Private Lives images
The world goes into slow motion as you get close to opening night. You make the same progress that you made in the first weekend, and no one can tell any difference. If this were the first time I might be a little disheartened. But.
Our stage, so ridiculously wide, needs lots of vertical elements. We put in battens and mock-pilasters not only to satisfy that need but also to mask some joints in the walls. The extreme left and right battens hide the places where flats pull out of the walls to let the Act 1 curtain through.
I want you to notice the boxes sitting on the edge of the stage. In order to establish "balcony" in Act 1, Amy needed a low railing across the lip, but everything we tried (a) became a strong horizontal element where we needed verticals and (b) blocked the view of the folks in Row A. Tom came up with a fine solution, a railing that is mostly not there at all. He built a conduit bender and made these "stubs," which worked nicely. The performers put their hands on the invisible parts of the rail, maybe even leaned on it just a little, and the picture just completed itself.
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