Amadeus (2010) Katrina Miller design (above and at right).  I arrived at Purdue just in time for the first show of their2010-11 season to open, so I got to jump in on the second, which had a marble-like floor and a bunch of portals -- plus paintings at the tops of the portals.  Oy.

     The piano forte that lives on stage for the show wound up being a shop build (right).  Fortunately Ron Clark, the scene shop supervisor, is pretty good at that kind of construction.  I'm pretty decent at painting cheap wood to look more expensive.  The result I decided to keep in stock. y'know, just in case someone needs a small piano for Herr Wolfie.

     How the Other Half Loves (2012); Ron Clark and Jake Wood design (at right during load-in, and below).  It's a long story, but what came about is that Ron and I volunteered to do the design for a graduate director's penultimate project.  Ron handled making sure that the mechanics of getting flats on stage would work, and I took care of "the look."  The grad director and his cast were pretty happy with the results.

     The play is supposed to take place on a set that depicts two apartments in New York circa 1970, one apartment looking upper middle class, the other more middle or lower middle class.  I elected to "bleed" the wall treatments around corners and across the doorway, rather than have an apartment's decor stop hard at a corner.  

     What really "sold" it, though, was one of our scenic design grads knew where to find dressing from the period, and having the "real thing" on the walls or on the furniture made such a difference.  

     Brighton Beach Memoirs (2013); Derek Miller design (two preceding and at right).  Doing much the same here as had been done on The Time of Your Life, we used large format printer paper then stenciled on wallpaper patterns downstairs, and lined it in the upstairs bedrooms.

     There's nothing quite like putting half of house on stage, in this case with front and back porches, plus clapboard.

     More on the wallpaper treatment on the "Other Things" page.

     Betty's Diner (2015); Ivana Vukomanovic design (above, at right {4}, and below).  This one I'm featuring because I like the way the floor turned out.  Faced with the want of a classic black and white diner flooring choice, I groaned -- then did the stencil thing, 'cause I could use a Cut Awl to make a stack of stencils at the same instance, and hand them to students.  When the first pass was done, it looked decent, and only required a minimum of fuss to finish.

     The Liar (2016); Ivana Vukomanovic design (two preceding and at right).  'cause, I dunno, I like the way it turned out.

     Eurydice (2016); Perry "Kyle" Ransbottom design (above and below).  Kyle was one to want to try things, as he figured he may never get another chance once he got out of school and had to make a living.  So with Eurydice.  What with the script, the director, and the other designers, he went with something that was akin to a derelict subway station surrounded by arrays of thread to help delineate space as well as allow the lighting designer something to play on. 

     And I got to treat myriad surfaces to look like busted concrete, which is kind-of a favorite of mine, so I wasn't complaining.  Not too much, anyway.  I mean, well -- never mind, it's theatre.  I like the way this one looked, too.

     The columns get a closer look on their own page.

      The Secret In The Wings (2016); Perry "Kyle" Ransbottom design (above and below).  Take some lesser known fairy tales and illustrate them with actors.  The conceit here was that a child being read the stories imagined them writ large, so a basement is transformed into a forest with a fancy (and large) toy box in the middle.  Each of the four sides of the box, when rotated toward the audience, would reveal something for a story.  So it was structural all the way up and around, had doors or whole walls that swung out of the way, and interior details -- all of which needed to be treated to every which-way, 'cause once a door was opened, it was amazing how much the audience might see inside.

     More with the concrete?  Yep, and rusted steel, 'cuase I likes me some rusted steel.  In this case Cabaret (2017); Ivana Vukomanovic design (above and at right).

     The Mousetrap (2017); Rusty Jones design (above {5} and below).  Ron Clark's last foray as TD.  June of 2018 will be his last month at Purdue, and he'll retire after over 30 years of service.  So he went out by fitting all of this wainscoat -- actually fitting it with panels in routed framing.  And all the other millwork, much of which Ron generated in the shop, too.  

     Painting all that was, like, the fastest oak graining ever.  I never quite believed it, but everyone else was really happy with the look. 

     Brought out the feather dusters to do the large crimson areas of the walls for a faint plastered effect sans real texture.

     Ron and I talked about what kinds of materials would be good for the stone wall (below) and so alternated foam and homasote, both of which I worked on before they got painted to accentuate the idea of different types of stone.   I -- what did I use?  Oh! right -- I used one of those Dremel oscillating tools with a chisel blade on the homasote to give it the slightly flaked appearance of rough dressed fieldstone, and the foam got acetone (of course), though not too much, 'cause it didn't need a lot of texture and I didn't want the acetone floating around the atmosphere.

     Plus, yes, there's a drop beyond that center window.  There was a fair amount of stuff on stage for this production.

Photos: R. Jake Wood, and {4} & {5} courtesy of Purdue Theatre.

That's all for now!

Please navigate back through the Theatre Work page for links to the "deep dive" subjects.