Theater

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The Designers

Designers collaborate with directors to create an environment for a play. That environment may be a well-appointed living room or a run-down tenement apartment, or it may be a nightclub setting or an empty stage for a chorus-line audition. The designers' work is to shape and fill the stage space and to make the play's world visible and interesting. In the modern theater various artists are responsible for different design effects. There are four principal types of designers: scene, costume, lighting, and sound.

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The Scene Designer

The modern scene designer, also known as the scenic designer or set designer, emerged in the late 19th century out of the work of the scenic artist, who painted large pieces of scenery for the theater manager. In those days scenery's main function was to provide a painted background for the actors and to indicate place and period. By the end of the 19th century, the requirements for realistic settings and furniture to make the stage look convincingly like the play’s actual setting called for a new theatrical artist—the scene designer.

Scene design can vary widely in style, ranging from the requirements of realism to theatricalism. Realism has been the dominant convention of modern theater, and it calls for the designer to create a stage environment that accurately represents real places, furniture, curtains, and so on. Stage realism pretends that the stage is not a stage but an actual living room, bar, street corner, or other environment. In contrast, scenic theatricalism expresses and symbolizes the play's atmosphere and imaginative life, rather than attempting to reproduce realistic details of place, lifestyle, and social and economic status.

In the early 20th century designers Adolphe Appia of Switzerland and Gordon Craig of Britain led a revolution against realistic stage design. They were concerned with creating mood and atmosphere, opening up the stage for large symbolic scenic pieces, and making theatrical design more expressive by using platforms, ramps, steps, panels, and drapes. The aim was to make the audience’s experience more theatrical by emphasizing language, sound, lighting, the actors’ presence, and the spectators’ imagination, instead of distracting the audience with a detailed set. This so-called new stagecraft was introduced to Broadway by Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson in the 1920s. Today, such international designers as Ming Cho Lee, John Napier, and Josef Svoboda work within these design traditions in order to serve the requirements of productions ranging from Broadway musicals to single-set dramas of domestic life.

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The Costume Designer

The costume designer is the creative artist responsible for the look of the characters and its contribution to the play's inner meaning. Modern costume design includes a character's garments, accessories, hairstyle or wig, makeup, and masks, if required. As a design element, costumes help establish a character’s social class, economic status, age, and occupation. They can also assist in identifying a play’s time period, geographic location, weather, and time of day. They help clarify relationships between characters (servant to master, for example) and a character's emotional state (for instance, Masha in The Seagull by Russian writer Anton Chekhov wears black to reflect her melancholy). During the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), signature costumes and masks readily identified the stock characters of commedia dell'arte.

From ancient Greek times to the mid-19th century in Europe, actors wore clothing of their time. The actor, manager, director, or wardrobe person was responsible for costumes worn on stage and gave little attention to the unity of visual elements. By the 20th century, the complex demands of stage production required specialized, trained costume designers to design, select, and control the elements of clothing as they relate to the total production design.

Like the scene designer, modern costume designers work with directors to make visible the world in which the characters live. They supplement the director’s understanding of the play and the characters’ lives visually through clothing, paying close attention to fabric, color, texture, and style. One award-winning costume designer has said that costumes serve a producer’s vision, a director’s viewpoint, and an actor’s comfort. In the commercial theater, costume designers have their own design studios and utilize construction shops with managers, cutters, drapers, and stitchers to execute their designs for Broadway musicals or regional productions.

Makeup enhances an actor's visibility and makes facial features distinctive. Like a costume, it helps an actor reveal character by giving physical clues to personality, age, background, race, health, and environment. In ancient Greek and Asian theater, actors wore masks or used white lead makeup with strong accents of color. In the modern Western theater, basic makeup that consists of a foundation and color shadings is used to prevent the actor from appearing washed out beneath powerful stage lights. Costume designers label makeup straight, character, or fantasy, depending on the way it is used. Straight makeup highlights an actor's normal features and coloring for distinctness and visibility. Character or illustrative makeup transforms an actor's features, usually with false noses, wrinkles, eyelashes, eye pouches, teeth, or facial hair. Fantasy makeup alters the actor’s appearance in a fantastic or unrealistic way. Actors appearing in the musical Cats, for example, require fantasy makeup and wigs to appear as the various felines. In Asian theater, bold makeup is often used. In China’s Beijing Opera, for example, male roles require makeup and beards, while most female roles require white painted faces with deep red and pink shading around the eyes.

Wigs are designed by a wig specialist and are used to lend authenticity to plays set in historical periods or to alter entirely the actor's normal appearance. In all instances, makeup, wigs, and hair require the costume designer's approval.

Mask-making is an ancient art dating from early cultures, where masks were thought to possess supernatural powers. Masks have been part of the early theatrical traditions of both East and West. The use of masks was common in ancient Greek and Roman theater, commedia dell'arte, and Japanese nō plays. Masks enlarge the actor's features for visibility at great distances, and they express basic emotions, such as grief, anger, horror, sadness, or pity. They also can create an altogether different presence for the actor wearing the mask. That presence can be stately, heroic, awesome, or mysterious. If the mask reflects light, it can even appear to change expression as the light changes. Today, masks are comfortable, strong, lightweight, and molded to the contours of the actor's face. The costume designer has final approval of the actor's mask.

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The Lighting Designer

Modern stage lighting affects what audiences see. Carefully planned lighting can establish mood and color, control the audience's focus of attention, and enhance the meaning of the play.

Once stage productions moved into enclosed buildings (and away from natural light), candles and then gas lamps were used to illuminate the stage. In 1879 the invention of electric light transformed the possibilities for the use of light as an artistic medium in the theater. The ability to control lighting effects made it possible to include a range of colors and intensities, create mood and atmosphere, and highlight areas of the stage. In the late 19th century Adolphe Appia first envisioned the possibilities of light as an artistic medium in the theater, and modern lighting design still follows his theories and practices. Today's lighting designer uses sophisticated equipment, such as computerized light boards and a variety of instruments, to achieve the desired effects. Like the theater's other designers, the artist responsible for lighting design collaborates with the director and other designers to achieve a unified interpretation of the play.

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The Sound Designer

The sound designer is the theater's newest artist. The technological capability today for both live and recorded sound has brought the sound designer onto the director's creative team to provide sounds of nature, such as rain or dogs barking; locations, such as doorbells, trains, or airplanes; and abstract sounds to underscore moods of romance or treachery, for example. Working with the director, the sound designer plots the effects required by the script and adds a creative element to enhance atmosphere and psychological meaning. The technology available to the sound designer includes tape recorders and playback units, microphones and turntables, mixers and amplifiers, elaborate speaker systems, and control consoles.

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