BY LUCIA MAURO
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Stephanie Nelson maintains a strong "environmental" sense of design even within a traditional theatre structure. Her Jeff Award-winning set for The Cut transformed A Red Orchid Theatre into a dank, narrow coal mine so realistic that audience members suffering from claustrophobia could have hyperventilated from the feeling of the walls closing in on them. Yet her scenic vision also was abstracted—mirroring the script’s spiral structure and the characters, who were descending deeper and deeper into an abyss of corruption and disillusion. The idea was inspired by an ant farm she had as a child.
For Seanachai Theatre’s staging of The Marked Tree, she crafted an ominous autumnal glade in which the image of branches became both embracing and deadly. With Thirteenth Tribe’s surreal deconstruction of a washed-up magician’s career, How To Be Sawed in Half, Nelson gave the Athenaeum Theatre’s vaudevillian-style mainstage a distressed and eerie sensation of crumbling dreams.
With Nelson, viewers should not expect a period-perfect set stacked with neatly ordered realism. Instead they will find themselves scaling, in visual terms, the heights of the human psyche.
"I guess I’m not in the business of duplicating life," says Nelson, 32.
Currently the Chicago-based scenic designer is working at Redmoon Theater’s shop with Ann Boyd on the visual concept for the company’s 10th annual "Winter Pageant," running Dec. 7-16 at the Pulaski Park Field House. Nelson and Boyd are co-directing and co-designing Redmoon’s secular celebration of the changing seasons and the coming of winter. This year, they’ve created the figure of Granny Winter who prepares a lavish feast to welcome the sun. Each course represents one of the four seasons. The show involves members of the Logan Square community and is geared toward families.
Nelson, who also designed the lights, is drawn to the Field House’s exquisite plaster work and chandeliers. The enormous space will be anchored by a long banquet table, which reinforces the "Winter Pageant’s" communal-ritual nature.
Nelson and Boyd designed the fire installation for Redmoon’s 1999 "Halloween Pageant," and they will collaborate on Redmoon’s upcoming mainstage production of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The mask and puppetry-based troupe is ideal for Nelson’s imaginative and immersive design aesthetic, which inspires psychological reflection.
She notes that the "Winter Pageant" took on a darker tone after the events of Sept. 11.
"Ann and I were talking about some very light and sweet images that seemed silly after Sept. 11," explains Nelson. "I think our attitudes have become a lot more serious. So there needs to be a greater weight and significance to what you do. [Theatre artists] have to be aware of how the meaning of certain images—like airplanes—has changed."
But long before the terrorist attacks, Nelson’s work has been profound and multi-layered. Her list of intelligent and provocative design credits include: Steppenwolf Theatre’s outreach production of The Water Engine; Redmoon’s Unbinding Isaac; Running With Scissors’ The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon; About Face Theatre’s Raising Voices; Gilead Theatre’s Richard II; A Red Orchid’s The Persecution of Arnold Petch and The Physicists; Powertap’s Missing Angel Juan; and Cook County Theater Department’s Tosca.
She collaborates regularly in Manhattan with Richard Maxwell and his experimental New York City Players, who are bringing their acclaimed production of Boxing 2000 to the Athenaeum Theatre, Jan. 24-27, as part of Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s season. Maxwell, a great influence on Nelson’s design approach, is very process-oriented with special attention to merging various art forms to tell intersecting stories. Boxing 2000 centers on a New York Latino family involved in pugilistic pursuits and romantic complications. Nelson also designed Maxwell’s touring production of Caveman.
She has designed props for Richard Foreman’s Bad Boy Nietzsche and is part of the wearable arts collective, De Corpse.
Nelson, however, did not initially plan to be a scenic designer. Originally from Louisiana, she recalls as a child telling her mom that she wanted to become a visual artist. "My mom said I would starve to death," she shares. At the age of 17, she went to New York City to study at the Parsons School of Design, intent on a career in fashion design. But she was magnetically attracted to fine art.
"At Parsons I took figure drawing classes, which I loved," acknowledges Nelson, "and sewing and pattern classes, which I hated. By the time I graduated, I was painting and sculpting."
Then her mother’s prediction suddenly began to come true. After she received her BFA from Parsons, Nelson moved into a tiny studio apartment in New York City and found the visual arts arena a tough place to earn enough money to pay her rent. She then got in touch with her actor friends—like Hallie Gordon and Amy Landecker—who lived in Chicago. They had started a theatre company called Pillar Studios (now disbanded), which produced shows in a huge Fulton Market-area loft. They invited her to design sets for their productions.
"Set design was the last thing on my mind," Nelson admits. "I could draw, but I never picked up a drill. I had to learn how to draw on a such a large scale, and it turned out to be a total blast."
Nelson moved to Chicago in 1993 and designed Pillar Studios’ production of Angst Giving, which featured a cartoon-like, cardboard-and-paint set. She went on to design other Pillar shows, like Edmond in which the tension of the script was mirrored by a series of strings tied tightly together and interspersed with pieces of metal and wood.
In addition to visual arts, Nelson had done some acting as a child and was intrigued by the theatre. An avid reader, she also thought about pursuing a career as a journalist or novelist.
"Theatre became the culmination of all my interests," she says.
Nelson went on to receive an MFA in design from Central St. Martin’s College of Design in London – balancing her time between hands-on projects and theory.
"I found that I got so much out of the actual designing," she notes, " more than I could get in school. Every production has taught me an incredible amount. And every [theatre] relationship is radically different from the next."
Over the past eight years, Nelson has established creative connections with daring theatres that foster an unconventional and revelatory design aesthetic. She has been hired via positive word-of-mouth and has sought out directors she believes will challenge her. Nelson makes it a point to immerse herself in the whole process; she’s a "performance-oriented designer" who is present at rehearsals.
When asked who or what influences her designs, Nelson is reluctant to give specifics because one of her main goals is to create a new design vocabulary that serves each individual script.
"I avoid other designers or set-design history," she says. "I work as a fine artist first. It’s necessary that there’s a personal connection between you and the script. Sets are very revealing in terms of myself. Every day a new part of myself is revealed.
"I love writing, and I love performance. I love thinking about it. I love space, and I don’t like repeating myself."
Her designs are tailored to each production and do not scream "Stephanie Nelson." But the one constant in her design work is its ability to speak kinetically to audiences.
"I’m really interested in the relationship between the audience and the performer, including the design elements," says Nelson. "That idea has gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older."
She traces that goal back to Pillar Studios’ big industrial space, punctuated by pillars, which required her to be innovative and flexible. The audience, positioned in key places in folding chairs around the room, became naturally integrated into her designs—making design an experience, more than a process.
Another pivotal creative moment in her career was a production of Tosca for the Cook County Theater Department when Richard Maxwell was its artistic director.
"I have a jealousy of the performer in that the actor is very malleable and the performance changes," admits Nelson, "but the set can’t do that. The Cook County Theater Department helped me make the design as malleable as the performers. We would run around and crash sets, treating them like they were part of the action. They had an energy to them.
"My sets interact with the performers, and my sets have physical challenges."
For instance, Missing Angel Juan featured uneven steps, lots of traps and a giant Ferris wheel. The Persecution of Arnold Petch took place in a room so excessively trashed that it looked like a bomb exploded in it.
Nelson, who officially traces her interest in theatre design to Pillar Studios, was unconsciously preparing for her career as a scenic designer when she was eight years old.
"My parents gave me a doll house," she shares, "and I ended up furnishing it with things I made. I remember making a canopy bed from scraps of fabric and using little doilies for rugs. I re-decorated daily."
A keen observer of life and the world around her, Nelson does not get too caught up in theory or offer detailed instructions on proper design technique. Instead she encourages aspiring designers to be at one with their environment.
"My interest right now," she says, "is being able to look more closely at ourselves and our surroundings. It’s never been more necessary."