Thoughts on Time and Space
With "Lonesome Traveler" Scenic and Lighting Designer
Thomas S. Giamario
Thomas S. Giamario is no stranger to Rubicon; if you know our productions, you know what a big part he so frequently plays. His art and imagination have literally set the stage for some 30 RTC productions, beginning with The Little Foxes a decade ago and including The Rainmaker, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Man of La Mancha, Hamlet, Bus Stop (for which he won an Ovation Award), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Fiddler on the Roof, Spit Like a Big Girl, Trying, Crimes of the Heart and The Tempest: Phase I. In his storied career Tom has contributed to over 470 productions in forty venues from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
The stage veteran recently offered these thoughts about his approach to Lonesome Traveler:
“All the talk about the music is, for me, less about the performance of it or the listening to it than about the relationship that all present at a hootenanny or concert had with it. The performers were well aware that it wasn’t about them, nor about whose song it was nor where it came from – it was 'we’re ALL going to participate in this together.' Something like an old-time baptist service – so much is experienced, of a cathartic nature and rejuvenative nature, simply by the process of singing. Of course in folk music there’s a narrative as well, that helps one more deeply relate to the experience.”
He continues: “Jim (O’Neil) and I had been going back and forth about the Lonesome Traveler script for several months, and one of the agreements we had was that it was not a theatrical revue, like Side By Side By Sondheim – with a show like that, the audience is detached from the music, hearing it from afar. What was important to us with Lonesome Traveler was to re-stimulate the presence of the audience in the participation of the music, while it was all going on–much as it might have been back in the day.
So this was the filter through which I was trying to interpret physical space on the Rubicon stage. In the research what struck me was that in all those venues where this music was performed there was a complete lack of artifice; a lack of manipulation to create something that we now all take for granted. It wasn’t like the Grammy awards – it wasn’t about the packaging, it was about the presence. How do we do that for a sophisticated theatrical audience, who expect a theatrical event that is, first and foremost, an exercise in artifice?
We liked the idea of turning the theatre into a folk club. Thus we offer “The Laurel Folk Club” – a space that’s conducive for re-creating that energy for all present, an environment that’s more casual and less formal; tables and chairs in some places spilling onto a stage where the dividing line between performing space and spectator space is less clear.
Seventy-five percent of the show’s theatricality is in the first ten minutes, and what struck me was that, in reality, the show is not just happening in the late twenties through the sixties, it’s also happening – with the performers and the audience – right now. It has currency,contemporaneity. That would mean the audience and the performers exist today, in this particular folk club, and it’s from that vantage that we go back and forth in time, establishing different patinas for the songs, and the participation in them.”
•••
The curtain rises on Lonesome Traveler – a World Premiere event–in “The Laurel Folk Club,” aka Rubicon Theatre Company, April 13 - May 8. For tickets, log on to www.RubiconTheatre.org or call 805.667.2900
No comments:
Post a Comment