Learning Theater Stuffs

The word of the day is "Gobo." (Pictures! And more pictures!)

Today, the stage, lighting, and costume design folks came in to talk about what they're doing for the production, how things will look, and so forth.

To be honest, when I teach Shakespeare, I talk a fair bit about the material practices of early modern staging and how, for example, a thrust stage works dramatically. But lighting? Let's see, there's sunshine, cloudiness, rain, none of which the playing company could control. And in indoor theaters, there's either sunlight through windows or candlelight of varying sorts. (No limelight until later.)

Anyway, it's fascinating to watch as theater folks talk about their ideas and present them to the cast. They bring in lots of pictures or drawings, so it's easy to imagine how the stage and such will look. And fabric swatches, which gives a sense of a sort of color scheme to the costuming, which gets picked up in the lighting and stage design. This is going to be pretty spectacular in the old sense of the word.

I must confess, though, that I am as happy to have Shakespeare played in jeans and t-shirts as in fancy dress. But I really enjoy conceptual productions, and I like to think about the ways concepts work to make a play new for me, to make me rethink what I "know" about it. So this is exciting!

Tomorrow, we're doing character work, so again, I'm in a rather new world. Exciting!