For design team, it's a long road to the Shorts

BY JACK ZINK
Theater/Music Writer
Posted July 8 2007

Erin Amico had a mantra as she prepared for her first stint as a costume designer with Summer Shorts.

"It'll be fine, it'll all work out," she kept telling herself. Having watched her husband work on previous editions of City Theatre's wildly eclectic and successful short-play festival, she wanted to get involved. But she knew the experience would be a challenge.

"If you actually understand what it is before you sign on, you would probably run away. So I purposely fooled myself," she says.

Amico has won the Carbonell Award twice for her costumes, including the human lizards of Edward Albee's Seascape at Palm Beach Dramaworks two seasons ago. For the 12th annual Shorts, she found herself having to assemble upward of 90 costume pieces in a matter of weeks.

The last one, a giant-sized human bumble bee, came at her by way of a note from artistic director J. Barry Lewis the day before Shorts opened: "Erin, please add bumble bee costume."

As Summer Shorts comes together in its two locations — first the Carnival Center's 200-seat Studio Theatre, where it closes today, then in the Broward Center's 600-seat Amaturo Theatre, where it reopens Thursday — the program's design team functions like a squad of troubleshooters, building the show's "delivery systems," as set designer and technical director Michael Amico calls them, on a fast track. There are nine performers responding to the urges of seven directors, each with different approaches and levels of involvement. Some directors allow the designers to envision the environment; others want to be involved in every detail.

The Amicos, properties master Matthew Glass, lighting designer Melissa Santiago and sound designer Steve Shapiro gathered after the Carnival Center opening to describe what it's like from their end to put together 15 playlets in approximately as many days.

The week rehearsals began, two slots had yet to be filled, and rewrites abounded during rehearsals. Finally, once the project arrived at the theater for technical work, everything changed again.

"Everything I thought was done, wasn't. And everything I thought wasn't, was," Glass says.

For instance, says lighting designer Santiago, "As soon as we got into the theater, the directors decided they all would like to work outside the box, where there were no lights." This, after she had already created the lighting for each playlet. "So I had to scurry up in the grid to hang another 30 lights, and see how to get around I-beams to light areas they were going to use."

By the end of this exhausting if rewarding process, she was able to make her lighting as flexible as possible, "but still have little bells and whistles, so that each piece has its own separate things that make it special, to stand out in its own way."
Abstract approach
The improvisational style of Summer Shorts during its formative stage forces Michael Amico's scenery to become the most abstract of the program's designs, while wife Erin's costumes take the fore in establishing the sense of time and place.

This year, the in-the-round format at the Carnival Center, and the switch to the Broward's conventional proscenium stage, made flexibility even more important. Amico came up with a series of large panels with abstract painted designs to do more than just frame the action.

"It was a long process. I had to think about technical issues as well as design," Amico says. "I wanted to do some color blocks to fill the room, and I really like abstract art. I thought it would be playful, modern, urban."

That left Glass with a larger than normal role of selecting props for each of the 15 stories. (The distinction between scenic design and props is that, if it needs to be built, it's scenic. If it's bought or found, it's props.) Glass scoured the region for everything from desks to something that would look like a tattoo gun, but balked at getting a car for Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart, in which two wacko high school girls exact revenge on prom night and head out into the wild blue yonder with a rival stuffed in the back seat of their vehicle.

To make all 15 plays work with minimal set changes, a decision was made early on to use rehearsal cubes — variously sized blocks — for furniture and other set pieces. That decision (along with Amico's panels) led to other choices following the same abstract concept.

Glass says that late in rehearsals, artistic director Lewis asked if he'd found a car yet. Glass and Amico had both assumed the car would be an arrangement of cubes.

"I couldn't see five rehearsal cubes for the rest of the scenery and then a realistic set piece. It had to be one or the other," Glass says.

Adds Amico: "I had just done Grease at The Actors' Playhouse with a gutted car and knew this was not going to work. You can't push something that weighs two tons past the audience. I said, 'We have the subway benches from last year.' There was no other way."

The subway benches are recycled as the car, with a steering wheel thrown in to top off the effect.
New and improved
With so many different stories and locales, costumes and sound are the most vivid designs that affect the audience's Summer Shorts experience. Four-time Carbonell Award winner Steve Shapiro says his job has actually become easier and more fun over the years via advances in technology.

"The good thing about my job is that it doesn't take a lot of space to keep my stuff like it did years ago," he says. "And when we were using tape or CDs, I would go away and guess and then go back in the studio and try to time it out," whereas with new technology, it's a snap.

Michael Amico says that he found Shapiro experimenting recently with a whole range of dog barks for a particular scene. In days of old, any bark would have done. So Amico asked why.

"I love what sound can do," Shapiro says. "I don't get the chance to do it enough these days. When you're close to the action, you're in the sonic picture that the cast is part of, you experience the same thing."

When the show moves to Broward this week, the effects will be tweaked to accommodate the differing requirements of a proscenium vs. the Carnival Studio's in-the-round setup.

"In a proscenium theater, it's more like you're listening to a story," Shapiro says. There, the design for songs is likely to be more forceful, and dramatic punctuation around dialogue is enhanced, while soft cues (crickets in a park) will fade in the larger space.
It's a rush
"This really is two nights of theater, two shows. It's also like summer camp. You're there with all your friends and if you're not there you're either working on the show at home or sleeping," says Shapiro, who has worked around the world, including Phantom of the Opera in South America. "For two or three weeks all we see are each other, so we have to like each other."

The others explode in laughter.

"I don't know about you guys, but I love it," Shapiro says. "Where else do you get to be so creative?"

Erin Amico says it's "electric" being able to work with so many people and ideas at once — especially those she doesn't normally meet during the course of a season.

"You get so many challenges thrown at you in one production. It's so different, you never know what's going to be coming at you," Shapiro adds. "It really is exhilarating."

Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.