Technical Director Ben Thoron on the Scenic Challenges of Rain
The set design for Rain began with research into the boarding house and hotel that is the central location of Somerset Maugham's short story. Designer Mark Wendland found images of colonial buildings in the Pago Pago harbor, one of which was the one Maugham used in his story. He took the original architecture, removed the walls, and simplified the structure to make a compellingly complete building that could highlight each room in the house as the action moves around, up and down and through the house.
I've been describing the set as a 3.5 ton, steel-framed, three-story house with no walls and spiral stairs to the trap room, that revolves, splits apart, gets reconfigured at the intermission, and finally pivots apart, all in the rain. This leads to the inevitable question, "is that all?!" The answer is, remarkably, "no." The details make it even more complex.
The single biggest engineering challenge was the various movements of the house. Much of the first act is spent rotating the house to show us various rooms. At the end of the act, the house splits apart, signifying the emotional divisions within it. In the intermission shift, both halves are reconfigured to give us yet another view of the house, only to be further deconstructed when the two units rotate apart, leaving a void center stage. Each of these moves required careful discussion and engineering. Rotating the entire house could be done in several ways; the first most obvious idea is to build a turntable underneath the house. It was a great solution for The Comedy of Errors in 2015. A turntable has advantages in rotational accuracy, lower power requirements, and an easier construction. On the other hand, creating a turntable added significant load-in time, required installation of a deck around it, and necessitated taking the huge point loads created by the casters of the house. The structural design of this turntable alone drove us to decide to drive the house on its own wheels.
Making a self-driving house is no easy task either. If you think of a car as an analogous machine, you can see that the four wheels more or less support the load of the car and maintain contact with the ground. That even loading and constant ground contact make possible the transmission of torque through the driving wheels. However, you’ll also notice that when you get into a car with several of your friends that the car lowers closer to the ground as it gets loaded. This is because cars have suspensions to compensate for road variations, rider comfort, and load balancing. A three story house on a suspension would wiggle, shift, and wave in the air as actors moved around it.
The end of Act I is marked by a physical separation of the house into two parts, one half remaining attached to the center staircase, the other traveling diagonally offstage. This required us to build the house wagon in halves, each with independent control. In the half that travels offstage, we have two more motor drives, essentially identical to the rotation drives, aimed carefully to shift the wagon in the correct direction. It is connected by an umbilical cord of flexible industrial conduit called e-chain.
One of the key elements of the set in Act II is that it is presented in a fixed tableau with the house units spanning the entire width of the stage but split apart once again on pivots, essentially creating a gulf between the units, completely eradicating any sense of naturalism. This pivot action requires a strong point to pivot around. Unfortunately, due to the geometry of the set and the stage area, the pivots end up under the platforms, hard to find or see. The job of the stage crew during intermission is to relocate the two-ton scenic wagons into a one-inch hole. The crew employs a collection of electric chain motors, hand-cranked chain "come-alongs," and a certain amount of brute force to precisely locate the wagons. The first time we tried it, it took the crew 29 minutes to complete the shift. Over the course of several previews, the shift time slowly diminished, then climbed to a frustrating 33 minutes, and with practice, has fallen to a blistering 15 minutes. Watching the coordinated action of the nine stagehands is definitely worth skipping the beverage line at the pub!
Once we determined how the house was to be rotated and driven, the next step was to address construction, both in the shop facility and then on the stage. Stage time is our most restricted resource; in this case, we had nine days between the prior production and technical rehearsals. One day is lost to striking the prior set, one day to rigging soft goods and hanging of lights over the stage. In the remaining seven days, we try to provide the majority of the crew a day off, leaving six days to go from bare stage to completed set. This constraint led us to make the house in large modules.
We can't end this discussion without talking about rain. It was crazy to think that we would have water onstage, indoors — terrifying even — but that's what we do. There are six rain elements in the current show. There are three "rain" systems across the front of the set: these are drip hoses set in split pipes to both support the hose and focus the drops into a specific line. Left and right of the house unit is a row of fogger emitters. Upstage of the house we have one long strip of fog/mist emitters to provide atmosphere upstage of the house in the second act. The final rain moment is a focused shower downstage center, using hot water, which douses two actors in Act II. The downstage rain systems drain into catchment basins under the front of the stage and then into the closest drain in the basement. Upstage, the rain merely falls on the deck, where the water puddles until the crew vacuums it up after the show.
The project took seven weeks to build in the shop. The first two weeks were spent constructing an entirely separate two story rehearsal set. The main house came together in the remaining five weeks.
I tease, and I'm a huge fan, but I know often his books are criticized (granted, more often when he writes them as well which isn't the case here).
