I call designing in the theatrical medium the creation of an environment
for the actor and the action of the play. This definition forces me to immerse
myself in the entire essence of not only the physical world of the play,
but also the emotional and psychological as well. The process is a complex
intertwining of research into place, time, condition, style and form, in
concert with the conceptual instincts of the playwright, the director and
all the other designers.
The final design is often far from my original reaction to the piece. In the case of Salem's Daughters, for instance, my first impulse was to create a gigantic hangman's tree which would move all over the stage and open up to reveal the interior scenes. I made a scale model, and the director, David George, and I actually started staging some of the moments of the play. I walked into my office one morning and realized that this production was starting to look like a play about a tree. So we agreed to scrap the idea. The core of my love for theatrical design is collaboration. Theatre is a collaborative art, and on every project I feel that I am involved in something bigger than any of the individual parts.
1. Aristophanes' The Birds. The effect of clouds at the top of this
expressionistic "mountain" was created by tubes of fiberglass
resin, seventy-five feet long and eight feet high, each covered with polyvinyl
fiber and filled with 60 watt light bulbs. Director: Bruce McDonald. Lighting:
Whitney White. Costumes: Betsy Hart.
2. Dark of the Moon. A steel-framed urethane foam and fiberglass tree adorned this mountain, with its trap doors, pneumatic platforms, magic illusions, and three-color, 100 watt, argon-krypton-helium laser projection unit. Director: David George. Lighting: Whitney White. Costumes: Betsy Hart.
3. Final Passages. For this tragedy-at-sea set entirely aboard two "tall ships," four tons of scenery and actors hung suspended from a single point above the stage, suggesting a sense of the motion of the sea and furthering the script's bizarre scrambling of time. Director: Tom Luddy. Lighting: Whitney White. Costumes: Jane Hillier-Walkowiak.
4. Hamlet Dreams. When Celena Sky's deconstructed Hamlet finds a young Viking prince in a nightmare world, what better environment than a smashed ship in an impressionistic cacophony of color and shape? Director: Celena Sky. Lighting: Jim Fallon. Costumes: Jane Hillier-Walkowiak.
5. Salem's Daughters. To create a feeling of disconnection from reality
and a magic of the theatre and not of the characters, this twenty- by thirty-foot
platform was "hung" from four 2-ton winches which could raise,
lower, tilt, and turn the platform into a floor, a cave, a second story,
a roof and eventually a wall. Director: David George. Lighting: Alex Molnar.
Costumes: Jane Hillier-Walkowiak.
6. Charlie's Aunt. Three English gardens in one environment all performed on a turntable created for this production. Beyond speeding the transitions between scenes, the design provided the staging of one of the funniest chase scenes ever seen at Salem State College. Director: David George. Lighting: Whitney White. Costumes: Jane Hillier-Walkowiak.
7. Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein's castle, the setting for this horror classic, featured an exploding laboratory, secret passages, and a finale of gunfire and a giant picture window's smashing, as Frankenstein and monster fall to their deaths over the cliff below. Director: Whitney White. Lighting: Sheila Donovan. Costumes: Betsy Hart.
8. Back to the Blanket. A "vision" world for Native American Sioux to play out the final epitaph of the Wounded Knee Massacre -- in the dreams of the only white man to be sent by the government to find out what really happened. Actual photos of the canyons of South Dakota provided much of the inspiration for this environment. Director: Tom Luddy. Costumes: Jane Hillier-Walkowiak.
Whitney L. White chairs the Theatre and Speech Communications Department at Salem State. A graduate of Indiana University in Theatre Design and Technology, he has been at Salem for 20 years. Professor White has taught at Indiana University, University of Texas at Austin, and Antioch College and has been a guest Artist at Emerson, Northeastern and many other institutions. Known as Whizz in the theatre world, he is also a design consultant and designer throughout the area. He will do designing for the new Summer Theatre at the colege this July.