From ancient times, when our ancestors sat around the campfire at the end of a hard day of hunting and gathering to share information about where the best berries could be found, or the latest saber-toothed tiger sightings, our propensity to gather in the dark to share, listen and respond to stories has endured. Now, we gather in darkened theatres where the medulla memory of primal fire comes alive within us, and ignites our imagination. We cannot get enough of stories that illuminate the journey of what it means to be human.
Figure 1 ”Twenty-five Years” sung by Karen McBride from production of Quilters. Fullerton Muckenthaler Theatre - 1993
Exploring the technical (set, lighting, props, costumes), story (metaphor as vehicle), and cast (playing a multiple of characters as well as inanimate objects) depicted in the attached photographs, serves to illustrate how these existential elements set the foundation of the ethereal magic that is theatrical storytelling. Its magic relies heavily on the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief as well as the actors’ to evoke an emotional response through revealing relationships. This is especially true in a musical called Quilters and the subject of my exploration.
Book written by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, music and lyrics by Barbara Damashek, Quilters was first workshopped and produced at the Denver Center Theatre Company in Denver, Colorado in 1982. It is about the lives of American pioneer women as told through the metaphor of quilting. Quilts, usually made of leftover fabric scraps, allowed the women who made them to keep their families warm, a basic necessity in the harsh life on the open plains. Although practical in nature, quilts were often transformed into works of art through the creative expression of the quilter, a means tell their own stories. When life gives you scraps, make quilts.
Figure 3, at the end of this paper, depicts the award-winning cast at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, California in 1987. This particular production garnered rave reviews, and the Playhouse brought it back three times within a five-year period. As an ensemble company, we performed various iterations of the musical from a one-hour competition version to a full two-hour professional production. Over a 15-year span, we competed and won national and international awards, toured the southwest US, enjoyed professional runs including the one at Fullerton’s Muckenthaler Theatre in 1993 (figures 1 & 2), all culminating in our company’s final performance in 2003. I give you this brief history because it plays into my analysis of the three photographs. Not only do they encapsulate all of the elements vital to the heart and soul of theatrical magic, they memorialize for me what it means to become a theatre family. The original cast from 1987 has stayed in each other’s lives for over thirty years. Our "Quilter family" was forged on dozens of stages under thousands of hours of hot Fresnels; we are bonded for life. Now, as the matriarch in the play says, “Let’s go to it.”
We begin with the technical elements of set and props. The Greeks utilized a naked acting space as most theatres were bowl-like with the stage at ground level. Seating rose upwards in a half or semi-circle around the stage floor. In Shakespeare’s day, most of his plays were presented on a raised, yet fairly bare platform stage; rarely were sets employed. However, simple archways or columns allowed characters a place to hide or enter from and indicated a separation of space. The imagination of actor and audience working together, along with a handful of carefully curated props, created the world of the play.
Book written by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, music and lyrics by Barbara Damashek, Quilters was first workshopped and produced at the Denver Center Theatre Company in Denver, Colorado in 1982. It is about the lives of American pioneer women as told through the metaphor of quilting. Quilts, usually made of leftover fabric scraps, allowed the women who made them to keep their families warm, a basic necessity in the harsh life on the open plains. Although practical in nature, quilts were often transformed into works of art through the creative expression of the quilter, a means tell their own stories. When life gives you scraps, make quilts.
Figure 3, at the end of this paper, depicts the award-winning cast at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, California in 1987. This particular production garnered rave reviews, and the Playhouse brought it back three times within a five-year period. As an ensemble company, we performed various iterations of the musical from a one-hour competition version to a full two-hour professional production. Over a 15-year span, we competed and won national and international awards, toured the southwest US, enjoyed professional runs including the one at Fullerton’s Muckenthaler Theatre in 1993 (figures 1 & 2), all culminating in our company’s final performance in 2003. I give you this brief history because it plays into my analysis of the three photographs. Not only do they encapsulate all of the elements vital to the heart and soul of theatrical magic, they memorialize for me what it means to become a theatre family. The original cast from 1987 has stayed in each other’s lives for over thirty years. Our "Quilter family" was forged on dozens of stages under thousands of hours of hot Fresnels; we are bonded for life. Now, as the matriarch in the play says, “Let’s go to it.”
We begin with the technical elements of set and props. The Greeks utilized a naked acting space as most theatres were bowl-like with the stage at ground level. Seating rose upwards in a half or semi-circle around the stage floor. In Shakespeare’s day, most of his plays were presented on a raised, yet fairly bare platform stage; rarely were sets employed. However, simple archways or columns allowed characters a place to hide or enter from and indicated a separation of space. The imagination of actor and audience working together, along with a handful of carefully curated props, created the world of the play.
Figure 2 "The Windmill Song" Duet with Kate Steiger and Karen Angela. "Quilters." Fullerton Muckenthaler Theatre - 1993.
It is much the same for Quilters, and illustrated here in Figure 2. The set consists of a raised and raked platform, meaning the floor is higher in the back of the platform than in the front. This allows us to clearly see any action that occurs at floor level and creates a perspective of distance; action taking place in the back seems farther away. The pioneers covered great distances when crossing the plains, and as one of the play’s characters laments, “As far as the eye could see, nothing. It was so lonely.” The set’s raked stage lends itself to that illusion. And notice how the spread-out staging of the women in Figure 1 heightens this feeling of distance between families. The actress up stage left (your right looking at the photo), stands almost in the shadow, creating a subtly exaggerated distance between her and the rest of the group, perhaps relaying sibling order as the eldest. The matriarch sits on a stool just off center, while the two youngest sisters sit nearer their mother on the floor. This staging relates their youthful status (sitting on the floor), and that as the youngest may still need their mother’s attention. The more independent ones clump down right around a basket. The pregnant sister (me) sits on a chair, a sign of respect for her condition. Notice, also, that Sarah, the matriarch, is center of attention as they all look to her. She is speaking, perhaps intent on imparting wisdom, and they listen attentively. This informs us that what she is saying must be important. We also listen attentively. Here, intention and focus create meaning between our characters.
The floor is covered with a large fabric quilt in subtle earth tones. This intuitively informs us just how foundational quilts were to their lives, and suggests earthen floors as were common in sod homes on the prairie. These technical elements might go unnoticed by virtue of their nuanced nature, but this is part of the magic held within stagecraft. There hangs a matching quilt at the back of the stage, serving as a neutral non-competing backdrop to the scene, while masking backstage activity. It aids in keeping us focused on the action before it. Save for a large wooden windmill off stage right and a wooden post off stage left, the set is bare. A small wooden saw horse lives up stage right with a wooden bucket hanging from it. Rustic props of the era remind us that water, even when pumped up from underground by the windmill, still had to be carried by bucket to its final destination. And because the setting is sparse, it allows the actors to create our emotional understanding of the scene through their focus and movement. This become very clear in “The Windmill Song” (figure 2).
Center stage, the three actresses stand neatly in a row heading upstage. They face alternating directions, right and left, and hold their arms out at diagonals as if forming the blades of the windmill. As they sing lilting background vocals, they circle their arms as blades caught in the wind, creating an evocative whirling effect. The large wooden windmill stage right doesn’t employ the standard top blades, the allusion of cross beam is enough.
Figure 2 catches the action mid-song. It is a duet between the two youngest characters of this seven-woman cast: six sisters/daughters, one matriarch – Sarah Bonham. Kate Steiger, playing the youngest, hangs with one foot and one hand so casually, so high up on the windmill, we get the feeling that she’s done this a thousand times and feels at home there. The set, of which the windmill is a part, is the actor’s domain. She must own it and her role so that anything the character would do, she is equally at home doing. Kate looks directly at her duet partner down stage left, and her focus does not waiver especially when she is not actively singing. This same focused attention is provided by the two women sitting on stools down stage right. Their characters are not in this scene, per se, but they are focused and engaged with the action so that we, the audience, know where to look. They are all looking at Karen Angela, down stage left. She is up on her knees, bent slightly backwards in order to look up at Kate who is staged up and right of her. Her mouth is open, and she is singing her verse in the duet. Her character’s posture reveals a momentary reveling in nostalgia for their childhood, for the windmill their father built, and what it meant to the family.
The subtle and natural lighting in this scene envelopes most of the stage (Figure 2), and deftly frames the world of the play from the top of the windmill to just past the edge of the raised platform. However, in Figure 1 “Twenty-five Years”, the lighting subtly creates shadows cast by the actor’s bodies and the quilts hanging on the close line behind them, and captures the feeling of sunset, a time of day when women gathered and rested from their chores. The stage area circled by light is tighter than in “The Windmill Song” photo; it feels cozier, a time for reflection.
The women’s costumes also serve to create the ambiance of the era of pioneer America so that even when an actor plays an inanimate object like a windmill, the audience stays connected with the overall story. (The magic of theatre allows us to remember what it was like to pretend to be an airplane or lion or astronaut as kids.) Costume colors are muted without being too drab. We are able to tell each character apart by the style and color of what she is wearing even though most have on aprons and long skirts. Notice, too, in each photo, the women are all barefoot. This grounds them in the world of the play. The scenes feel more down-to-earth because they are literally touching earth colored fabric with their feet, and it illustrates the perfect combination of reality informing illusion so that we are never jarred out of our suspension of disbelief, thus allowing the magic to continue.
What is theatre to me? The magic of creating something out of nothing, of starting with a bare stage and adding minimal set and props, basic lighting and costumes, and creating a whole world that the audience can immerse themselves into for two hours in a dark theatre. The magic of theatrical storytelling comes not from the things we see on stage as much as what we feel with our heart. Quilters, as depicted in these three photographs, embodies the essential craft, focus and intention of a collaborative ensemble – the very heart and soul of theatrical storytelling at its best.
The floor is covered with a large fabric quilt in subtle earth tones. This intuitively informs us just how foundational quilts were to their lives, and suggests earthen floors as were common in sod homes on the prairie. These technical elements might go unnoticed by virtue of their nuanced nature, but this is part of the magic held within stagecraft. There hangs a matching quilt at the back of the stage, serving as a neutral non-competing backdrop to the scene, while masking backstage activity. It aids in keeping us focused on the action before it. Save for a large wooden windmill off stage right and a wooden post off stage left, the set is bare. A small wooden saw horse lives up stage right with a wooden bucket hanging from it. Rustic props of the era remind us that water, even when pumped up from underground by the windmill, still had to be carried by bucket to its final destination. And because the setting is sparse, it allows the actors to create our emotional understanding of the scene through their focus and movement. This become very clear in “The Windmill Song” (figure 2).
Center stage, the three actresses stand neatly in a row heading upstage. They face alternating directions, right and left, and hold their arms out at diagonals as if forming the blades of the windmill. As they sing lilting background vocals, they circle their arms as blades caught in the wind, creating an evocative whirling effect. The large wooden windmill stage right doesn’t employ the standard top blades, the allusion of cross beam is enough.
Figure 2 catches the action mid-song. It is a duet between the two youngest characters of this seven-woman cast: six sisters/daughters, one matriarch – Sarah Bonham. Kate Steiger, playing the youngest, hangs with one foot and one hand so casually, so high up on the windmill, we get the feeling that she’s done this a thousand times and feels at home there. The set, of which the windmill is a part, is the actor’s domain. She must own it and her role so that anything the character would do, she is equally at home doing. Kate looks directly at her duet partner down stage left, and her focus does not waiver especially when she is not actively singing. This same focused attention is provided by the two women sitting on stools down stage right. Their characters are not in this scene, per se, but they are focused and engaged with the action so that we, the audience, know where to look. They are all looking at Karen Angela, down stage left. She is up on her knees, bent slightly backwards in order to look up at Kate who is staged up and right of her. Her mouth is open, and she is singing her verse in the duet. Her character’s posture reveals a momentary reveling in nostalgia for their childhood, for the windmill their father built, and what it meant to the family.
The subtle and natural lighting in this scene envelopes most of the stage (Figure 2), and deftly frames the world of the play from the top of the windmill to just past the edge of the raised platform. However, in Figure 1 “Twenty-five Years”, the lighting subtly creates shadows cast by the actor’s bodies and the quilts hanging on the close line behind them, and captures the feeling of sunset, a time of day when women gathered and rested from their chores. The stage area circled by light is tighter than in “The Windmill Song” photo; it feels cozier, a time for reflection.
The women’s costumes also serve to create the ambiance of the era of pioneer America so that even when an actor plays an inanimate object like a windmill, the audience stays connected with the overall story. (The magic of theatre allows us to remember what it was like to pretend to be an airplane or lion or astronaut as kids.) Costume colors are muted without being too drab. We are able to tell each character apart by the style and color of what she is wearing even though most have on aprons and long skirts. Notice, too, in each photo, the women are all barefoot. This grounds them in the world of the play. The scenes feel more down-to-earth because they are literally touching earth colored fabric with their feet, and it illustrates the perfect combination of reality informing illusion so that we are never jarred out of our suspension of disbelief, thus allowing the magic to continue.
What is theatre to me? The magic of creating something out of nothing, of starting with a bare stage and adding minimal set and props, basic lighting and costumes, and creating a whole world that the audience can immerse themselves into for two hours in a dark theatre. The magic of theatrical storytelling comes not from the things we see on stage as much as what we feel with our heart. Quilters, as depicted in these three photographs, embodies the essential craft, focus and intention of a collaborative ensemble – the very heart and soul of theatrical storytelling at its best.
Figure 3 Wagon Train to nowhere. Quilters. Laguna Playhouse - 1988
