"We pierce the darkness. We tell stories to each other. We don’t want those stories to be forgotten."

With provocative precision, Wendall K. Harrington summarized her role as a projection designer after accepting her Michael Merritt Award for Excellence in Design and Collaboration, sponsored by Columbia College, at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in May. A pioneer in her field, the New York-based designer has developed a textured visual language that quietly illuminates the writer’s vision.

Harrington received the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and American Theatre Wing Awards for her projections for The Who’s Tommy. Other poignant work on Broadway includes Ragtime, Freak, Capeman, Having Our Say, The Heidi Chronicles and My One and Only. She has traveled around the world, designing projections for Julie Taymor’s The Magic Flute in Florence, Italy, along with Orpheoed Euridice in Vienna and the Royal National Theatre’s London staging of Amy’s View.

When A View from the Bridge premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago this past fall, Harrington’s richly suggestive black-and-white projections of Italian immigrants and Brooklyn shipyards transported me to a complex world of the mind and soul. Frank Galati directed William Bolcom’s operatic version of Arthur Miller’s tragic play. While the dissonant score and stilted lyrics left me unfulfilled, Harrington’s lush yet spare visuals carried me to another dimension where fragments of my own humanity were revealed.

In his presentation speech to Harrington at the Merritt Awards, Galati praised his collaborator for achieving artistry by "persistent reduction." He cited Gertrude Stein’s notion of hearing a bell ring whenever she encountered a genius. Galati recalled, "When I met Wendall K. Harrington, I heard what sounded more like a car alarm."

Minimalist and bold, this gifted projection designer emits a stream of pungent paradoxes throughout our interview.

"I’m opinionated and I scream a lot," Harrington says, "but I’m very much a backstage girl. I find myself making the images less bright; I’m constantly subtracting. I want to leave a gentle touch."

It’s the day after she received her design honors, and Harrington insists on grabbing some breakfast then returning to the Hyatt at Printers Row, where she unceremoniously plops down cross-legged on the floor in the lobby and shares her candid insights into her craft, the travails of working on Broadway and the future of the American theatre. A native of Queens, N.Y., she speaks with an edgy accent offset by an inner quietude.

"What I know about the technology, you can fit in a thimble," says Harrington. "The thinking is so much more important. What’s crucial is that I want people to work. Any kind of over-exposition in theatre makes me crazy. I have to touch the collective unconscious. I just want to jiggle that place in someone’s head.

"I love language. I care about the way syllables run up against each other. I love the idea that, visually, you can make music with ideas. Projected images are ephemeral. They live in another dimension and dance in a way that’s like poetry."

Thus begins our odyssey into those fascinating intangibles that shape a designer’s vision. We scrap the technicalities and talk about how Harrington hones visuals into luminous verse.

Staunchly committed to the writer’s purpose, Harrington states, "If every picture is worth a thousand words, you begin in the voice of the author. Who the fuck are you to put your own words in there?"

She continues, "I’m driven by my love of language and music. That’s where I live. It’s never about me. It’s about the words. The point is never you."

Harrington relishes the collaborative process, which gives her a context to bounce around ideas, try different things and learn something new. Known in the industry for her assertive demeanor, she does not apologize for her chronic probing.

"You have to question authority," says Harrington. "You have to question everything a director says–not to be annoying–but because everyone involved needs to learn from the process. I like to try different approaches because you can’t fully understand projection design unless you see it.

"I’m not afraid to be wrong. I learn something from it. I mean, come on. Theatre is not open-heart surgery. The fighting that’s not about ego is healthy. It has to do with having a standard and sticking to it. All self-knowledge is good. Conflict is good as long as it goes somewhere."

Productive debate, therefore, is at the root of successful collaboration. This belief ties in with Harrington’s life philosophy and some of the problems plaguing the Great White Way.

"I really want to shake people up!" she exclaims. "I really want people to think for themselves. Right now, the American culture has a stake in us not thinking.

"When it come to Broadway, I believe Disney is merely a symptom of what is a larger issue–the idea of doing things as easily as possible," says Harrington. "Producers brag about how they bring in school groups to experience theatre. But they do nothing to keep the ticket prices down. So to make theatre worthwhile, people want guaranteed entertainment. In the realm of guaranteed theatre, you’re doomed."

During a pre-awards panel discussion, Harrington called Broadway "a hell hole." As far as the future of the Broadway stage, the designer thinks we should just accept it for the "amusement park" it has become and no longer define it as theatre. Her hope is that individuals will be "upset about something enough" to do street theatre again.

Interestingly, projections may be regarded as multimedia special effects for audiences raised on television. But Harrington’s visuals are more closely linked to deep-thinking art. In Steppenwolf’s production of Don DeLillo’s media-themed Valparaiso, Harrington’s repetitive projections of a character peddling an exercise bike or a canary hopping from perch to perch suggested an unbearable claustrophobia not readily apparent in the script.

This brings us to another point. Why use projections? If they are merely about illustration or about decorating extraneous scenes, Harrington isn’t interested. Her visuals must add new layers of meaning to a production without overriding the playwright’s intentions. During the panel discussion, she said that directors have to convince her that a show needs projections.

"The layering of textual images," Harrington says, "will either illuminate or confuse. Directors have to understand the complexity. Projections must be part of the language, and they must exist in a reality that has rhythm in it.

"Take Don DeLillo. I’m drawn to the way he uses words. Doing tech for Valparaiso involved a lot of improvisation. That was like playing bebop to me. I was attracted to the sprung rhythm of the language. Now I don’t think you can live in a projected environment with Eugene O’Neill or with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. But I would consider projections for The Tempest because it takes place in the mind."

Harrington says her most exhilarating project was Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, a contorted play about spies, at Lincoln Center. The opening scene is set in a swimming pool. Besides molding projections of the water, Harrington projected a diver jumping straight down along the wall into the pool. "It was absurd and completely truthful," she remarks. "People knew they could laugh. It added this crackling Stoppardian rhythm to the piece."

The image, which paralleled the lead character’s ultimate emotional nosedive, illustrated her idea of a unique yet complementary visual language.

Harrington admits she got into theatre by accident. Originally thinking about majoring in writing and art history, she dropped out of Hunter College to pursue a career as a filmmaker. One of her first jobs was as a biller-typist in a production house in New York. There she learned how to cut film by "hanging out with the guys." She adds, "I watched and listened and tried it."

She then landed a job at an ad agency and was assigned to compile a slide presentation for an industrial show. Harrington turned to industry professionals who taught her how to use computers for projections.

"I became completely fascinated by the process," the designer recalls. "Any jerk can make someone walk across a screen in 24 frames. What intrigued me was to do that in three frames so that the audience fills in the continuity."

Her work in advertising unexpectedly put her in touch with theatre artists. In 1979, she designed projections for They’re Playing Our Song on Broadway and a new career was born. She even took a job creating industrials for Esquire magazine with the provision that she get five weeks off a year to work on Broadway.

Despite being involved with countless big-name shows, Harrington makes it clear to producers and directors that her family comes first. She does not work in the summer in order to spend time with her two children. This rule forced her to turn down an offer to design projections for The Lion King. But the priority-conscious artist has no regrets.

"It was what I had to do," says Harrington. "When I work, I work flat out. I’ll do 17 productions in one season. I need to spend summers with my kids. I can’t have it any other way."

Harrington likens a projection designer to an art director and a symphonic conductor. She is neither a photographer nor a painter. But she draws on a vast wealth of research.

"I’m like the picture-book junkie," she laughs. "I’m constantly tearing out pictures and filing them away. I’ll collect odd things like cartoons or movie clips. For A View from the Bridge, I looked at [the film] On the Waterfront. You end up with these touchstones of images. Then you cut away everything that’s not the Pietà."

When Harrington designed projections for American Ballet Theatre’s Othello, she watched many rehearsals and found herself "riffing off on the texture of the movement." For the dramatic storm-at-sea opening of the second act, she persuaded one of the production guys to take off his shirt so she could scan its unusual compass design and incorporate it into the visuals.

Her experience in opera with teams of international designers has led Harrington to conclude that this once elitist genre is opening up many possibilities for invention. She believes opera is becoming "groovy theatre."

Ultimately, she responds to the emotional groundwork of a production–not what it will look like, but what it will feel like.

"A real interactive theatrical experience," she contends, "is to stump me, to make me feel the joy of figuring things out."

Right now Harrington is entering "a meditative phase" and taking a much-needed break.

"I have made the world safe for projection," Harrington said. "I know I have changed the way people see and think. At this point, I only want to do things that inspire me. I feel like I need to be quiet to hear the muse sing. And I know there is something new for me to invent."

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