Seminar Makes the Grade

The "brutally hilarious" Seminar has critics and audiences alike raving about this “bitingly funny” show.

Schuyler Scott Mastain as Douglas and Ray Dooley as Leonard

Indy Week: 4 1/2 Stars
"brilliant" “masterful”
“conveys razor-sharp lessons in a compelling master class”

The News & Observer:
“Ray Dooley in one of his most impressive roles … [shows] masterful artistry”
“highly satisfying”

The Five Points Star:
“lively entertainment”
“the ensemble sizzled”

Triangle Arts & Entertainment:
“an ideal show for a college campus”

Schuyler Scott Mastain as Douglas, Carey Cox as Kate, Ray Dooley as Leonard, Allison Altman as Izzy, and Myles Bullock as Martin

And audiences agree ...
"fun - lots of verbal fireworks"
"reminded me of my graduate school days"
“amazing actors …. such a talented company in our midst!”

Don't miss Seminar with a stellar cast led by Ray Dooley - onstage through November 1st.

Click here or call the Box Office at 919-962-7529 for tickets.

Ray Dooley: Finding and Becoming Leonard in Seminar

Ray Dooley as Leonard

In Seminar, Ray Dooley plays the ruthless and frank character of Leonard, a writer/editor who conducts private seminars with young writers looking for both expert criticism and connections to the field of publishing. "Leonard's brain moves so quickly that one sentence can last the better part of a minute. His mind is continually turning over new images and thoughts, and new thoughts are pushing the previous thought out of the way as he strives to make his point the most effective way he can," says Ray, describing how Leonard's grammar is connective and that learning it requires intuitive leaps, one of the largest challenges of playing the role.

With a cast of five, the play "adheres to the unities of time, space and action" more closely than some other productions. The scenes lead to a final showdown, which creates a tighter and smaller canvas. Leonard is moving on a straight line towards an climactic encounter, which is easier to get one's mind around, "but just as a sonata or a quartet, it's not necessarily easier to play." Ray says that although it's different, it's more focused, and in some ways more demanding.

Through a series of metaphorical exercises led by director Michael Dove, Ray was able to uncover the underpinnings of each scene and the skeleton beneath the surface which provided structure to the action.

"Near the end of the play, I have a long speech where I am including one of the young writers in a pointed and emphatic critique of his life, my life and the writing profession. Myles [Bullock], the actor playing the young writer, in order to 'protect' himself, started building a wall around me with chairs. It became that he was putting me in a prison so that I couldn’t get to him with my critique and attack. At the end of the speech, what happens in the play is that my character leaves his character in a very exposed and bleak position. As I got near the end of that speech, I walked around, took him by the hand, walked him into the prison he had created, and as I finished the speech, I close the door on him. We had a visual metaphor of what my character had, in essence, done to his character, leaving him locked in a prison of his own creation. It was a beautiful visualization of that moment."

The four actors playing the writing students in PlayMakers' production are actually Ray's students in UNC's Professional Actor Training Program. "There's always extra pressure when you are working without a net with your own students." He describes the pressure to practice what he preaches, as they can see whether or not he's applying the things taught in the studio. "It's also a great joy when I see these early career professionals doing so well," says Ray.

When creating the wardrobe for Leonard, Ray and Jade Bettin, costume designer for Seminar, drew closely from real life models. "There's an actor in New York I admire greatly, who has some similarities to Leonard." To some degree, they based the wardrobe on that real life person's clothing choices, found in professional and candid photos. "When an actor is building belief in a character, it's a great help to know that these are looks that actually work in real life." The duo also considered where Leonard had just come from and where he is going. In doing that, Ray is able to build a backstory for the earlier portion of the day, which may or may not have gone well.

In terms of set, scenic designer Robin Vest has built a sunken living room downstage, close to the audience, where the first two seminar sessions take place. This allows for a more personal, intimate setting, whereas if the play were upstage, "we would have to try to open it out to the audience, almost as if we were playing in a proscenium house, and probably not able to play quite so intimately." Ray says that playing downstage allows the cast to "paint with fine brushes" rather than having to be sure the audience can hear and see them, allowing the cast more flexibility.

Ray feels it has been a rare privilege to be a part of PlayMakers for so long. Being at PlayMakers is the job Ray says he trained for in the 1970s at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. "Among the greatest joys are my colleagues." Ray describes the role of Leonard as a parting gift from former Producing Artistic Director Joseph Haj and calls working with director Michael Dove "a joy." "It's an extraordinary company of people, and in many ways, a family. We have become the fabric of each other's lives and it shows in the work on stage."

"I certainly get inspiration from the audience here; the audience and I have a 26-year relationship now-and that’s a great privilege. I try to live up to that every time I step on stage and try to live up to the responsibility and the implicit promise every time." 

- Ray Dooley

Seminar takes the stage October 14th through November 1st.

Click here or call our Box Office at 919-962-7529 for tickets.

A New Look at an Iconic Musical: Robin Vest’s Scenic Design for Guys & Dolls

Scenic designer Robin Vest returns to PlayMakers to create the set for Guys & Dolls. She’s an SYC veteran, having designed last summer’s colorful take on 1960s Baltimore for Hairspray. Her other designs for PlayMakers include the sets for A Raisin in the Sun/Clybourne Park and Shipwrecked! An Entertainment.

Robin says “The most exciting thing about designing this Guys & Dolls is that director Jeff Meanza chose to set it in the 1930s, when the original stories on which the show is based were written. This really gave me an opportunity to re-invent the Paul Green Theatre and forget my preconceived notions of a bright graphic 1940s-50s set (the period the musical debuted on Broadway).

“I started by looking at photos of Times Square in the 1930s and Bernice Abbott's book Changing New York, a collection of photos of all the neighborhoods of Manhattan, taken in the late 1930s for the WPA (FDR’s Works Project Administration).

“New York was a bustling place in the 1930s, but the spectacle of Times Square looks seedier. There's less neon with more signs made of light bulbs. I was also taken with the fact that there were American flags hanging from the lampposts up and down the streets surrounding Times Square. The Great Depression was a very patriotic time. We were choosing not to enter the war brewing in Europe and put our energies on healing the country.

“I needed a sort of glue to hold all these ideas together in the theatre space and that became the image of “the subway.” I started with the wall upstage housing the band being modeled after details of a subway car. Then, when I was looking for inspiration for the floor the 1939 subway map followed.

“We set out to make a collage effect that reflects the story, the time, and the energy of 1930s Broadway. When we go to specific locations in the play, such as The Hot Box Club or Havana, we light up signs or add small pieces, we don't do big changes.

“Anything can happen in New York. At any moment you can be anyone or find yourself somewhere new.”

Join us to experience our new look at Guys & Dolls - onstage July 15-25.

Click here for tickets or more information or call our Box Office at 919.962.7529.

Batik Part 1

I'm designing costumes for PlayMakers Repertory Company's upcoming production of Donald Margulies' Shipwrecked! An Entertainment. This play affords a huge range of design challenges, not just within specific departments but collaboratively among all the elements of production.

One project we've already begun work on is the generation of some batik fabric yardage for the characters of Yamba, Gunda and Bobo, a family of aborigines who are shipwrecked on the same island as the play's protagonist, Louis de Rougemont. These characters will be wearing lengths of fabric as wrapped/tied costume items (Yamba with a sarong-style wrap and her old father, Gunda, with a shawl-style wrap), which they later remove to create sails for a ship they build onstage.

So, the look of these fabrics is extremely important, not only to myself as the costume designer, but also to the set designer (Robin Vest), who'll be incorporating them as "ship sails", and obviously to the director, Tom Quaintance, who'll be seeing them and using them in multiple contexts.

I began the process by researching what indigenous Australian aborigine fabrics look like. If you Google "aboriginal fabrics," you'll get a good idea what the common graphical theme is - pattern creation using dots! Very pointillist, yet abstract. I discovered that a company called M&S Textiles issues a line of cotton fabrics with aboriginal art prints, and this online vendor has .jpgs of the whole line. I then found a local fabric store, Thimble Pleasures, which carried the M&S line, so i dropped by to check out the scale of the prints.

It was immediately clear that the scale was far too small for theatre--the dots in the commercially-available prints are around 1/8" to 1/4" in diameter--onstage, those would blend together in the eye of the audience, and create a very different visual than the scale I had initially envisioned, with the dots being more like the size of an adult fingerprint. I realized that we were likely going to need to create this fabric ourselves. Still, I shared the links of the M&S thumbnails with the production team so we could talk about pattern and color with concrete visuals. This is the print to which we all felt most drawn.

So, my next step was to investigate the possibilities for digitally-printed fabric. I consulted some colleagues at the NC State College of Textiles as to the current leaders in print-on-demand fabric. The cool thing about the companies utilizing this technology is that you can create a print design and choose from a whole range of fabrics on which it might be printed--everything from canvas to charmeuse, and a whole range of fibers. (One of our graduate students is having some charmeuse custom printed for her historical reproduction thesis project, which I can't wait to see the results of!)

I knew I needed a cotton with a fairly soft hand. I looked at some custom digitally printed samples from KarmaKraft, First2Print and Spoonflower, and decided to give Spoonflower's cotton lawn a shot.

Spoonflower does their printing locally, right up the road in Mebane, NC, and they got me their sample fabrics quicker than any other company I contacted. This is not at all a criticism of the speed or competency of the other companies--it's simply an example of how speed is often the primary factor in theatrical production. The fast turnaround of orders and processes is why Spoonflower became the option I chose. KarmaKraft is based in Raleigh and also quite close, but they conduct a lot of their printing in China and were out of their sample swatch sets when I inquired.  However, they did send them and have a lot of great options, so it's likely that, should we need digitally printed fabrics for some future production, they will remain a good contender.

I then created two print designs using Photoshop:

• Yamba One, in which the pattern is made from crisp-edged "polkadot" style dots
• Yamba Two, in which the dots have more brushy, irregular edges

I suspected though, that there would be issues with these digitally-printed fabrics that would make them less than optimal for our stage purposes--namely, the "flatness" of the printed colors under stage lights, the opacity of the fabric (so, the front and back would be starkly different when the fabrics are "flown" onstage as flags and sails), and the gridlike regularity that tiling of a print design would create. As I was working on the digital designs, I realized that if we had the ability to spend more time on the creation of the art and the money to utilize a printing service that would afford a larger repeat for the design, perhaps digital printing would still be a great option. In this case though, I decided to see whether my crafts artisan, second year graduate student Samantha Coles Greaves, could generate a couple batik samples as well. I bought two types of fabric for potential in-house batiking at the local JoAnn Fabrics: a bolt of Egyptian cotton and a bolt of dyer's muslin. (I figured, even if we didn't use either of them at all on this show, those are great stock fabrics to have around a costume shop for mockups and other uses.) Samantha then created two samples of batik inspired by our chosen aboriginal print.




Samantha used a compass to create a guide for the large circle elements. The research image above right influenced her pattern generation.
    In batik, you layer wax application with dye application to create patterns. This is the sample on muslin, stretched in an embroidery frame. I'll write a lot more about the technical steps in the batik process in Part Two.
    Here's the Egyptian cotton sample, stretched on a small stretcher frame.
You can see in the images of the two samples the different dot shapes created by different applicators--Samantha made dots in a variety of ways, using a round sponge, a wine cork, a dauber, her gloved fingertip and a round-tipped bristle brush. I felt that the brush gave the best result in terms of yielding a dot pattern that was both organic and controlled. The sponge and cork were too uniform, and the fingertip and dauber were too messy. At this point in the process, I was convinced that the Egyptian cotton was going to be my choice--the colors looked great on it. Meanwhile, the swatches of Spoonflower fabric I ordered arrived in the mail! Samantha removed the wax and washed the samples, and it was time to compare...
  Wow, look at those four different fabrics! Let's break it down, what's what.   They're all so different-looking! One in particular though was clearly the one for Shipwrecked...   Here I am with the finished yardage!

I'll be writing a second part to this process in a day or two, documenting exactly how we went from a tiny 9" x 17" sample of batik, to the huge three-yard chunk you see in the above photo. For now though, I hope you've enjoyed reading about the first part of this journey, literally halfway around the textile world and back again!

–Rachel E. Pollock, Costume Designer