Design: "The Impossible..."

construction site run by a foreign company in West Africa, surrounded by fences and surveillance towers.

This is Ricardo Hernandez, co-chair of design at the David Gevin School of Drama.

He's reading from the script for the play Battle of Black and Dogs by Bernard Marie Coltez.

And right now, that's all there is, a script, just words on a page.

It's a favor of mine because I absolutely love Coltess.

Ricardo was the scenic designer for the show when it was staged at Yale Repertory Theater in 2010 with Robert Woodruff

directing.

Robert wanted to use the space to create something poetic and menacing because it's a scary play.

I had taken out the entire floor of the Yale Rep and Robert wanted to see into the pit.

And I thought, well, my God, it would be amazing if the entire floor of this production is glass.

And we lifted the whole space.

It was like one inch plexiglass because the actors had to walk on it.

Concerned with the crafting of the physical environments actors inhabit in a play, scenic or set design is one of the five design disciplines taught at DGSD.

One of five design disciplines that bring a script from the page to the stage.

Lighting played

a huge important role in the storytelling.

Lighting is another one.

What Robert said was, I want to feel extreme heat.

We created these metal drums.

They were big, metallic.

And inside, Stephen Strawbridge put, I don't remember what kind of instruments they were, but it was extremely bright.

You felt that you were in this intense African heat.

Costume designers can create elaborate, period-specific ball gowns or build a fantasy wardrobe from scratch.

And sometimes, as for Battle of Black and Dogs,

less is more.

Very, very subdued.

It was very simple.

There was nudity, there was blood.

Sound designers, meanwhile,

deal in the world of the unseen, but

That production had that quality of this sonic, weird, something was off.

You knew it was

dangerous.

And often, a production is lucky enough to include projection design.

Design encompasses all these elements.

So at the drama school, we teach set design, lighting design, costume design, projection design, and sound design.

In Europe, they call it scenography.

It's a singular name, but it's a very complex group of artists that create a specific world for plays, musicals, operas, etc.

So it's whatever you feel, whatever you hear, whatever you see is what we do.

Designers have come up with some incredibly imaginative ways to translate written text to the physical world over the past 100 years of Yale Productions.

A world that felt

exclusively lit by candlelight.

I'm

projecting a forest, that forest is not there.

And processed to sound like a rhinoceros yelling.

Working together, they often solve complex problems, even when the odds are against them.

The pandemic did not stop the defiance of the need to create something.