Lilienthal's rough for "Death and The Maiden."

"THE PLAY'S the thing," wrote William Shakespeare in "Hamlet." But if Shakespeare had lived in our age of ubiquitous verbal flash, he might have amended that a bit to read: "The play's the thing — with some help from the set."
 

Some pocket-sized sets need to tell the whole story, as in the rendition of a stark studio apartment that Etta Lilienthal created for the Printer's Devil Theatre's production of "21 Shots."

On the vibrant Puget Sound drama scene, playwrights, actors and directors tend to get more of the glory and media attention. But behind these theater artists are some equally important collaborators — the artisans and designers responsible for bringing a show to vivid life before your eyes.

Most of us can easily imagine a playwright toiling before a hot computer, or actors rehearsing their lines. Less familiar is the job of the set designer, the man or woman who spends weeks and months dreaming up, researching, sketching out and sometimes even building with hammer, saw and paintbrush the imaginary world you will be wooed into.

Lucky for us, the Seattle area boasts many accomplished scenic designers who are responsible for conjuring the look of everything from big, splashy musicals to bare-bones fringe-theater dramas. We invited three of these designers to take us behind the curtain for a guided tour of the artistic alchemy involved in "dressing the stage" for a new production.

Recently, Tacoma-based designer Carey Wong was responsible for creating an enchanted land inside a clothes closet for the current Seattle Children's Theatre production of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

Another local stage wizard, Seattle resident Norm Scrivner, was hired by Issaquah's Village Theatre this fall to evoke the wide-open spaces of the American frontier in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma."
 

		Etta Lilienthal sketch of the set of "Fainting Spells."

And a younger designer, Etta Lilienthal, is building a strong reputation for her ingenious, offbeat settings in smaller productions. Among the most recent: the wittily claustrophobic studio apartment in the Printer's Devil Theatre show "21 Shots," and an eerie, lamp-lit house on the Chilean coast for the Bridges Repertory Theatre's Seattle presentation of the political drama "Death and the Maiden."

Drawing, painting, sculpting, drafting, carpentry, photography, interior decoration, architecture, textile art, historical research, championship-level shopping: In the course of a single project, designers may need to call on all or many of these skills. And while designers have different special talents and their own methods of working, all share a similar goal: To transport the audience to another place — whether that means the eye-popping wonderlands typical of big-budget productions at some of Seattle's larger theaters or the seemingly modest, one-room abodes that are so perfectly effective they attract little attention to themselves.
 

Norm Scrivner designed a rustic cabin as one of the sets for the Village Theatre's production of the musical "Oklahoma."

"Being a set designer is really about creating a complete world," says the ever-enthusiastic Lilienthal. "I want you to feel, when you enter the theater, take your seat and the lights come down, that you're coming into a totally new environment."

The soft-spoken but highly focused Wong, who splits his time between designing plays and operas, says each environment must be, quite literally, a state of mind. "One tries to create some kind of psychological statement that might give you a key to what the show is all about. A play is just words on the page, but our job is to give those words a place where the actions in the story can happen."

But set designers are not just piquing your imagination. They're also dealing with such pragmatic concerns as space, time and functionality. Scrivner points out that set designs must be carefully thought-through "traffic plans" arranged so they don't cause actors to bump into the furniture, or each other, as they go about their make-believe business.

Another major practical challenge is ensuring that set changes will be smooth and swift. The average scene shift should happen in mere seconds. If it takes much longer, the theatrical spell may be broken — and the audience's attention long gone.

"On musicals, which I do a lot, scene changes are really important," says Scrivner. "In 'On the Town,' which I designed for Village Theatre a few years ago, there were 23 separate scene shifts. And if they didn't happen at lightning speed you turned a two-hour show into a three-hour show."

But before designers get into the mechanics of timing and traffic, there is the first creative phase — the time for reading the script carefully and often, discussing the set with the show's director, and seeking inspiration from myriad sources.
 

	Scrivner says he once did three trial designs for "Oliver!", including the above, before the director settled on one. Below, his backdrop for "On the Town."

"Every designer I know spends way too much money on art books," reports Scrivner with a laugh. Picture-clipping files in public libraries are another treasure trove for Wong.

Lilienthal says she even uses her leisure time to inform her work. "I'm always going to museums, to movies, I practically live in the library. Anything I see can be fodder for a design."

Once a concept has been settled on, the next step is to communicate it to one's collaborators — not just the director and actors, but to the lighting designer, costumer and prop makers.

At this juncture, a designer becomes a craftsman and maker of objects — prototypical objects created to get one's ideas across, but sometimes beautiful enough to be considered works of art in their own right. (Set sketches by such famed artist-designers as Marc Chagall, Maurice Sendak and David Hockney are highly valued as art pieces.)

Lilienthal likes to demonstrate her ideas primarily through drawings. For Wong and Scrivner, the principal vehicle is usually an architectural model. Each one is a detailed, dollhouse-like structure in which movable cut-outs represent the actors and the various set elements.

"Because I don't draw for beans," Scrivner admits cheerfully, "I really need to get my thoughts into three dimensions."

However, the most artful sketches or models are not always rubber-stamped by the director, who has veto power over every element of the production. Scrivner says he once did three trial designs for "Oliver!" before the director settled on one. And Wong says that while some directors are very clear on what they want, "others can only tell you what they want by telling you what they don't want. You have to show them oodles and oodles of stuff before they latch onto something."

Once a concept is approved, the designer must find ways to realize it within the constraints of the production budget, which can vary widely. A fringe troupe may have $100 to spend on sets; a mainstage production at Seattle Rep can price in at more than $100,000; at Seattle Opera, more.

You might figure, the bigger the budget the happier the designer. Not necessarily. "Some of my favorite jobs have actually been the $200 ones you do with a gallon of paint and a lot of found furniture," Lilienthal confides. "Without a lot of money, you really get down to the true essentials of what the show needs. So often in bigger sets, there's just a lot of extra decoration."
 

Designer Carey Wong holds some of the detailed models he used as guides in creating the sets for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" at the Seattle Children's Theatre. On the floor in the background, artists work on sweeping scenic backdrops for the play.

As the vision takes shape, the designer usually produces drafting plans to guide those who will build the scenery. (If the budget is really low, the designer may also pitch in.)

Whatever the budget, out of necessity it often takes great ingenuity to find the best way to erect an illusion of place — for a locale that a movie crew, for instance, might be able to find in the "real world" and just shoot on film.

Props and furnishings can be a real challenge. Wong has had to make fake Chihuly glass sculptures out of plastic for one show and an Egyptian sarcophagus out of hair curlers for another. Highly versatile materials such as acrylic, inflatable plastic, foam and paint often stand in for more solid, expensive substances.

The carpenters who construct the sets are not underlings, Lilienthal emphasizes, but valuable collaborators. "Almost nothing seems impossible because you have these very talented and experienced people thinking about it with you, and figuring out solutions to your problems." For one show of Lilienthal's, colleagues helped her devise impressive-looking "stone" statues using mannequins, chicken wire, thrift-shop clothes and paint.

These designers seem to find a marvelous sense of satisfaction in such work, but they also say their profession is very competitive and financially unstable. Besides talent, they must have years of schooling and/or on-the-job training and experience. Usually, designers are freelancers who survive from job to job and may be paid fairly well or very poorly for countless hours of planning and work — depending on the financial scope of the show.

Relatively few design professionals in the country make a living strictly from concocting stage scenery. Despite his many awards and depth of experience, Wong sometimes teaches at Seattle University to supplement his income. Lilienthal has a day job as design associate at Seattle Repertory Theatre, which means assisting visiting set designers, though she hasn't yet been hired to design a Rep show herself. For Scrivner, the theater gigs became so sporadic he has taken to earning his daily bread as art director for Pacific Studio, a Seattle company that designs and builds exhibits for museum shows.

Scrivner voices his frustration that some of the area's largest theaters tend to bypass local designers in favor of scenic artists from elsewhere. "I think they sometimes waste a lot of money paying for the travel and lodging of these people, when we have a lot of great talent here that's not being used enough."

Despite all the difficulties, many stage designers stay motivated by the aesthetic challenges of their craft, and an enduring love for it. "It hits you when you're sitting in a theater, trying to work things out, and suddenly it all comes together and a beautiful image appears on the stage," Lilienthal says. "Creating that image with your collaborators is the most powerful kind of high."

In those moments when everything does come together "it's really transcendent," Scrivner agrees. "You can almost sustain an entire career on just one or two of those moments."

Misha Berson is The Seattle Times' theater critic. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.