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Stage Blood Design Statement

 

A physical and farcical comedy, Charles Ludlam’s Stage Blood is best supported by a versatile space that reflects the ambiguity and metatheatricality in the play. Charles Ludlam appropriates Shakespeare’s Hamlet by directly incorporating scenes into the Caucasian Theater Company’s own production. Ludlam further mirrors the plot of Hamlet (an already meta-theatrical play) in the events of Stage Blood, distorting the events past the point of mere humor to the stratosphere of absurdity (hence Ludlam’s “Theater of the Ridiculous”). It necessitates an element of realism in creating the theater within a theater to form a stable backdrop on which ridiculosity can ensue. Incorporating smaller movable set pieces also allows the space and blocking to be open-ended and shaped by comedic gags.

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While the dressing room serves as a space of “real life” as opposed to the fictions created on the stage, my design underscores that nothing is “real” on the stage, blurring the lines between reality and performance. The characters conflate these two realms by constructing performances of their own within the “real” world: Carl stages a drunken speech to prompt Elfie to quit acting, Elfie acts as if she’s in love with Carl, and Stone Sr. fakes his own murder and poses as Gilbert. Many of the scenes in the “real world” also echo scenes from Hamlet, such as the “Poor Urine” scene with Jenkins and Carl (a parody of “Poor Yorick”), Edmund’s fake stabbing gag (mirroring Polonius’ murder), and the appearance of Stone Sr.’s ghost (like the ghost of Hamlet’s father). To support the ambiguity the characters create, I matched the vocabulary of the set to the elements of Kenyon’s Bolton Theater, mimicking the black cinder block walls, the production photos, and the old set pieces. I placed the dressing room door further upstage in order to create a continuous line from the proscenium wall. The arras in the dressing room could then be moved to break up the space, dividing the dressing room from the stage, or unify it, closing the gap next to the upstage center flats. I also included a unit of shelves, much like the flat goods storage used in a scene shop, and a pin rail with rigging. I made the gutters of the stage into a kind of prop cemetery of items leftover from past productions, as if Kenyon’s Bolton Theater had been left in shambles by previous productions, rehearsals, and classes.

 

In contrast to the black walls and floor of the Bolton, the introduction of the Caucasian Theater Company serves as a forced disruption of the space, bringing color and extravagance along with it. To symbolize the disturbance, I had a photo of the Stone family placed on the wall by the other production photos during intermission (on a glittery and ornate frame, of course). Their trunks and costume rack further intrude upon the mostly black stage with bright teal and feather boas. The trunks then served as convertible objects, used as chairs, tables, and storage to support the thrifty and nomadic nature of a traveling theater troupe. The other objects in the theater (the arras, door, and chairs), once unassuming, became similarly transformative. The dressing room door, for instance, turned around and moved to the opposite side of the stage in Act 2 to become the inside of the dressing room. More vibrantly painted and adorned with cheesy motivational quotes and images, this door inverted the space, bringing the inside out.  For the arras, I designed a rolling unit with a curtain for shadow play that could be opened or closed by the actors as needed.

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  As Susan Sontag wrote in her “Notes on Camp,” camp is “one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon… not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization” (Sontag 2). I included elements of camp in the Hamlet set pieces to further the camp sensibilities of their characterizations and costumes. For instance, I designed the elements of the castle to play with proportion – in contrast with the large reticulated tower tops, the door and window of the castle were laughably small. The tops of the towers also functioned as hats for the characters, who used their own bodies as parts of the scenery. The shakiness of the scaffolding compounded the overdone performances of the company, which quaked at every large gesture, making the scene comical. When the crew flipped the castle during intermission, the painted lightning bolt sky in the window, curtain painted on a curtain, and tile pattern on the rug for the subsequent Hamlet scenes supported the artificial and aggrandized elements of camp and theater. The rug specifically stood as a nod to the many Hamlet renditions with a tiled floor, referencing the Kronborg Castle in Denmark. 

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The rock for Jenkin’s play used the same gray paint as the Hamlet castle, indicating their creation in the same world (and on a meta-level, that same world would be the Kenyon set shop). The rock was lightly aged but not overly detailed, as it would’ve been thrown together last minute for Jenkin’s play. The materials used for both the castle and the rock came from any poor theater designer’s toolkit: cardboard, chicken wire, and paper mache. 

With these fabricated elements, the set dressing of production photos and prop bins, and the stage rigging, my design brings the backstage forwards, highlighting the artifice and illusion innate to the theater, while making the theater a flexible space for play.