The hole on Mainstage should be complete by the end of the week
Over the next several days, M.A. Sette Corporation of New Haven will construct an 8-ft. by 8-ft., three foot deep trap beneath Long Wharf Theatre’s Mainstage, expanding the ability of designers and directors to create interesting and innovative stage pictures.
“This surprising and welcome historic alteration to Long Wharf Theatre will give another tool to our brilliant designers to bring more dramatic surprise and delight to our stage,” said Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein.
A trap is a small area beneath the stage, used as a design element or, in some theatres, as another escape for actors. The process of digging a theatrically viable hole in the floor is not a simple one. The existing wooden deck needed to be removed and the 45-year-old concrete then removed. Concrete Coring then removed the dirt and sand beneath the 8-inch layer of concrete. Flooring is then framed and the concrete floor poured. Concrete blocks will be used to create the walls for the trap. Finally, once the hole is created it is then plugged and the wooden deck restored. The process takes about seven working days to complete.
“What we’re all so excited about with this new addition is that it really gets at the heart of what we do here, of our mission, of the work we put on our stages. It contributes to possibility, to potential–it gives us a very potent tool to ignite discovery, to tell a story well,” said Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting.
The impetus for the idea came from set designer Eugene Lee and Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein for the upcoming production of Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver.
The play takes place in a desolate graveyard in South Africa, where a white South African train driver tries to find the unmarked grave of a black woman who was struck by his train. One of the two characters, a gravedigger, spends a good deal of the play digging a hole in the ground.
There are two ways to handle this kind of theatrical trick – the first, and in some ways the easiest, is to build upwards, creating a platform through which the performer can dig. Lee, had the notion that the more the performer digs, the further he would disappear into the floor. “I thought we should investigate the possibility of going below because it is more real,” he said. “The graveyard will be as big as possible. It makes it more sad and shocking.”
Lee, whose sets are known for a meticulous verisimilitude, is excited about the prospect of incorporating it into his design. “It would be something that no one has ever seen here,” Lee said.
