Reflection on tour of Oregon Contemporary Theatre and Silent Sky
My first impression after touring the building the Oregon Contemporary Theatre now occupies was how large it was, despite its diminutive appearance from the outside. The theatre manager mentioned this was a common experience and expressed gratitude for the space they now inhabit. The theatre’s previous home was described as a small space bound by “a hallway” that made up the dressing room and prop storage concurrently.
Talking with the carpenter for the company was interesting. I hadn’t thought about the challenges that a set designer is confronted with previously. She mentioned the challenges she faced in designing the spiral form that served as the centre piece for Silent Sky. She is usually able to make considerable use of stock pieces, but cubes and rectangles don’t translate into curves very easily. I’ve seen a few shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before, and one in particular struck me as having a particularly evocative stage design. Much Ado About Nothing‘s set consisted of a large number of hanging strands of flowers that were illuminated depending on the the mood and demands of the scene.
Image from Eugene Art Talk
I saw some of that same idea repeated on the stage of Silent Sky. The boards behind the stage receiving the projectors image served to signal location and scene change. The painted spiral galaxy served to underscore the main point of the second act. Our heroine undergoes an existential crisis during this act. What does her work mean? Why does it matter? In contrast, the other characters have found purpose in their lives in the second act. Her sister takes care of the Wisconsin farm, Peter takes a teaching job, and her colleagues at Harvard have rallies in support of the suffrage movement. It is not until the end of the play that Henrietta finds purpose: measuring the stars. The stage design allowed her to stand at a level above the spiral galaxy. She has transcended her earlier struggle for meaning and now stand above the Milky Way, which she has proven does not define the entire universe. She looks back on her accomplishments from her place among the starts and in the words of her sister, has “answered the question God put before her.”
Abstraction that straddles the border between attempt at naturalistic representation and emotive fluid form has always interested me. After talking with the shows’s staff on Tuesday it was apparent to me that the sort of stage craft displayed in Silent Sky is an excellent application of these principles. The set was able to function as a Wisconsin farmhouse, Harvard office, ocean liner, and various outdoor environments, all while implanting the cosmic significance and striving of Henrietta Leavitt’s quest to measure the starts by way of abstracted spiral galaxy on the floor. If this floor painting would’ve been done in a way that made its star-nature more obvious, the play would’ve suffered. What sense does it make that the stars are under a home in Wisconsin? It would’ve been distracting. Instead, their degree of abstraction allowed you to notice them when the plot demanded, and allowed them to fade out of memory in other scenes. Overall, the design forced me to think more about the ability of forms and colours to function as multiple symbols simultaneously. This is something I have struggled with in my own project, which contains many nested symbols. It was encouraging to realize that this sort of dense symbol arrangement could be effectively pulled-off, albeit by professionals. People will interact with my cardboard sculpture like actors interact with a stage. In that respect the play cemented in me the importance of having clear meaning behind symbols that are employed for two purposes simultaneously.
I was not at all familiar with the work of Henry Leavitt before the play, which I know now is because of the way science was conducted during that period at Harvard, at least in the astronomy department. The fact that the actual Dr. who conducted the work was never in the play resonated powerfully. The whole set-up reminded me of a parallel in the fine arts world, where master artist depend on a team of artist to bring their ideas to fruition, and then claim the credit for the entirety of the process.