Finished a rendering and model of the Tempest set. I call it “first draft” because for me nothing is ever finalized. But the next step will be setting up the 10x8x8 ft. aluminum structure and starting to string up muslin, making a full-size “model” set that will eventually be the set itself.

Some thoughts that have gone into this:

• The visual design needs to have great sense of fluidity. The nature of the island varies with the person experiencing it. Nothing is fixed: reality is a tough negotiation. The video projection on the rear screen will be the major element of this, but I’ve tried to create a color range between warm and cool that allows radical transmutation depending on color washes in the lighting.

• Tempest is unique in Shakespeare (except for Comedy of Errors) in being tightly bound to the unities of time and place. The time pressure felt by Prospero is immense, the key to his first scene, where he must impart a vast amount of information like the panicked cramming for a vital exam. It moves about the island but builds a claustrophobia worthy of Beckett. So I’ve created a structure with some sense of movement, yet restricted, as if it’s contained within one person’s head. The characters seem to be on a journey, yet it’s more as if the journey comes to them.

• The island itself as a character, almost as if the humans found themselves walking on a living sea creature. There’s a sense of yellow sands, of abundant life, of desert—it’s indefinable. So I’ve painted it in overlays of creams, yellows and browns, of blue-greens.

• And the sea—with its brother the storm—is always present, with its magical power of sea-change transformation, with the frail humans passengers upon it. So I’ve echoed the shapes of sails, the texture of sail cloth.

• And the sense that the island, in fact the whole play, is a palimpsest. The characters bring the vast baggage of their pasts to this place, where they try to envision a new world and erase the past, yet have to cope with it. In another sense, the play is a theatrical artifice, nearly 400 years old, and so its text, its view of humanity, are imprinted in fragments on our collective mind. So I’ve looked to give it a sense of fragmentation, incorporating words and phrases as patchwork on the sail cloth, and some of the sense of decay one sees in the paintings of Ivan Albright. This is echoed in the finials at the five top points of the set: fragments of life masks of Prospero.

• The set forms a huge frame around the 8x6 ft. rear projection screen, which will use a wide palette of semi-abstract video (more about that later). When the video isn’t in use, there’s the possibility of drawing one of several travelers across the screen or bringing in some self-standing units to modify the space.

• The “busy-ness” of the set’s texture, the movement of the video, the richness of the sound score—all these are directly counter to the sense of The Tempest as a “peaceful” play, and that’s intentional. To me, the grand movement of the play is from the most extreme agitation at the outset to the achievement of peace at the end: but it’s a huge journey.

• Practicalities: must fit on a stage that’s 21x20x11 ft. Must be flexible for touring, ideally 3 hr. setup, 1.5 hr strike. Must provide good masking for offstage props in confined space. Must allow hanging positions within the set for small lighting instruments, as opening is too narrow for instruments in traditional hanging positions. Must provide minimum 5 ft. projection depth behind set. Must stay within $500 materials budget, besides the projection screen and aluminum structure that we already own.

Still to do: Video is half the design, and I have only some vague ideas on this. Probably some free-standing mobile set elements. Possibly another shape of traveling drop across the projection screen. Possibly engineering a concave billow in the two broad side panels, creating more the sense of a sail and a more dynamic line. And settling on a color palette for the costumes that works with all this.

Next week, notes on the music & sound score.

-Conrad