Theatre for a New Audience: Troilus and Cressida, Sets, Costmes, Props

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"Brave Pavilions" and the "Six-gated City"
- Sets, Costumes, Props

Douglas Stein's set design work for Peter Hall’s Troilus and Cressida was simple but effective. He had supplied Theater for a New Audience with a spare, but elegant, platform for last season's King John, and, like the King John staging, for Hall’s Troilus he again surrounded the playing space with audience seating. Stein's sets typically display great economy wedded to masterfully precise and pleasing proportions. For Troilus, Stein recreated the central design statement of Hall's 1960 RSC production at Stratford, a large platform covered in sand, but he made some telling changes for this production.

It emerged because I kept bullying the designer to give me the right color stage. He finally lost his temper and said, "I can't go on painting sand. "Why don't you have real sand?" And we did. And the sand of course represents a bullring, a place of play, a place of sexual relaxation, a place where you can fight. And it's Mediterranean.

The 1960 Stratford set was an octagon, but the New York arena was larger and more rounded, with twelve sides. More importantly, the white sand of the original Stratford stage was replaced by more "natural," brown sand, the sort one might find on a beach, not in an hour-glass. The full-circle round made the space more dramatically arena-like than the earlier set had been with its red curtained backdrop. Players could appear from the downstage proscenium entrances of the theater's conventional orientation. There were, in addition two entrances down the aisles in the main house and two that passed through the seats that had been added in the "upstage" space to complete the theater-in-the-round. The additional pair of doors at the front of the house, which saw some use in last season's King John were not employed. Hall did bring into play the "battlements" above the audience at one dramatic moment. It is there, high up on the audience's right, that we first hear Cassandra [Vivienne Benesch] shrieking her prophetic, and unheeded warnings to her father and brothers, "Cry, Trojans, cry!" Her voice is all the more shocking for its arrival out of the blue.

The audience finds more to look at in the pre-set than a field of brown sand. The battleground-to-be sports the remains of battles past in the form of several mummified corpses propped against each other on a large frayed brown blanket, some discarded armor, a lost helmet, and, downstage right, two bleached skeletons whose ambiguous position, one atop the other, anticipates Thersites' cry, "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion, " (5.2.201-2) and sets up the relationship between war and lust that much of the text explores. Round the sand arena was a sunken walkway about two feet wide that was also employed as a playing space. About this rim the Trojan warriors marched as Cressida and Pandarus reviewed them from the center of the stage (1.2). From this step Aeneas addressed the Greeks when he arrived in their camp (1.3) and Hector faced Ajax on his arrival (4.5).

As Hall noted, the sandy surface of the playing platform lent itself to a number of identities (not only a bullring, but an ashtray), but in the battle scenes it became a character in its own right. In the dizzying choreography of B.H. Barry's battles it swirled about the combatants as well as some hapless audience members in the front rows, and was trailed up the aisles as the alarums and excursions spilled out into the house. Some of the soldiers' swords were distributed about the stage by Thersites at the top of Act V, but during the battle other swords suddenly materialized from beneath the surface as the fighters reached into the sand where they were buried.

If the set presented a simple, but well-proportioned, visual statement, Martin Pakledinaz' costumes were richly variegated, imaginatively conceived, and lushly executed. The Greeks looked the part of men who had lived roughly in tents for seven years of their siege. Their colors were dark-blacks, deep blues and grays. The materials were heavy and tough -- tattered denim, patched wool. Some incorporated gray or black pieces of ragged blanket as partial skirts over their trousers. The kings among them sported thin crested steel crowns. All were shod in heavy black combat boots. In battle they added black armor pieces and helmets with varied crests that combined classical Greek with later industrial traditions.

When the scene shifted to within the walls of Troy the look of the stage was transformed by the rich warm colors of the Trojan costumes. The warriors wore thick, but loosely draped long skirts in deep reds and oranges over warmly colored trousers, and, when armed, leather cuirasses over their skin-tight shirts. The older Trojan men, Pandarus and Alexander (played by Jordan Charney who doubled as Menelaus), were in looser, but similarly colored garb. Only Priam, in his striking white robe, and white hair, shone more brightly. The women of Troy, including Cressida, wore light and flowing costumes in warm but muted tones. Only Helen, the Greek interloper, defied the warm soft fashions of the Asian city. She wore a bodice of metallic gold over a chiffon skirt of the sort of blue aqua that belonged to the Greek color scheme. Unlike their hard living adversaries camped on the plain outside the walls, none of the Trojans wore shoes. Their bare feet sank comfortably into the ever present sand, even when they marched into battle. For battle they were better armed against the sands of their native plain than the invading Greeks. They wore their colorful scarves tied over their mouths and noses.

Scott Zielinski's lighting accentuated the shift in color tones between the two warring sides. The scenes in Troy were illuminated by a luxurious warm rose-pink downwash which highlighted the reds, oranges, and pinks of the Trojan costumes. The overhead wash turned a cool blue-green to add a hard edge to the dark grays and deep blues of the ragged Greeks. The battle scenes were rendered more sinister by stark two-thousand-watt fresnels washing the stage from three directions. A harsh, cold, no-color blue downlight from overhead turned Achilles into a dreadfully shadowed apparition as he confronted the unarmed Hector. Three overhead follow spots contributed a dynamism to the lighting that small playing spaces like American Place often lack, constantly picking up and highlighting characters onstage and keeping the focus of the scenes under tight artistic control.

Hall did not indulge in the common practice of directors who, when they have abandoned specifically "classic" time frames, adopt modern weaponry as well. These warriors fought with swords, though they were closer to eighteenth and nineteenth century sabers than to the short swords of classic Greek vase paintings. Only Achilles' Myrmidons dissented -- they used short spears when they ambushed Hector, wickedly efficient butchers' tools they had planted about the rim of the stage as Achilles instructed them. Where the sabers of the other fight scenes suggested the forms of chivalric battle, these looked like tools for slaughtering a bull or a boar.

The generally clean uncluttered look of the stage made the few props that appeared all the more telling. Furniture was rare. Though the Greek commanders brought on rustically improvised camp stools, the Trojans, in their war council, kneeled in the sand about Priam's minimal throne. Paris and Helen lolled on a large pillow and a blanket, but their fellow revelers sat in the sand to the side. Pandarus's only instrumental accompaniment for his song was a pair of linked cowbells. The house in Troy where the lover's finally meet was devoid of furnishings; they performed their courting dance on the sand. No structures were set to establish any of the Greeks' tents or Hector's chambers. The stage was at its busiest with props during the battles scenes. Thersites sets the battlefield by returning with the ragged blanket, some mummified corpses and general debris to return the stage to a look similar to the pre-set, bringing the audience back to what they saw when they arrived.

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