JUN
28

No Set?  No Sweat!

By Edith Weiss 

Edith Weiss is the author of several published children’s plays, including nine with Pioneer Drama Service, with a tenth coming this fall.  A lot of Edith’s writing time goes into her stand-up comedy routine, which has taken her all over the country and on three overseas military tours.  Besides writing, she also acts and directs in both children’s and adult theatre. 

You’ve got the script.  You’ve got your eager student actors.  What you don’t have is money for a set.  Or maybe just a little...  about the amount you’d have if you commandeered the cast’s lunch money.  Which of course you can’t do, since you value your job!

What you need here is a concept.  Specifically, a concept that costs very few bucks.  In 1971, Peter Brook did A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare in London, and his set was three white walls.  Now, that’s a concept.  As Brook said, “A man walks across an empty stage whilst someone else is watching him, and that is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

Here is a concept to help you create a set for almost nothing:  have the audience draw your backdrop!  Here’s how it worked for me:

When I was part of a children’s theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, known as the “Jack Pudding Players,” we were poor and had too little money to build a set.  We went to a store and bought a 5-foot high roll of brown packing paper.  Before the show started, we gave the kids in the audience crayons and markers and asked them to draw a “dark scary forest” on the first ten feet of the paper.  On the next ten feet, we asked them to draw scenes of happiness and sunshine.  We secured the roll upstage displaying the forest scene when needed.  When the actors left the scary woods, we rolled it out further to display their happy backdrop.  The kids loved it — they were invested in the show immediately, and their artwork was displayed throughout.  We of course would ad-lib how beautiful and frightening the woods were, etc.  They also loved seeing us change the set.  Critics called us “interactive,” “original” and “down to earth.”  You see, people saw a concept, not the lack of money behind it!

From this backdrop, it became quite easy to enhance the set with simple representative props since the audience already clearly identified with the location.  Paper bags painted green and weighted with stones became bushes.  Stepladders, chairs and small tables also can be disguised as various bits of landscape.

Of course, the drawings can be used to depict a meadow, a farm, a city — the possibilities are endless.  If you don’t have the time to involve the audience, is there an art class in your school where the kids could draw the set?  Each child could even make an individual drawing on a piece of construction paper that you can hang from the ceiling, tape to the back wall or even tape to a coat tree that now becomes a “stage tree.”

Likewise, if you need just a brief set change to, say, the woods, bring some kids onstage, holding their drawings of trees, potted plants or whatever and have them become the set.  Just make sure you have a dependable actor or two who could handle directing these kids onstage.

Instead of worrying about your lack of money, have fun with any number of variations on this simple concept and you’ll be...  all set!