VIRTUAL SPACE AS AN OXYMORON

As a set designer who is very much interested in physical, tangible space (see spatial dramaturgy), I struggle to find my place in the unavoidably virtual COVID-19 theatrical space we seem to be in right now. After stubbornly concluding that “virtual theatrical space” is an oxymoron, I temporarily gave up and turned to doing as many tangible things as I could manage, gut-renovating my studio, oil painting, etc… But then I had this interesting moment during a zoom meeting where I started seeing the matrix of faces and spaces, not as a frustratingly inflexible grid of low-quality video, but as a unique series of windows into human space, and I imagined that each of these windows could be a pixel in a huge picture if we were to somehow magically zoom out far enough to see it. This got me thinking about impressionistic paintings, and I didn’t know it yet, but this is an essential idea written into “Ordinary Days”, a beautiful chamber musical written by Adam Gwon.

Dave Solomon (director) and I were talking throughout the Summer about how we might find a way to make theater within the context of COVID-19 restrictions that wasn’t simply a Zoom reading - absolutely no disrespect to some really amazing work being done on zoom by our colleagues! We wanted to use our required remoteness and separation as a fundamental conceptual starting point for a theatrical project, rather than dealing with it as a challenge to be overcome (though it was still certainly a challenge to overcome!).

As I was thinking about zoom boxes as pixels, Dave mentioned that he had been thinking about “Ordinary Days” as a particularly relevant musical to produce now (2020) and suggested that I listen to it. Part-way into the musical one of the characters - Warren, an aspiring artist - tries to explain his theory of life to a soon-to-be friend as they look at a Monet painting at the Met Museum: “This painting reminds me of people like us. Thousands of tiny specks huddled together in random arrangements that nobody expects. Every dot on its own ordinary and pale, but thrown together one by one, they make this dazzling, joyous, hopeful sort of [fairy tale]”. And so we started working on our hybrid tangible/virtual filmed production of “Ordinary Days” with the Pittsburgh Playhouse, exploring this very simple idea (which of course was not simple to implement) of humans inhabiting individual pixels of a larger picture of humanity.

DESIGN CONCEPT

The design concept is summarized in the video below, which is an unfinished mock-up for the opening of our production. We start with a photograph of apartment building windows in New York City, evoking this zoom meeting matrix of boxes of humanity and glimpses into people’s lives. We zoom in - or more accurately, we pixelize this photograph to such an extent that the tiny square pixels of color become large enough to be inhabited by humans. Each actor is in their own separate pixel, physically isolated, but not disconnected from each other, working together to make this bigger picture.

DUPLICATING A CUBE BY DUPLICATING THE CAMERA

If we were producing this play in post-pandemic (or pre-pandemic) times, it wouldn’t look anything like this, but for the sake of explaining the idea, imagine a hypothetical physical production of this where the set design is simply a large wall of 8’x8’x8’ glowing cubes with actors standing in those cubes. That is our virtual space - our scenic structure that only exists in the computer. The set is not just virtual though - we constructed one of these pixel/cubes and instead of making a matrix of that one physical cube, we made a matrix of cameras to film that one cube. The cameras are places as far apart from each other as the virtual cubes are, so when we put those different camera’s filmed shots together on top of the virtual matrix of cubes, everything lines up and it appears that there are many physical cubes stacked together. See below for an example of how we are making the opening shot (this is still a work in progress).

TECH SET-UP

And though we specifically wanted to stay away from creating a zoom play, we actually love zoom and how it allowed us to collaborate remotely to design, plan, rehearse, and ultimately film and edit this production. Dave Solomon (director) is located in New York City. I am in Westchester NY. Pei-Chi Su (costume designer) is in Long Island, and everyone else was in Pittsburgh. Dave and Camille (music director) rehearsed the two casts via zoom (or was it google’s video conferencing service?) with each actor in their own home. The set (the one cubic pixel) was constructed and installed in the Highmark Theatre at Point Park University. The cube is made from rear-projection screen panels with lighting and video projectors pointed at each surface. There is an array of 14 different cameras pointed at the cube from a wide range of different locations, very precisely located in relationship to the cube to match the locations of virtual cameras in Cinema 4D where I modeled the virtual version of the set.

For the tech and filming process, Cat Wilson (lighting designer) was in the theater space along with the rest of the production team. Dave, Pei-Chi, and I were zooming into a computer sitting on what would have been our tech table in the theater. The actors and production team could see us on a big monitor and our voices were connected to the sound system in the room. We had various camera feeds so we could see each of the cameras as well as a devoted “director’s camera” so Dave could see facial expressions and details. We shot one actor at a time in order to comply with COVID-19 safety requirements which allowed us - for most of our shoot - to have the actors unmasked, lip-synching to pre-recorded (masked) audio sessions. With only a few days left of shooting, rising COVID-19 cases forced us to switch to everyone in masks at all times, so in the final edit, there will be a mix of maskless and masked performances.

Here are some images of the set-up in the theater and in my studio / remote tech table:

PRODUCTION PHOTOS