Designing Macbeth
By Michael Locher, Set Designer

Rob Melrose approached me with typical directness last winter. He wanted to produce a Macbeth that was vibrant, deeply grounded, legitimately scary, and honestly tragic. He was armed with robust ideas about how the set would get the job done. Theatre is an indisputably visual medium but, even so, a surprising number of accomplished directors shy away from strong opinions about show aesthetics, something both liberating and frustrating for designers. What begins as artistic freedom easily becomes a source of detachment and the designer's work eventually materializes as an afterthought rather than an important facet of the vision. Having worked with Rob Melrose over a dozen times since 2001, I'm aware that the challenge with the Cutting Ball is often the opposite; carving one's own stake in a territory packed with talented visionaries and stratospheric (but specific) expectations. Like two of his favorite influences, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, Rob's production concepts revolve tightly around a comprehensive vision of how the piece will occupy audio, visual, and verbal realms together.

Here, the aesthetic cues appropriately draw from Rob's decade-long examination of Macbeth's text-presenting the story as an experience of mental illness, brought on by the grief of having lost a baby. Opting for a stark, institutional white, the set refers to the recent production of Sarah Kane's 4.48Psychosis (locally staged at Zellerbach Hall), using an asylum interior as much for literal effect as for its neutrality and quiet. Equally important, we discovered, was investing the space with a subtle aura of the recent past and familiar geography. Together with Raquel Barreto's beautiful gray military costumes and elegant ladies wear, small scenic flourishes (wainscoting, painted electrical conduit, spartan moldings) aim to evoke a vaguely European, mid-20th century locale. Disrupting the show's tight palette of color and texture is an aggressively painted wall of red, an unmistakable picture of turbulent, hellish evil. Hidden behind white doors, it's selectively revealed to inject appropriate moments with a surrealist shock of color.

Rob and I sought to mark the play's climactic moment, when converging armies arrive at Dunsinane to confront Macbeth, with a meditative hush, rather than the usual torrent of mud and battlefield horrors. In our production, Birnham Wood arrives at Macbeth's estate as a grove of tall saplings, like birch or poplar clustered in a snowy field (a landscape inspired by the melancholy scenery of the Netherland Opera's production of Eugene Onegin, recently staged at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco). It's a serene moment, aptly enveloping Macbeth in a place with graveyard-stillness. It's also an immensely difficult scenic trick to stage, particularly in as intimate a space as the EXIT Theatre on Taylor. A rich sound design, supplied by the always impressive Cliff Caruthers, completes the effect while masking the efforts of a capable backstage crew.

--Michael Locher, Set Designer

*The Cutting Ball is both sad and proud to say farewell to Michael as he departs this fall for Yale to pursue an MFA in Set Design.