The Sound of Music: Concept
At its core, Once On This Island is a story about a girl from a Caribbean island, Ti Moune, who is unwittingly the central figure in a wager proposed by the gods to determine whether or not love is more powerful than death. Ti Moune leaves the safety of her village to a city where she learns that love must struggle to overcome class, race and family. The narrative is a fairy tale, much like The Little Mermaid, on which it was based, but the play is about much more than that: it is about community and heritage and the stories and traditions that we share with one another to strengthen our society and to invite strangers into our communities.
Once On This Island begins with a storm that frightens a young girl; the village gathers around her to ease her fears and as the story unfolds the story tellers become the principle characters: Ti Moune, her mother and father, her lover and even the gods. Nevertheless, we are never allowed to forget that the actors are storytellers, and because of this we-the-audience are invited to become part of the story-teller's community.
From a scenic point of view, it became clear that we had to choose between illustrating the story of Ti Moune or creating the community's world context in which the story was told. We decided that the more important theme was that of the community of story tellers, and that the way that we would best serve that idea was by inviting the audience to be a part of the community, as though the audience were sitting around a campfire with the villagers listening to the story. Beginning with that image, I proposed basing the set on a circle, placed downstage between the audience and the stage. I further proposed that the action of the play was a combination of people being together in one place; people being alone on a journey from somewhere near to somewhere far; and people coming from far away - usually the depths of imagination - to enter into Ti Moune's space. Finally, I suggested that because the play is not set in any time or place, and that the events that it refers to are a long time ago but not so very long ago, that we consider the storytellers to belong to the present while the characters in the story belong to a period of amorphous memory. With this in mind, three things were clear:
1) The set would consist of a circle close to the audience and path around the circle far from the audience;
2) The set would need to allow actors to enter from shadow as though from a great distance away but for those entrances to be quick and surprising;
3) The set would need to be made of materials that invoked present-day life on the islands with neither nostalgia nor sentimentality
Research
I divided research into three categories. First, I looked for artistic expressions of the type of spaces and shapes I knew I was going to use. This mostly came in the form of installation and sculpture. I was looking for circles, sweeps, combinations of materials, and interesting lighting possibilities.
Second, I was looking for pictures of daily life in the villages in the Caribbean. I have spent a lot of time on a few of the Caribbean islands, most notably St. Kitts and Nevis, and have collected quite an archive of images from my travels. I was struck by the strength of the colors - the richness of the greens, yellows and blues; by the prevalence of corrugated siding; by trees that had bottles hanging from them; and by the use of arches in roads, bridges and industrial architecture.
Initial Drawings
The Meadow Brook Theatre is a wide and deep stage space that has a tendency to swallow actors. The seating is continental around a wide arc. When I began drawing I proposed using the cavernous backstage to create a sort of intimacy with the audience. If we built a circular platform - relatively small, only 20 feet in diameter - and placed it in the center of the proscenium arch then we could bridge the divide between audience and stage. The curve of the audience would turn our central playing space into a modified thrust; in fact, most of the action would appear to be performed down stage of the proscenium. We would then pull out all of the masking to reveal the full openness of the stage space and build a sloping platform at a distance from the circular platform. This platform would be curved, echoing the curve of audience seating and reinforcing both the form and the central position of the main platform. The curved ramp would provide a path for "on the journey" and be a bridge under which actors could pass to enter the main playing space. The negative space would push on the central platform (an illusion we could support by slightly raking the central platform), making it feel more closely connected to the audience. We could increase this effect by removing parts of the proscenium to widen and heighten the opening, further dwarfing the relatively small central platform.
At this point I wasn't sure what the final form would be, but we agreed that the textures of the corrugated siding and some kind of broken stick structure would be a part of it. We also knew that this was going to be a world of color and light, and that the lighting should immediate, tangible and could be both romantic and aggressive.
Further Development
After the initial form was approved we set to work finalizing our vocabulary.
The initial concept felt right for movement patterns and audience-stage relationship. As a design team we worked through staging possibilities as though we had nothing but an open circle and its supporting arc - committing to the idea that we physicalizing the circle of the community and dividing space into "within the community" and "outside of the community." Satisfied that the play could be elegantly and simply staged on an open space, we began exploring the textural-emotional range of this world
The story that is being told takes us to places of love, punishment, betrayal and death. At the same time the community is faced with the physical threat of a storm, the reality of toil and the comfort of unity. All of these were a part of the fabric of the world we were creating.
We created the textural richness out of materials common in Caribbean villages. Platforms were draped with a ground cloth in order to give an unfinished earthy edge to the playing spaces. The surrounding stairs and support structures were left open but built of uncut lumber, suggesting the openness of an outdoor society and invoking the feeling of a windswept Island while reminding us of natural and simple building materials. The back wall was laid with corrugated sheets. Both the back wall and the stick structures were placed as though they were about to float away - elevated to give the space lift and reinforce the idea that we were creating an emotional rather than a literal space. The direction of the corrugated panels and the stick wall reinforced the rise of the pathway platforms. The fill-in stick-walls between the arches reinforced the distance between the main platform and the curved walkway while funneling attention back to center.
Returning to the idea of the vastness of the stage space isolating the central platform, we further developed the elasticity of openness and closeness by hanging bottles filled with Christmas lights in a sweeping arc around the stage. This acknowledgement of air and space was used to emphasize both the largeness of the space and create an intimacy in the center. It reinforced the movement of all of the other elements in the set and carried that movement forward by coming out into the house, creating a ring of light that circled the main platform and unified the split spaces of stage and audience. More Christmas lights were added under the stage platform to further unify the space with the fairy light vocabulary and to amplify a sense of depth and layers of scenery.
We continued to build layers and depth by adding fluorescent lights under the arches and along the back stick structure. Two more systems of fluorescent lights on the back wall created another layer of light between he raised corrugated panels and the architecture that supported them.
The platforms were painted with a gradient of burnt umber to yellow ochre by way of a ruddy sienna in order to create a visual hot-spot. Sticks were painted a blend of rich greens, blues and browns so that they would recede into a jungle like cacophony while contrasting against the platforms. The same combination was used on the back wall of the theatre in contrast to the rusty panels of corrugate, and also on the theatre floor. No part of the set was left without richly saturated colors.
As we worked our way through the individual scenes, we found areas where a little theatrical poetry was needed to heighten key moments. For the Rain sequence in the story, where the god Agwe creates the storm that brings Ti Moune and her lover together, we built a backdrop of hand-painted china silk that rose from behind the actor playing Agwe and spread to cover the back of the stage as though coming from the actor's body. His costume was of the same material and included another sheet that extended from his waist and covered the stage in a fabric flood. In another scene the storytellers step away from the story to tell the history of the colonization of the Island. For this scene we told the story of French colonization slave revolt through puppets based on dolls made and sold in Haiti. Most of the other staging was done with actors, but in the final moment of the play, in which Ti Moune dies and is brought back to life as a tree, we had three stick (not unlike the ones that made up the set) come from below the stage floor and meet gauzy leaf drops lowered from the flies. These drops followed the same curve and sweep as the rest of the set, transforming the whole with symbols of life and continuity.
Drafting Packet
Click Here for the Ground Plan
Click Here for the Center Line Section
Production Stills
