“It is a massive playground,” Mary Hardy, a junior film studies and theatre major, said from the floor of the latest theatre set construction. “I’ve always enjoyed the idea of calling our theatre space our playing space.”
Stage lights were the only light source when I slipped into the theatre. The lights washed the theatre set in white light, singling it out at the head of the room. It didn’t look like a playground, but the atmosphere the set construction team created left the impression of the playing space Hardy described.
As I pulled up the Notes app on my phone, I asked if I could sit on the fountain they had built in the middle of the set. I was halfway seated when they stopped me hastily.
“Wet paint,” MJ McGavin, senior English major, said and pointed at a stack of constructed suitcases along the back wall of the set. “You can sit on those, though.”
McGavin and Hardy sat on the floor of the set and began bantering before I had the chance to perch on the suitcases. It was no wonder Hardy referred to the space as a playground; the two had a tangible enjoyment for the work at hand, however tedious it seemed.
“One of my jobs is going, ‘Okay, who can have this job?'” McGavin said. “So, like, I cannot program lights because I just … cry. However, Mary can program lights! And so she’s up there programming, and I climb the ladder because I can climb the ladder and hang the lights without anything falling.”
Hardy turned to me.
“Ladders terrify me,” she said. “So we’re the dream team, you know?”
The group of students working on theatre construction, four in total, have been building the set for the upcoming show Decision Height since the beginning of the semester. The team is led by communication arts professor David R. Burke, who sketched the initial design for the Decision Height set.
Hardy explained to me that they are in the final stages of set construction: painting the set and programming the lights.
“Lights, more specifically during theatre, helps set the mood, theme … it does a lot to the people who are watching, to their psyche, about what they should be feeling in that moment,” McGavin said.
“Sad moment: blue light,” I joked.
“Actually, you don’t want to use blue light for a sad moment; it makes people feel happy,” McGavin said. “You want to use darker purples.”
“Now that you have that information, you’re one of ours now,” Hardy said to me. “Welcome to the theatre.”
We lounged on a set that faced rows of empty chairs idling in the fuzzy dark just outside the range of the stage lights. Although the theatre felt spacious with only a handful of us in the room, the room is comparatively small.
As McGavin described her past experience in a high-budget high school theatre program, it became clear that while some theaters have “more” than Union’s theater program does, the bigger space and shinier equipment do not necessarily lead to a stronger show experience.
“There are definitely cases where I wish we had a full fly, or I wish we had more moving lights because it would make our job so much easier,” McGavin said. “But then there are other times where I’m like, it’s good. It works. The bigger the space, the bigger the problems you wind up having.”
“I like the smaller space in the acting realm because it’s so intimate with the audience,” Hardy, who will play Virginia Hascall in the upcoming production, said.
A theatre set provides more value than a setting: the set contributes to the overall atmosphere and tone of the show. In Union’s case, Decision Height is a World War II period piece, and the set construction reflects that.
“We’ll take you there with lights and sounds and a set, but after that … we’re going to ask you to suspend your reality for a moment and come visit these women in these barracks in World War II,” McGavin said.
Hardy gestured at the elevated platforms they had built on either side of the set. “These are planes. And we have the space for the actor to get up there and do their thing; the audience just needs to believe it.”
Even in these serious pursuits, the “playground” element of theatre set construction is not lost.
“They were definitely very fun to build,” Hardy said, looking up at the constructed planes. “But actor-Mary and tech-kid-Mary are very different people. It was a little nerve-wracking getting up there at first, because like, you’re up there in the air. You know, it’s just so fun.”
The Union theatre department will present Decision Height from Nov. 12-16 in the W.D. Powell Theatre. Purchase tickets online at uu.edu/theatre.
