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FurtherMore: Designing Dirty Business
One of the pleasures – and challenges – of a period play is revisiting the visual style of a bygone era. Below, Scenic Designer Victor A. Becker and Costume Designer Suzette Pare answer a few questions on how they approached this task for Dirty Business.
 Victor A. Becker
Q: What’s your first consideration when creating the set for a play like Dirty Business? Do you go straight to play’s time period for inspiration? Do you let the playwright’s storytelling style dictate the choices? Or are there more practical concerns that need to be addressed first?
A: While I don’t have a predetermined process for approaching the design of a play, there is always a back-and-forth between an objective, analytic, cerebral kind of “thinking” and an emotional, metaphoric, intuitive kind of “feeling.” The design of Dirty Business took this contrast to new heights with its legions of practical challenges coupled with countless images of events that are still very real and powerful for me (I’m embarrassed to admit that I was an eager 13-year-old campaigner for Nixon).
Two strategic realizations shaped the design. The first was the observation that the number, sophistication, and familiarity of the play’s locations would be best served by an abstract, non-literal world. The solution to each scene needed to be a simple, evocative gesture that conjures up both place and character. The process became one of paring away everything not essential to the soul of the scene.
The second realization was that the shifts between the many locations needed to be organic and fluid. Mechanical solutions to moving scenery seemed very wrong. What was needed was a porous, shifting stage space in which people and things can appear and disappear as needed in a seamless, graceful flow.
Q: How did you research the look of the early 1960s?
A: The search for furniture and architecture that can create an atmosphere was more about establishing the character of a scene than focusing on the time period for the play – something that costumes can do much more effectively. Instead, the scenes need physical distillation and distinct character.
The set for the first scene of the play illustrates both qualities. A single wicker chair occupies a space defined by sheer curtains and two windows that offer a view of the sea that could only be seen from the deck of a sailboat – a place JFK would greatly prefer over fighting with his father about his political indiscretions. Similarly, the one Rococo chair in Frank’s Vegas pad says more about his aspirations than about any particular time or place.
The need for research to find both physical solutions and period style for any play has remained pretty much unchanged for decades. The technological revolution of the Internet, however, has vastly increased the resources for this search, especially for the mundane things that tend not to be found in lovely coffee table books. Google turned up 320,000 images of meat hooks in 0.36 seconds! Photos of the Oval Office during every 20th century president’s term are easily found. Defining the range of acceptable furniture styles to inform the propmaster’s acquisition process has been turned from a chore to a joy.
An additional joy was the serendipitous airing of the TV series Mad Men, with its stylish evocation of the late 50s. Here again, it isn’t just the style and color that informs; the sense of composition and the choice of particular physical viewpoints offered ways of thinking about scenes that might have not occurred otherwise.
Q: One of the most striking features of Dirty Business’ scenic design is the circular, reflective floor. Where did that idea come from?
A: Despite the focus on distilling scenes and creating character, it was very important to create a strong context for the framework of the world on the stage. This world needs to be both amorphous and precise at the same time. It needs both to obscure and to focus. It needs to be both invisible and extremely well defined.
In a previous production at Florida Stage, I used a partially mirrored floor to suggest that a character was floating in the sky flying a plane. The sense of “other-ness” and “no-where-ness” the mirror created seemed perfect for the world of Dirty Business. The disk shape arose from two instincts: a sense that all the characters in the play want to be at the center of the stage, and a sense that the center of the stage turns out to be an unpleasant and dangerous place to be. The size of the disk (16’ diameter) concentrates the action for a play filled with two-person scenes, some with little or no real action (bedrooms scenes, restaurant/bar scenes, and other comparatively static scenes).
Q: You had a hand in the design of Florida Stage’s theatre. What do you think of it now, in your role as a set designer?
A: Dirty Business is the 10th show I have designed for this theater space and my feelings about the space – both the good ones and the not-so-good ones - are the same as they were for the first show.
First, the semi-regrets – both unavoidable in a space previously designed to be a supermarket. The existing structure of the roof forced the lighting grid to be at a height that makes any sort of “air” or “breathing room” around scenic elements difficult. It also limits the height of stage platforms, complicates the already difficult job of lighting shows in a three-quarter round theater, and makes the lighting equipment uncomfortably present in virtually every scene of most plays.
The plan of the space was also impacted by its history as a supermarket, where columns to support a roof can be accommodated wherever they need to be. A theater space, however, requires both an unobstructed audience seating area and an equally unencumbered stage space. With the budget supporting the removal of only a very few of these columns, the challenge of fitting the theater spaces within the remaining columns became a real Chinese puzzle! While achieving a workable seating area and a stage space with a good relationship to it, the resulting solution could not create adequate off-stage space for the movement and storage of scenic elements. This constraint impacts most of Florida Stage’s plays but is a particularly difficult problem for Dirty Business with its 39 scenes happening in 17 different locations!
But these two pesky problems do not prevent the theater from offering audiences an intimate and warm relationship with the characters on the stage. The theater enables an evocative conversation to take place between actors and audience. This conversation can be provocative and confrontational or it can be dreamy and quixotic. So, despite whatever its flaws, the theater succeeds in supporting the wide range of emotions and ideas inherent in the wide range of plays that Florida Stage loves to produce!
So I look forward to doing at least 10 more challenging plays in this space!
Click below to view examples of Victor's scenic design plans
 Suzette Pare
Q: You're creating costumes for characters who will be familiar to the audience. How does this influence your design choices? Is that familiarity more of a blessing or a curse for you?
A: In some ways, it is a blessing and in other ways it is a curse. It's fun to be able to bring familiar figures to life for our audiences, and in this case there is a lot of research to pull from. The downside is that our audience also knows a lot about these characters, so they expect to see those familiar elements on stage. In this play we have five very intriguing characters that the audience wants to know more about. I hope I have met the challenge of bringing the familiar forward for a couple of hours of entertainment.
Q: Every character in Dirty Business ends up in a drastically different place than they started the play. For most of them, it's a descending spiral from good times to disaster. How do you use their costumes to support that story arc?
A: In this piece, because of the formality of the sixties that doesn't exist today (men wore suits, women wore dresses, hats, gloves, etc.) there is not as much of an arc in costuming. The arc in this play is more with color choices than shapes and styles. The costumes get darker and more color specific in Act 2, are lighter and more fun in Act 1.
Q: As a costume designer, what's your favorite thing about 1960s style? Your least favorite?
A: I really love the early sixties style! I have several rooms in my home with a nod to the sixties. I like the shape of women's dresses in the early sixties. The combination of full skirts and pencil skirts gives a great deal of variety to the era. The sense of style in hat shapes, shoes with the pointed toes and narrow heels, narrow jackets and pants for the men, all lend themselves to great silouettes. My least favorite are the boxy looks from that time period, making women in suits kind of "shapeless". Men's suits with the boxy jackets and narrow pant legs (always hemmed very short) are not very flattering either.
Q: I have to ask: Dirty Business is set in the exact same time period as the TV series Mad Men, which is known for meticulously recreating the look of the early 1960s. Did you ever watch Mad Men for inspiration?
A: I had not heard of Mad Men until Lou [Tyrrell] suggested I use it for research. I ordered all of Season One from Netflix and became an instant fan. I wish I had some of those clothes for this production! There aren't any women in Mad Men that have the qualities that Judy has, so I didn't copy any specific character's style, but used it as a way to immerse myself in the time period as I started designing Dirty Business.
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