Peter: set design ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS

For weeks, the kanban on my monitor had a sticky note that said SET DESIGN, and my TASK AVOIDANCE on that one was masterful.

Remember, I have not designed a real set for fifteen years, and my first foray back into the arena with Peter & the Starcatcher is a doozy: Act I takes place aboard two ships, including a huge storm that rips one of them in half; Act II takes place all over an island, from a mountaintop to the beach (and two chases between them) plus a magic grotto.  It's no wonder that I just sat there and watched that sticky note sit there.

Finally, faced with the fact that soon I would have a cast of actors waiting for me to tell them which part of the set they needed to be climbing on, I came up with this very vaguely specific idea:

Pretty simple: a jungle-gym approach, using a couple of 2x10 boards with steel pipe punched through, like "1/2 a ladder," as my notes say.  The idea was that actors could climb, sit, swing, hang things, etc. in a dizzying number of variations.

There was one small glitch: the ceiling beams to which we would attach the upper ends of the boards did not exist.  Oops.

I was flummoxed, because I really liked the idea.  Then at a meeting at Backstreet Arts, I saw a drying rack:

In chapter on RITUAL in the book, I talk about Numen/Connection as being part of the process of the work — being open to what the universe is trying to give you. This is a prime example: seeing the rack sparked a further SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION of my original idea.

Believe it or not, one of my main concerns in the design was not killing the actors who had to climb on the thing. It had to be not only sturdy but stable, i.e., not tip over when someone climbed to the top.

So I designed a kind of teepee idea, all set onto a platform that rolls (for that extra little bit of foolish danger):

actually kind of to scale, sort of

My physics skills are not the best, but this should work.  We might need to shift the "center" point further to the back to offset the weight of the pipe and any humans, but on the whole it should work.  (We're also inserting a bench on the back end.)

So imagine two of these things, plus two rolling trunks and two or three little crates, and there's the set for Peter & the Starcatcher.  (Also, a backdrop with an astonishing coup de théâtre at the end of Act I, more about which later.)

I'll keep you posted.