Geva

The Company We Keep

Geva’s production of Company, directed by Mark Cuddy, is about to head into the theatre for technical rehearsals, and since I’m not on the creative team for the production, I’ve only heard snippets of music from the rehearsal room. But what I’ve heard has me incredibly intrigued! As I look forward to seeing the production onstage, I’m also thinking back to the history of this piece, and its relevance today.

Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Company, collaborating with George Furth who wrote the book, and it first appeared on Broadway in 1970. It was one of the first “concept musicals” in American musical theatre, a collage of scenes and songs organized around exploring an idea – in this case, marriage and commitment. The legendary director Harold Prince directed that first production, and together, the three men agreed on what Sondheim called a “secret metaphor” for the production.

The show compared the 1970 definition of marriage with the island of Manhattan, which Sondheim called “the handiest local for the inhumanity of contemporary living and the difficulties in making relationships.” Scenic designer Boris Aronson’s set (which won a Tony Award in 1971) conveyed the attitude of Manhattanites – emotionally detached, efficient, and gleaming. Throughout the performance, slides were projected onto the set, highlighting the emotions in the scenes or suggesting specific locations. With over 600 different images projected onto the set, most audience members were probably unaware of the nuanced changes throughout the play. However, moments like the one below, in a nightclub, surely made an impression.

Critics immediately picked up on the “secret” metaphor that Sondheim referred to, the comparison of marriage to the island of Manhattan. One critic expanded on the notion: “Company makes Manhattan a metaphor for marriage. Manhattan is an island of anguish and delight; so is marriage. Manhattan is an incessant roar of competitive egos; marriage is a subdued echo of the same. Manhattan is a meeting of strangers; marriage is a mating of strangers. Manhattan is a war of nerves; marriage is a ferocious pillow-fight battle of the sexes. The links do not stop there. The tempo of Manhattan is a kind of running fever; modern marriage runs a fever and the partners are always taking its temperature. It simply is not the placid old heaven-ordained, till-death-do-us-part, for-better-or-for-worse institution it used to be.”

Company‘s opening song was written AFTER Sondheim saw Aronson’s design for the set, rather than the song inspiring the design, as future productions would work. This first set allowed the married couples to each have their own spaces up above Bobby, and to comment on his contemplation of marriage, all the while remaining oblivious to each other.

There have been numerous revivals, including a 1995 revival at the Roundabout Theatre and another the next year in London at the Donmar Warehouse, which was notable for its casting of Adrian Lester, the first black actor cast as Bobby in a major production of the show.

The most recent Broadway revival, however, was in 2006, directed and choreographed by John Doyle. Doyle’s approach to Company was similar to his 2005 approach to another Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In both productions, Doyle employed the actors themselves as the orchestra – the actors sing and play instruments throughout the performance, which gives them all a kind of voyeur status. The set for the 2006 revival, designed by David Gallo, is almost the exact opposite of the 1970 debut – it feels intimate and loft-like. We feel like we are inside an apartment, and maybe even Bobby’s thoughts, rather than outside. (Should you be interested in more about this, the production was filmed for PBS and is available for instant streaming on Netflix.)

So…what will Geva’s production look like? Our set, designed by G.W. Mercier, also takes inspiration from Manhattan, but not in such a direct way. It also builds on the notion of compartmentalization and isolation – if only we can keep different parts of our lives boxed up, we can keep ourselves separate from others and attempt to disprove the notion that we need people to share in our lives. In this illustration here, you can see both of these inspirations at play – the boxes, when taken together, suggest the skyline of New York City.

The Ingredients in Geva’s Donuts

We opened Superior Donuts here at Geva over the weekend, and it’s a really fantastic show. In my last post, I promised that this one would focus on the design and technical elements of the show, and I don’t want to break my promise!

The play takes place in a donut shop in Uptown, an historic Chicago neighborhood. The donut shop first opened its doors in 1950, and is showing its age. So the set, designed by Jack Magaw (who also designed Geva’s Evie’s Waltz and Bad Dates), has to be clearly aged while looking like a contemporary functioning shop. Onstage, we see the donut case behind the counter, the red vinyl chairs and bar stools, the coffee maker, the door to the kitchen and the soda cooler (just out of the range of the camera in the picture to the right) – everything that  makes a donut shop run. The shadows just visible through the transom windows hint at the city beyond the shop. In this photo, taken by Ken Huth, we see the wear on the doors and walls, and the dated chairs and bar stools. The floor tiles, handcrafted by Geva’s scene shop to create the perfect look, are worn and complete the sense of the store’s 60 year history.

Accuracy is important when staging any play – historic or contemporary. Attention is paid to even the smallest detail. In the photo above, Arthur Przybyszewski (center), played by Skip Greer, talks with Officers James (left) and Randy (right), played by Ron Scott and Mary Jo Mecca respectively. While the show takes place today, the costumes for Superior Donuts, designed by Christina Selian, reflect the same kind of attention to detail given to a period play. I asked Geva’s costume shop manager Amanda Doherty for an example, and she responded with a great story about a very intricate detail, and the importance of new technologies in theatre:

Re-creating police or military looks on stage is one of the biggest hurdles costume shops face.  We know we must strive for absolute authenticity, not only because we are representing official government agencies, but because audiences care deeply about these institutions being accurately portrayed.

However, since Sept. 11, 2001 it has become increasingly difficult, if not outright illegal, to acquire many of the accessories necessary for authenticity in military and law enforcement apparel.

There are a few companies that carry authorized replicas of badges and patches, but usually only for larger, well known cities and organizations.  In the case of Superior Donuts, we were fortunate that we could get replica badges, or stars as the Chicago Police Department (CPD) refers to them. But we could not acquire a hat shield, nor a hatband, for the unique and very distinctive CPD uniform cap.  Occasionally, a decommissioned cap will appear on eBay, or a shield on badge trading web-sites; but these are few and far between and the demand is high.

With the advent of affordable and easily accessible 3-D printing, costume and prop shops have expanded opportunities for creating hard to find pieces.  This is an amazing process using a digital file to literally print a 3-D object in a solid material, as opposed to laying down ink on a 2-D piece of paper.  The ink is replaced with a solid material, in our case acrylic, and laid down in layers to build an object.

To create the CPD hat shield for Superior Donuts we pulled several high res images of the shield from various internet sources.  Gary Jacobs then used those references to digitally draw the hat shield in a sculpting program.  The data was sent to a Granular Materials Binding printer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and printed in acrylic. The image below on the left shows the hat shield as it arrived to us in white acrylic. I then could mount the appropriate hardware to the acrylic (center) before painting in black and adding silver leaf (right).  Painting a 3-D image black before gold or silver leafing helps bring out the definition of the details on stage. 

The finished shield was mounted on the uniform cap (below), with custom embroidered hatband, and appears much as an authentic one would.  The only concession we made for legal reasons was to print “Chicago Police” on the front as opposed to a precinct number.

Welcome to Geva Journal!

Welcome to Geva Journal, a new place for conversations about the work at Geva Theatre Center, inRochester, NY. My name is Jenni Werner, and I’m the director of literary and artistic programs here at Geva.  This is my first season here, so I’m learning new things about Geva, Rochester and the five county area almost every day.  Here on this blog, we’ll talk about the artistic process of creating the work on Geva’s stages – and maybe about some of the work that you never see, the conversations in our conference rooms and rehearsal hall.  I won’t be the only blogger, but I’ll be your host here on Geva Journal, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

My background is in dramaturgy.  As a dramaturg, my main responsibility is to help paint a full picture of the world being created onstage.  Dramaturgs do this for artists primarily by sharing information about the context of the world – the historical, biographical and social background. And we do this for audiences by creating opportunities to more fully engage in the world of the play – through lobby displays, articles online and in print, and conversations.  And we ask questions.  Lots and lots of questions.

I’m working, as we speak, on preparing to serve as the production dramaturg for our production of A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, directed by Robert O’Hara, and for the next couple of months, this blog will follow our creative process.