Welcome to Window Week!
We are doing a slow-motion design process for the 1975 play Checking Out by Allen Swift. The set required for this show is a realistic apartment, and the play serves well as a teaching moment for how to design one of those - but many other great plays that get performed hundreds of times a year require a realistic apartment set. Why choose a play that no one will produce ever again?
Because! this show fails if you don’t get the set correct! The original production got some laughs, but, ultimately, it failed because the set designer (and the playwright) got the set wrong.
So, hundreds of designers attempt this show, just on paper and in models, to see if we can get it right - and the vast majority of us fail the first time, and the second. I cracked the case on my third attempt. The secret to success can be summed up in one word: Windows.
This ground plan is on the last page of the original published script. The current copy does not have it! What we are looking at is a real ground plan/floor plan of the playwright Allen Swift’s apartment transferred to a stage. Those dashed lines at the bottom are where the curtains fall when they are closed, and the solid line at the bottom of the page is the stage.
For folks unaccustomed to these double height apartments it may be hard to understand that the front of the stage is intended to be a room that is at least 16’ high, but the back, where the ‘stairs up’ are is like a second floor. That is one of those open lofted bedrooms. Just a railing and a platform with a bed at the back of the stage.
Places like the apartment the play takes place in were not designed to be the full living quarters. They are a chunk of a larger apartment that has been divided up. So, some walls are very plain - they were added to cut rooms up. We are to assume that the ‘sleeping area’ and back wall of the apartment were added to make this room into a studio apartment; and everything behind what we see belongs to someone else now.
That is the floor plan of one of the full length apartments made into office spaces. It is possible that those apartments were even longer - that they stretched all the way to the back of the building and had a smaller window wall along the back. There are two floor plans above because the room is double height; so those offices and bathrooms on the right are stacked on top of each other.
If you look at the left of the images, along the bottom line it says, ‘standing ledge’ - that would be where the ‘balcony’ and ‘sleeping area’ would be. The original apartments did have that balcony spot, but not a full room up there.
Those windows at the far left of the ground plan are actually full bay windows, that solid wall that forms the top of the apartment actually slices that window, so that 2/3 are in this space, and 1/3 belongs to the neighbor. Those window panes are narrow, but developers in New York City do that all the time. Look at the apartment below. There you can see that her back wall slices into a window - making it half the width of the windows next to it.
That apartment maintains the original intention of the space - to give a lot of natural light to a visual artist. The apartment in Checking Out and this one were built to be marketed to artists who need that kind of space. The developers were counting on artists as a source of income. In Lincoln Center in particular, some of those rooms were dance studios, like the one below that Agnes DeMille used to choreograph Oklahoma!
Bill Cunningham, the photographer, slept on a cot in between file cabinets and stacks of fashion books in the same building when the movie these shots are from was filmed. But he originally had the below studio for his hat business.
You can see that same type of spiral staircase and walkway in the background shots of Editta the photographer’s apartment:
Looking at the photos above, it is hard to imagine that the playwright (and the set designer) would take in a place like that and think the audience should face the apartment and not look right at the windows - but they did! All of us did! Not one got it the first time around. We all looked at that floor plan and said, well the action of the play happens in the apartment, not out the window. So, of course, you would put the audience on the window side and look at the apartment.
Rookie mistake! Wow! Those windows! That light! That view!
Some of that fumble can be attributed to the practicalities of the play - if you take up 50%+ of your wall space with windows you take away a lot of entrance/exit options. It also makes it harder to cross backstage in most spaces.
You do have to look at how folks will get from one side of the stage to another, and how to make secret entrances or strong entrances eventually. The play will certainly suffer if the audience has to wait for several awkward seconds because an actor has to descend several floors, walk through the boiler room, and climb back up the fire escape to exit stage left and enter stage right (true story). Or, someone has to “sneak” onstage…in full view of the performer they are hiding from. etc etc
Very importantly, some moments need a ‘strong’ entrance for a character, and others need a surprising one. Performers do need help making an impact when they enter. Those conversations tend to happen very early in the design process.
….but we never, ever, ever, think about those practicalities when we do the first design pass. The ideas and the images are even more important than those traffic and staging mechanics. Staging and traffic patterns are fluid and malleable. If the world of the play is unclear, if the set design doesn’t ‘get it’, the whole play that follows is in constant war with the immovable physical space it sits in.
So, if we designers don’t think about traffic patterns right away, we are just trying to have the right idea, and maybe make something beautiful, how could we miss those windows?
An experienced designer would kindly flip that ground plan at the back of the script and build a beautiful model with a window wall to convince the playwright of the importance of that design feature. The stuff of the place, like the paintings and the posters and the sleeping loft, do tell us about that charismatic character and ‘a bygone bohemian era’. But, the windows tell us that artists were valued when this building was built.
Brace yourself for shock and horror. Even at Lincoln Center, when those artist tenants move out, those apartments do not become studios…Lincoln Center chops them into florescent lit offices! Ahhh! With cubicles!
The people that work in those spaces are tele-marketers. They are the ones that call you and ask you to re-up your subscription to the Met, or donate to their new renovation campaign. Maybe the era of giving studio space to the actual artists, inside your actual building, as opposed to the money and marketing folks is so foreign an idea to us nowadays - that we don’t even know what those windows symbolize. We can’t imagine what has been lost.
Even experienced, wonderful set designers, working on plays that do not have ground plans printed in the back of the script, make this mistake. Tomorrow we will look at a recent play that had 3 well-financed productions with 3 excellent set designers … that failed 2 out of 3 times! For now, please enjoy Editta’s Lincoln Center apartment from various angles and decide which one you like best.