Tony-winning set designer Derek McLane on the inspiration behind his work on ‘The Heiress,’ ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s, ‘The Last Five Years,’ and this year’s Oscars
Tony-winning set designer Derek McLane has had a busy season. He celebrated his 30th Broadway show with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the adaptation of Truman Capote’s classic novella centering on the antics of the high-spirited party girl Holly Golighty (played by Emilia Clarke of HBO’s Games of Thrones). McLane’s versatile set evoked dozens of locations in 1940s Manhattan through a hazy lens of memory. He also recreated an abstract version of contemporary New York in Second Stage’s Off-Broadway revival of the two-character musical The Last Five Years, and the same city again, this time 19thcentury, in the Broadway production of The Heiress starring Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty). In addition, he created the dazzling sets for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.
The 54-year-old McLane was born in London, where his father was a graduate student at the University of London. The family moved back to the states—Evanston, Illinois to be exact—where his dad taught history. After designing a set for a production of Guys and Dolls, the young McLane had found his calling and enrolled at the Yale School of Design in 1980 to learn his art. After graduation, he made designs for theater and opera all over the United States. In the 1990s, he began accumulating awards and nominations, including two Obies for sustained achievement (1997 and 2004), a Lortel Award forThe Voysey Inheritance (2007), and the Best Scenic Design Tony Award for 33 Variations (2009), as well as Tony nominations for The Pajama Game and Ragtime.
NewYork.com recently spoke with McLane about the inspiration and process behind his latest Broadway and Hollywood creations.
Model of ‘The Heiress’ set
What inspired the dark, heavy drawing room of Dr. Sloper [David Straithairn] in The Heiress?
I did a lot of research into 1850, the period of the play, and saw some of the existing houses on the north side of Washington Square, where the play takes place, which are now owned by NYU. The house is almost a character in the play. Morris [Dan Stevens], the young man who courts the doctor’s daughter Catherine [Jessica Chastain], longs for it and it becomes an aspiration for him. I wanted to strike a balance between the incredible wealth of that house, which Morris covets, and the austerity of Dr. Sloper’s personality. He’s not a particularly warm character; he has an almost puritanical work ethic and strong opinions about money. He avoids ostentation. So creating a sense of wealth without flashiness was what I was trying to achieve.
The complete set of ‘The Heiress’
How deep did you go on the research?
There were a lot of photographs of houses of the period in the New York Historical Society and several really terrific books including one called Opulent Interiors of New York of the 19th Century. Literally walking around the neighborhood of Washington Square, the director Moises Kaufman and I went on appointments to see the inside some of the NY houses. We also introduced ourselves to a couple of strangers who lived there and got them to show us their houses. We also went to the Merchant House on Third Street, which has been left in its original condition since the 19th century. It’s where they filmed some of the film The Heiress.
I really pushed the color palette in the set. There are a lot of colors, many different shades of leather, brown, dark red, as well as black. There are shades of color all closely related. My goal was to create a sense of richness, but also have it feel very subdued. I was trying to create a sense of restrained wealth. I layered as much detail as I could into the woodwork and the wall so that every inch of it had dimensions. The wallpaper was made out of lace that we had milled in Scotland. It had its own texture, then we painted it white and dyed it to a leather color and then painted the pattern on top of that, to create a layered sense of richness and wealth.
Model of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ set
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
This play takes in multiple locations. How did you address those challenges in your set design?
Yes, Breakfast at Tiffany’s happens in a million different places and sometimes simultaneously in more than one place. There are so many split-screen scenes and so many times the writer Fred [played by Cory Michael Smith] steps in and out of direct address to the audience because it’s a memory play. You flash forward and backwards in time. It has to move very fluidly, you can’t have any set pieces that are terribly solid. And some of the scenes are only a few minutes. So it almost moves like a musical. The mood is smoky and ephemeral; it’s very much a memory piece. It’s told as a kind of flashback. So I made everything out of scrim.
‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ set
[cont'd] There were panels that tracked across the stage, printed with very large photographs of New York in the 1940s by Andreas Feininger, a great photographer of the period. We got the rights from his estate and we made collages of them and printed them on the scrims. At time, we layered projected imagery on top of that, to create a diaphanous feeling where we could see through one room into another. Even the little bits of wall that we had in Fred’s and Holly’s room were made of scrim so they could be lit through and have a less solid feeling.
I did a lot of research into 1850, the period of the play, and saw some of the existing houses on the north side of Washington Square, where the play takes place, which are now owned by NYU. The house is almost a character in the play. Morris [Dan Stevens], the young man who courts the doctor’s daughter Catherine [Jessica Chastain], longs for it and it becomes an aspiration for him. I wanted to strike a balance between the incredible wealth of that house, which Morris covets, and the austerity of Dr. Sloper’s personality. He’s not a particularly warm character; he has an almost puritanical work ethic and strong opinions about money. He avoids ostentation. So creating a sense of wealth without flashiness was what I was trying to achieve.
The complete set of ‘The Heiress’
How deep did you go on the research?
There were a lot of photographs of houses of the period in the New York Historical Society and several really terrific books including one called Opulent Interiors of New York of the 19th Century. Literally walking around the neighborhood of Washington Square, the director Moises Kaufman and I went on appointments to see the inside some of the NY houses. We also introduced ourselves to a couple of strangers who lived there and got them to show us their houses. We also went to the Merchant House on Third Street, which has been left in its original condition since the 19th century. It’s where they filmed some of the film The Heiress.
I really pushed the color palette in the set. There are a lot of colors, many different shades of leather, brown, dark red, as well as black. There are shades of color all closely related. My goal was to create a sense of richness, but also have it feel very subdued. I was trying to create a sense of restrained wealth. I layered as much detail as I could into the woodwork and the wall so that every inch of it had dimensions. The wallpaper was made out of lace that we had milled in Scotland. It had its own texture, then we painted it white and dyed it to a leather color and then painted the pattern on top of that, to create a layered sense of richness and wealth.
Model of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ set
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
This play takes in multiple locations. How did you address those challenges in your set design?
Yes, Breakfast at Tiffany’s happens in a million different places and sometimes simultaneously in more than one place. There are so many split-screen scenes and so many times the writer Fred [played by Cory Michael Smith] steps in and out of direct address to the audience because it’s a memory play. You flash forward and backwards in time. It has to move very fluidly, you can’t have any set pieces that are terribly solid. And some of the scenes are only a few minutes. So it almost moves like a musical. The mood is smoky and ephemeral; it’s very much a memory piece. It’s told as a kind of flashback. So I made everything out of scrim.
‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ set
[cont'd] There were panels that tracked across the stage, printed with very large photographs of New York in the 1940s by Andreas Feininger, a great photographer of the period. We got the rights from his estate and we made collages of them and printed them on the scrims. At time, we layered projected imagery on top of that, to create a diaphanous feeling where we could see through one room into another. Even the little bits of wall that we had in Fred’s and Holly’s room were made of scrim so they could be lit through and have a less solid feeling.
We wanted this to reflect Fred’s experience of Holly. He tells the story from the point of view of Holly being this amazing person, but she’s gone and he doesn’t know where she is. She’s vanished into thin air. It’s almost as if you don’t know if she existed or not. It’s also a smoky, jazzy era in New York and the photographs captured that sense of a hazy, gauzy city.
Model of ‘The Last Five Years’ set
THE LAST FIVE YEARS
What inspired you to use all these window frames in the set design?
A couple of things. Jason Robert Brown, the director and composer of the show, and I wanted to feature the musicians throughout the evening. So we arranged them on the backwall of the set. That’s the first thing you see when you walk in is the musicians taking their places. One of the remarkable things that made that possible is they memorized their music so they didn’t need music stands or sheet music. That meant we could really control how to light them. The reason for putting them there was the piece so much about the music. It’s sung-through and, except for one scene, there’s always only one character on stage the whole time. It’s always one person singing to him or herself so the musicians become very important.
We also wanted to convey a sense of New York with the windows. Like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but in a completely different way. The windows go away when we’re not in New York. They are meant to create a cityscape in a way that’s as delicate as possible so the musicians are only partially hidden. I felt the windows convey a sense of what might be going on in other lives in other buildings. They create a sense of that without actually using buildings.
‘The Last Five Years’ set
Is there a difference between designing for Broadway and Off-Broadway?
I approach every project as uniquely as I can. I try to figure what is right for a particular show, what will tell the story in the best way possible. It’s true you have greater resources on Broadway.
Model of the 85th Academy Awards stage design
THE 2013 ACADEMY AWARDS
What was the inspiration for the fabulous, glittering set for this year’s Oscars?
The Oscar producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron made the theme the music of the movies. That was explored in a variety of ways throughout the show. In the most abstract way, I was riffing on celebrating that aspect of the movies. I looked at a lot of Busby Berkeley imagery and was taken by the kaleidoscopic repeating patterns in his musical films. Craig and Neil also asked me to design the show so that it would feel like my own work. They said, “We don’t want this to look like any other Oscar show, we want this to be something that you’re excited about.” They specifically cited some of the things that I had done on Broadway as something to riff on. Shows like I Am My Own Wife, 33 Variations, and the revival of How to Succeed[starring Daniel Radcliffe] which had a lot of ordinary objects, but repeated and lit in the right way become quite beautiful. Craig and Neil were two of the producers on How to Succeed, so that’s how I got to know them.
The Oscars incorporated this use of repeated objects. The curved proscenium had about a thousand Oscars on little shelves. Each one had its own lighting and color so that from a distance they looked like a pattern but in close up each was a beautiful individual object. There was also a shelf of about 50 old movie projectors, each with its own up-light. It was this imagery that I played with for the Oscars. The goal was to make all these things look glittery, though they were everyday things like projectors.
Charlize Theron on the completed set of the 85th Academy Awards
Were there any big differences between designing for a big TV production and Broadway?
The network people were slightly terrifying at times. The biggest difference is with the Oscars, you’re not telling a story. Whenever I work on a Broadway play or musical, I start with a script or the text that creates the story. With the Oscars, you’re starting more with themes and ideas than a story.
Did you feel more pressure because millions of people would be watching it?
Yes, I felt a lot of pressure. Sitting at home and critiquing the Oscars is an American sport and I was aware that was going to happen and tried not to let that intimidate me. But that’s part of the thrill and excitement of doing it.
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