“Cut the trees out and paint them glossy black. It always works.”
That is from the mouth of a lighting designer 400 shows and 30 years into his career. He meant that trees work if they are 2-dimensional. So, in the model, just cut them out of board with an X-acto blade, spray them with black spray paint, put them on a stand and voila!
For the real design you build a ‘flat’ out of something…flat, like a plywood like luan. I bet that Treasure Island design in the big picture above has those big flat trees on tracks with wheels. They can slide them in and out. We have loved a flat piece of scenery for a very long time, this magazine page is from 1924.
I hear that all trees have a sound and a smell, and that even without touching them, we can sense their presence by feeling the way the air moves around them before it hits us. Those perceptions, though mostly subconscious, are all important.
But theater needs to work direct and fast. If you have a play named after a bunch of trees, how can we feel the presence of those trees in the way that the playwright imagined - right away? The easy answer is that all we need to do is choose the right tree and get the shape right. Boom. Tree.
When an experienced lighting designer wants to tell you how to build a set piece, they are really saying - I will be able to light that set in a way that will capture the wonder and beauty of real trees. Because you can do the shape of the tree correct, but really it is what the trees do to the light on the ground, to the shadows on bodies and the way it off-sets a sky - that explain our relationship to trees. Lighting designers are our most valuable experts on trees.
The lighting designer went on to say that 3 dimensional trees always look fake in a bad way. He had never seen a 3 dimensional tree done so well that he could light it from any angle. Instead of working on lighting the actors in a scene, he would be thinking about how to make sure the light doesn’t fall on the tree.
Humans naturally gravitate toward trees. We like to touch the bark, lean on the trunks and stand in their shade. Actors and directors stage scenes assuming the tree will be all the wonderful that a real tree is, so they spend the scene within 2 feet of it. And then, they have to re-stage the scene during technical rehearsals because no one likes how the tree looks when light falls on it; so the actors have to do the unnatural thing of avoiding the tree.
Room full of nodding heads. Big deep, full range of motion nods from every set designer in the room.
That set above has one tree printed on the scrim, and the rest as 3-dimensional set pieces. I have seen this Bohème at the Met. It doesn’t care about looking fake, so long as the overall picture has all of the sparkle of the drawings. I remembered this printed scrim from a particularly beautiful lighting change as the sun is supposed to come up.
With his chorus of set designers, the lighting designer went on to take away that printed trees on a scrim strategy.
“Real depth can only be faked for so long.”
When the lights behind the scrim change, the printed or painted tree will change, too. It is very hard to light something that is both translucent and opaque so that it has the optimal look for both surfaces. Franco Zepherelli’s very fake textures work because there is so much going on. No one surface has to be beautiful in and of itself, because the action, music and people move so quickly no one image has to hold up to more than five seconds of attention.
So, a plain scrim + black cut out trees. A plain white scrim is the equivalent of putting a piece of white paper behind your set. It always works well enough to warrant a try. I chose that tree image above because it is a white paper/white scrim kind of image. So beautiful, and easy to achieve….if you can cut out those trees.
When I design The Cherry Orchard I will print out Cinga Samson Okwe Nkunzana’s portraits. The trees and the people seem to have equal consideration, though the trees are usually just black, in the background and fairly flat - and the faces have a few colors in them, in the foreground and have clear depth. The layers he created allow us to pull out the person, or the sky, or the plant in his hand. His head can blend into that tree behind him - but some side light putting that gold hue we see on his forehead onto his full outline would make him stand out so nicely.
He is the trees and he is himself. Cast this man in The Cherry Orchard.
What if I was so sure that I could build a tree as well as Mr. Knunzana can paint it? I would still do that flat black silhouette of a tree we see on the same plane as the fence. And I would give it a try…and then be happy enough to have them cut the tree when it just plain wasn’t good enough to light up with the same loving light that actor’s faces get.
I think this painting illustrates the light designer’s point as well as all of my words above. Trees are living things with a presence as strong as a human. The tree needs to be as good as its scene partner.