you're seeing, but then we didn't know exactly how it was gonna work. Yeah, well that continues to change throughout your view. Sure, even to the point where I think one of the very last things that Ken did during the creating process was he actually kind of sped up the inner rhythm of the baking of the pies while during the voiceover because he wanted it to feel like it was a different, like there was a different inner rhythm than what the regular, this is what, this is the sort of paraphrase in Ken. Like if they're baking pies at a sort of normal like lifelike pace, he kind of sped that up a little bit in a very subtle way during the voiceover, it's a long voiceover sequence because it was a little bit out of time. One issue that we were always navigating, I think with that there being so much voiceover in the play and you create the voiceover and there's a certain pace to the recording that you do and we may modify that through editing to arrive at what we think is the optimal pace, but every night the performance on stage has variations within it. And so putting that together really felt like a grand experiment. This play actually felt more experimental to me than most of the work that I do because there was this sort of very unusual situation of having the audience be so orally focused for so long and having that mixed with live performance. It was a back and forth that I think Ken was always trying to navigate and arrive at the sweet spot with because of course we sort of modified and modified and then we came to a point where things lock in terms of sound. And we had from the work go, we had three different recording sessions scheduled and one was a really quick and dirty in the room like toward the beginning of the process so that we could work with recorded sound and just have that in the room. And then we had the first recording session with the actors for the big recorded sections. We did room with the kids even before that. Right. To the, although we ended up re-reporting some of that. But we had always, but we had a secondary session scheduled toward the end of previous because we knew that over the course of previous we would discover so much about the rhythm and focus of those scenes. So part of the difficulty of this process for the actors was that they all had to listen to themselves in a fixed way over the course of some weeks before they go in and sort of bring their new actorly understanding of their roles and the rhythm of the play until what would be the final. Right. So we had to go back and re-record material so that they could incorporate everything that they'd learned about the play in the meantime. And sometimes that process was limited. We couldn't bring back necessarily everyone, a particular Skylar, the young girl who's in the recordings in order to continue that work. So you have to kind of make it happen. What have you got? And in the play, I mean, how do you decide what, I mean, in the play there's both scenes that are re-recorded and played back in the studio. And then there are other scenes that are performed live with people speaking and I'm like, how do you decide? Well, I mean, even the very, very beginning of the play when Andy Parisse who plays Nina is on the phone, so she gets a phone call from Adrienne. That was at one point delivered live performed live and then it actually became recorded. It was the lemonade sequence. The lemonade sequence. Oh, yeah. Yes, before she speaks, yes, she's always speaking live but the pouring of the ice, the ice going in the glass in the sound of lemonade which is the first thing you hear in the play was a weapon live and then it became recorded. But also some of the scenes I think were, it was not clear whether they were going to be recorded or live, right, until rehearsals. When I first spoke with Ken, he said, absolutely they're all going to be recorded except for the one scene that they do in Law of the Lears on stage with the stars. But I think that through working with the actors and realizing how beneficial it would be for them when you were probably present for those discussions. Yeah, we had thought, oh, how efficient we'll just have everything pre-recorded minutes ago and less work for everyone and the actors of course hate that. They want to be in control of their performances because they just want to be, they want to weave their performances through the fabric of the play. So the scenes in the cabin where the first one where Adrienne is sitting there rocking in the dark and then the second one where he comes to wake her before taking her out into the star scene, those were meant to be recorded and they very swiftly, they very swiftly voiced the opinion they would much rather they were live and there was kind of no reason not to because those scenes take place in a cabin. It's a very controlled sound environment. What we could do backstage was great. They would have loved if we could have had the whole potato chip discussion of Casey in the blue hole being live. But because for that, we really needed to have a different sonic environment. That did end up being recorded. And I think both Nina and both Annie Parise and Rob Campbell, I remember it. Annie Parise during those scenes has headphones she puts on so she can't hear herself. And I think Rob goes off into a very small corner where no one else is and listens to it. Like they have their different ways of keeping their character trapped through those moments and not getting distracted by the reality that they're actually backstage at that time. So that was sort of an interesting, what is that, actor psychology of recording? That's what I didn't know about that. Well, for Nat who has a very long recorded Bachelor's speech, we did that recording very early on in the process. Well, early previews. And he had to listen to it for two weeks before we did the re-recording. And for him, apparently, it was just agony. Just cover his ears. Because he just heard himself doing things, making choices he would no longer make. Well, as the play settled in and the actors kind of inhabited the play a little bit more in this space, it did feel like the recording was more in line with how it was reading early previews and at a certain point like mid-previews. It did feel a little bit like it needed to get, like there was a slightly different tone and more casual, soft tone to that monologue in the final recording that we made. So that did evolve over. Like the play shifted a little bit. Like the tone of the play shifted a little bit. And so the recordings, which are fixed things, had to shift along with it. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about Ann and Dan, about the composition, how these songs came about, how much was pre-determined by the script and how low was that process like? Both the composition and the recording. You should start, since you started. All right, well, I'm sure. I had a very definite song for the Ann song. Or a very definite sort of song for the Ann song. And I am not a good singer, and I am not an exact singer, but I'm sort of a stubborn singer. So I couldn't sing it the same time twice ever. So I sang a couple different versions of it, I think into my little phone and sent that off to Dan in an atmosphere of trust. And for that song, you sort of brought a slightly more sculptural version of that. And then the second song, we're sort of, there were notions. We ended up, I mean, we sent it back and forth a couple of different times and actually worked on that a little bit endlessly. It finally ended up with us on 3M, the picnic table, late at night, kind of singing back and forth at each other as we worked through the song bit by bit, just trying to work out what the musical event of the song was, how to what degree it was sort of a dramatic pop song and to what degree it was something eerier and out of time sort of, which was a push and pull, which was a book about content and about taste. Is that how you describe this? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would say that I think you're a very good singer and a very exact singer. So when I received the first recording that you sent me, there's actually, even though the way you're putting it down is improvised and maybe never do it the same way exactly twice, like in the structure of each line, there's a lot of detail in terms of the, there's like a sort of Celtic sensibility musically to it and there's a musicality to it that's both, it's like borrowing from the way you speak, but the way a person speaks and also, I don't know, I think clearly like you heard something in your head musically that had to me like, iconic in a certain way. So actually what I did was I just wrote down exactly, you told me like, make this better and I just wrote it down exactly as you're saying it. I just wrote it down as an exercise for myself because what I wanted to capture with, like I didn't wanna digest it and fix it all. Like I was interested in like the level of detail that you were bringing to it even if it was unconscious. So like step one was just putting this sort of casual improvised thing on paper without any interpretation. And then what I discovered was I thought, okay, well if we're gonna be singing this as a group, there might be this strange effect of taking the variabilities and the irregularities of that sketch and by having a full group sing them, deliver it as something intentional. Which I think kind of relates, I mean this might be a stretch, but I think kind of relates to the, like on a very granular level, like the stars and the player, the idea of like asymmetry and irregularity. Does that make sense? So like you don't repeat a phrase in a sort of conventional Western compositional style. Like do you have a phrase and repeat it basically the same way and change it a little bit at the end and develop it. And this is something like more, it's a little bit more unconscious. And so we did a rehearsal and then we taught it to them where I basically taught them the irregularities of what you sang it the first time. And it was kind of cool. And then of course like then you take a step back and we still had to then make some like bigger structural adjustments to it. So we went back and rewrote. Like the middle of one of the pieces and we then, I think I mean I think the last song was like significantly rebuilt in an intentional way. But I think what I think is successful about it is it kept the, I think it kept on a like phrase by phrase level. We kept the spontaneity of the initial. And that, the composition actually affects ultimately like all what was the sound design as well. In that like one of the cues that's running throughout the play is the sound of a guitar tuning to play the melody of what is ultimately the last song that is sung. Can you talk about the birth of that idea and the challenges of recording it? Cause I know it was recorded several times and it was. That was something which was never in the original script. When we did our very first recording with the kids, we somehow discovered, I don't remember how, that Skyler, the actress who plays the little girl, who was herself a little girl, obviously. We somehow discovered that Skyler was learning how to play a Tom Petty song, falling on her own time. And I sort of conceived that the musician father in the script I sort of conceived of as being a cross between Tom Petty and Johnny Cash, which is why in the pre-show music there's a lot of Tom Petty and there's a lot of Johnny Cash as well as other people. And so that was sort of, it became a sort of enchanting idea of mine. How great would it be to have Skyler in her childish way playing the guitar and singing free falling? And might that not be sort of her leading out, playing out her grandfather's legacy, it would be something Skyler could do in the studio and then we could have various things in the play, sort of as a progression, it was a notion. It wasn't something I thought for sure would work but I thought well we've got to get it, we have this opportunity, this great cute girl who only happens on play the guitar and sing, like what could be more affecting. And so we were going to have her come do that in the next recording session, but it turned out for, it would be kind of expensive because then she would have to be paid as a musician and run afoul many unions at once. So that idea went to the wayside for reasons of economy, but the idea of having someone hearing the process of someone playing the guitar, which in our heads, which does not need to convey at all, but sort of you sometimes make a through line, an emotional through line just for your own sake. If Adrian had stopped playing the guitar for many years and is picking it up again and sort of relearning it and so the guitar tune you hear throughout the play is what will be the final song. So that was something which we sort of developed along the wayside and then Dan brought in a musician, friend of his, and we ended up in a recording studio kind of weirdly late at night, kind of sandwiched in between other recordings. It was something which happened at the last minute and you were in the middle of previews and I was going to watch the show, but that was the only time we could do it. So we all ran over in the recording studio and kind of kept flinging instructions at your friend as we sort of were conceiving how it would sound on the fly, yeah? Yeah, we essentially had to get a classically trained guitar player to perform as, to do some character work, to play. It's like that thing where it's like it's easier for a dumb actor to play smart than it is for a smart actor to play dumb. Well, there were a couple of digressions along the way. There was one point when we went off in another direction completely and we were using sort of birds and frogs and a kind of semi-cacophonous kind of nature scape that you don't know if you really knew. I do, I do, I know, it's kind of. That sort of comes. Well, yeah, yeah, that's kind of too specific. We tried that in one direction and then, although I think you had had this guitar instinct from earlier on and then you came back to that. That's right, then you brought in from the internet. And then I just plugged some great stuff. And tried out the idea of guitar and it was like really rough, sort of very amateurish kind of material and then here we were trying to get your, yes, Brett, who imitates something we downloaded. You know, you have to play it but you were looking for some kind of novice quality. And also I remember it was very, one of the issues that was important to you, Ann, and it made sense was that it would feel almost like we were too close to the guitar. It had to not just be that you were sitting and listening to a guitar, but that you somehow had your ear inside of it. And so there were a lot of apologies that are difficult to communicate also, you know, person to person to person. So we had to keep going back. What would you say was the sound design cue that you were scratching your head about the most of the play? Like what was the last one that you finished? Was it this? Definitely that what we refer to as the trilob between the three, between Nina and Adrienne and Casey. Which I didn't realize that would be the case. But because of, particularly because of this issue of the performances transforming all of the time and you're trying to also have the same sort of flexibility with this extended piece of dialogue, it really took, it was a lot kind of also how to sort of seed it, how to give things three dimension and to what degree we want them to have three dimensions sort of playing around with these ideas. Is it a radio play or is it actually more cinematic or are we just listening to the audio channels of a film or are we listening to a radio play and like the whole sort of intentionality in those two environments or situations is quite different. And kind of trying to find what is right or that for us in this situation. And that part was really up until the last, very last moment. There were also complications that arose because I did not fully understand how complex your job was. So the thing that I like to do during previews is cut. Of course you hear the play and it goes along you realize what is inessential. And that's always a great joy is cutting things. But you have to moderate how you do it because every time you make cuts the actors have to readjust and it's not simple for them especially if you've been making a lot of cuts or a lot of cuts in a particular section. They have to really recalibrate. Sometimes if you make a tiny cut here and a tiny cut there it can take them days to recover. So part of my thing during previews is working out what to cut or add and when to give it to them so that they can move slowly, move through the play and not always feel like they're digging and adjusting. So a kind of little calculation I mean was that as I was listening to this trial log section between Casey and Nina and Adrian night after night is I was hearing little cuts I wanted to make but I was kind of putting them to this side because I thought like, oh, these are just tectonic snips that don't affect the actual actors so we can save these till the last minute. Like I can be thinking about other cuts that the actors need to get sort of in the forward part of the process and I can save thinking about those till the very end. But of course it turned out once I delivered them to you, cheerfully. Each one of them takes three hours because 17 different tracks have to be calibrated and tied in together in ways that I still don't understand but it was not just sort of, I'm used to giving things to actors and they under go their own organic. 17 tracks have to be calibrated and stitched together and I somehow thought, oh, it's in the air, it's magic, you just sniff, it's gone. Yeah, that was a long time since it's tied so it's not as agile as I wanted it to be. Can you talk a little bit about the complexity of making the natural world outside? Because I love watching you do it so much and I'm obsessed with it. Is there a particular cue that you're thinking of when you're asking that? I am thinking about the journey of the crickets and the frogs and the birds and how they happen during the day and how those sounds change at night and like, it's not like you download a thing that's like, Texas Day and you know what I mean. And I am so deeply aware of how what you do subliminally changes the tone of the room and almost nobody thinks about it which is why I'd love for you to talk to these guys out here. And can we maybe listen to one of these? Is there a particular cue that you think of that we can listen to to put that to frame that? Well, I'm not having a cue list in front of me. I mean, I guess that we could listen to the crickets at the very top of the play. Yeah, we have a sound inspector. Yes, so the cricket cue at the very top of the play, when, here we go. So we've worked on, you know, they kind of, it's a relatively dry landscape. So sort of figuring out what the sound of this dry landscape is. I was kind of working with crickets and birds and frogs and cicadas. I'm sorry, these are cicadas, not crickets. And so, and kind of trying to, you know, listen with detail to the different recordings because sometimes what's dramaturgically correct doesn't actually sound the right way. So distinguishing what is a daytime sound from what is a nighttime sound, what is an afternoon sound. And so I was trying to track the play in different times of day and reflect it through this environment, which I wanted to be kind of floaty in the air but subtle so that's part of why we have these little speakers in the wall just so that we could kind of have the sound be in the room but not have it be too present for the audience out there. Something we worked on was like how to get to the right level, sort of you want to, you want to just establish things and then have them go away, but Anne talked about, well, could we, at one point we had a lot, we had much more present naturalistic sounds and Anne I think you came and said, I feel like they're not serving us and maybe you can say a little bit about why but we ended up, what we ended up doing was sort of trying to, this is how the sound starts but eventually it comes down to, which will happen as you listen to it, it comes down to sort of almost a subliminal level so that it's just changing the air in the room and just sort of holding you up and then we find a particular moment like when people are reciting their potential epitaphs to withdraw it so that just to, and that way you focus people on that moment and then you slide it back in when that moment is over and again sort of bring up the energy in the scene but maybe you can say something about why you felt like the naturalistic sounds needed to. I thought they were too lulling. I thought it was a lovely sort of white noise and the motor of this play is very delicate. The forward momentum is gentle. So there's always the danger of this play which we always talked about from the very beginning is that if things are too, ostensibly it is a casual situation much of the play and if the actors are really too relaxed, if the characters are really too relaxed, you know the characters all seem very relaxed, they're falling into old patterns but underneath they're quite tense about everything and just sort of making sure there was that underlying level of tension so that the audience sort of subliminally knows that they actually do need to pay attention even though nothing technically is going on and I just felt like having this sort of lovely lulling cricket, cicada, frog thing was just too relaxing. It was gonna be too biologically relaxing for the audience that when you pull it back a little the words hover in the air in a way which is more charged and slightly stoneier. So here you can hear what we've come down to in terms of, I think that is the bay down complete Alex? Yeah. Yeah. So this would be sort of scene level. Which is there and you're aware of it but you don't, but you're not really aware. I mean it's there as it's working on you subliminally. But you know what I mean? It tells you where you are in a way that you don't even clock. I mean this thing about these creatures are dry landscape creatures. Like it, you know that somehow. You've been there and you know it and you fly. You know, Leigh and the other one knows what makes it sound like this. Yeah, you just have to listen to what, like the right space, the actual recording of the right space might not sound like the right space. We have about 10 minutes for questions from you guys. I'm curious if anybody has any questions that you'd like to ask. Any one of the designers here. We'll start here and then we'll go back to you. Did you just play it? Did you just play the cricket game? Because I didn't. It's running right now. Oh, okay. Do you feel slightly soothed? Do you feel maybe like you're in Texas? I think it's because there's a little bit more noise happening in the room. Everyone be quiet for 10 seconds. Now take it out, Alex. There you go. Yeah, but yeah, it's pretty. Yeah, no question. Miss Washburn, as you mentioned being on this retreat, but can you talk a little bit more about the writing and the ideas and the theme? How did that all happen? I mean, I'd be happy to. I don't want to lose the track of these guys. You know, that's actually, it's a long, I think it would be a long answer. Maybe we could chat afterward. Only because I don't want to take away from the short amount of time we have and the availability of these guys. There's also sort of writing concerns. There's also a pretty good interview between Anne Washburn, which I can't, I don't know why I'm using your last name. Between Anne and Tim Sanford, artistic director that's available in the law. I think. But I'd also be happy to chat with you about it if you can go to the lobby and anyone else who'd like to have a discussion. We can do that there. Any other questions? Yeah. Yeah, I found the play wonderfully disorienting. Just a lot of the pretty things like the, two sisters being different races, but it's never mentioned that only one character can accent. And I'm wondering, there were some things I wonder if I imagine, like odd little mistakes in pronunciation and grammar. And I did Google afterwards to see if that was a real consolation, and it is. But all throughout, there was just this sense of what in the world is going to happen next and how much attention did we put in things that was Washburn that were a little bit off and we may not even notice. Can you think of an example of one of these? Well, yes. Right at the very beginning, Annie Carice is talking to somebody that's somebody named D-O-N and she pronounced it dawn. And I actually know nothing about linguistics to know that that would be very unlikely to ever happen. Is that intentional or? No, that was, you'd have to talk to Annie Carice about it. Well, I think it's a great indication of how strong the writing is to imagine quirks that maybe weren't even there because Annie Carice also said something. I will say that there was one point where Anna and I got into an email exchange once where you were railing against Strunk and White. As they were like, they were just like needlessly fussy and how language has to evolve. And I will say that sometimes I'm aware that in some of your plays, sentences are odd, purposefully. Oh, well, people don't speak grammatically, so there's no reason in a play why anyone... Sure, yes. It's fine, it's my personal feeling. Yeah, yeah. I'll just add one other thing. When I went down the elevator afterwards and saw the sign occupancy coming into eight people in this huge hall here, I thought that's probably just a little after-court of a play, but that's... No, that's real. Anybody have any questions about really just the design of the show? Yeah. For sound, at the very end sort of, or it may have occurred earlier, and I think in the clip earlier, there's like a bass line that emerges and I, atmospherically, how I was dealing with sort of ethereal sounds that differ from environmental sounds as far as expected audience response. I'm sorry, I don't understand your question. How is it ethereal? Well, like it's obviously not a natural thing within the space to have like a bass line underlying the whole thing compared to like how the crickets set you environmentally within the scene. And what is the tone that you wish to set by adding that? I'm just trying to figure out what you were hearing at the end of the play? As he's... Forgive me, I forget the name of his character but he's delivering the final monologue about the bachelor. There's a bass line underneath the whole thing that's sort of separate from the environmental sounds. Unless I imagine the entire thing, I'm sorry. That's fine, that's fine, that's fine. We could have been the elevator. Yeah, that elevator with the occupancy of eight actually does make quite a difference. I don't know if there's some environmental stuff happening there. I know that I kind of do some gentle wind in leaves but that really happens afterwards when we get into the song. So I'm sorry, I can't answer. Might have just been the elevator, okay? That was something to hear. Any other, yeah. I actually just wanted to comment on the idea that I haven't read the play itself but the idea of a concrete floor and a granite counter the way that the design developed through the process and what you're all speaking to, it really worked so well with the play to create an intimate space and the idea of growth within a group of people and the push and pull and it really was so cohesive, but thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Do you talk about the Black Virgin, the Anne's Wrecking Song that was there that started really small and then Sound of Life was acquired and then there was a symphonic orchestra. Was that original, that's what's in the actual text or is that was the decision you guys made? In the text it starts with a little girl and then other voices join in and it becomes another thing. How the other thing that it actually ultimately became was Dan and certainly the horns were. Yeah, I mean the basic idea is that the, well I should say the initial impulse was that there would be a sort of ant choir, is that fair? No, that was something we sort of were, we never thought, who were these other voices and at some point after we had made it we were like, who is this, this is singing and we decided I think that it was the ants. But that was a really a... Okay, so the impulse is that the child is singing and then I guess in a sort of dream-like way it should, your instruction was basically like this should blossom into something beautiful and essentially the way I described transcribing the initial impulse and I taught that to the cast and I just, I basically had them sing it overdub in the studio, sing it over top of themselves many, many times and it developed this sort of militaristic quality to it. It gave it a strong significance and it was the ant was the old dying and kind of the medium being the event, right? Yeah, the way that they were able to sing it confidently led to the brass choir idea. Yes, question here and this'll be our, actually the person behind you has asked a question. Well, I just wanted, you were going to tell us about the beautiful wood floor. Oh, delighted to know you're about the wood floor. So we knew with this floor, we knew with the wood in the set, wanted to have character, wanted to feel like it's not the place that we are. It didn't want to be like Home Depot, brand new pine. It's one of those things that you write on a drawing in very little language results in a very large change in the budget. But I had specified that this lumber was either rough cut lumber or reclaimed lumber. And if you hang around lumber a lot, you might know that reclaimed lumber is one of those things that you write in order to get the rough cut lumber because reclaimed lumber is extraordinarily expensive. Our remarkable technical director has a family that is in the lumber business. And so when he found a reclaimed lumber shop in New York that offered to sell us, we could pick them up tomorrow. Beams that were not clean, meaning they had just been pulled out of a warehouse. He did not shy away. This lumber is 200 years old. It came out of a warehouse. These beams were three inches thick and everything that you see on the set is made from that lumber. So they milled it in the shop. They cut it in half. The inside, it's called heart pine because it comes from the center of a pine tree. I learned all of this from our technical director, Joel. When he split the lumber, we started sending these pictures around to each other because I was so delighted by it. But this is the outside of the beams. The good side of this lumber is so beautiful that we put it face down because it is stunningly beautiful lumber. But the whole, all the beams, all of this stuff comes from that. And the reason this place feels old is because this material is old. It took them, these beams that were, I think 16 feet long or 20 feet long, three inches by 12 inches, it took them two hours to split a single beam. And they went through four saw blades before they, so they were immediately called me and they said, we're behind schedule. But it's really, really remarkable stuff. So we have to, I know Leah has a reversal to dash off to. And I wanna give you guys a couple of minutes to be able to just walk around if you'd like and just take a look at the set up close. But I just want, so before we, and I just wanna say thank you all so much for giving me this opportunity. Okay, when you're walking on the set, make sure you open the cupboards and look inside. Yeah, oh yeah, a couple of things if you're all walking like, if you're aware, there's some lights here that you really don't wanna step on. And don't touch me. But thank you all again. Really a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you.