Interview: Creating Spaces for Reflection with Carla Orosz
- AL
- Feb 18, 2020
- 15 min read
Reasonable Doubt was a production put on by the Persephone Theatre from January 29th to February 12th, 2020, that explored settler Canadian and Indigenous relations in Saskatchewan, the reaction to death of Colten Boushie, and the Gerald Stanley trial. In 2016 playwright Joel Burnbaum began to gather interviews about race relations in Saskatchewan from people from all walks of life, and during this time period, Boushie was shot and killed at Stanley's farm. After Boushie's untimely death, Burnbaum noted that in the interviews, "people began to speak with a new kind of raw honesty from a heart-space instead of a head-space."¹ The production sold out it's last six shows, and there was talk of the show being reproduced and touring. yxe art caught up with set designer, Carla Orosz, to discuss the process behind the stage design and how it aided in visually storytelling the show's themes.
Photo credit: Olivia Swerhone-Wick
Amanda Leigh: How did the process of the set evolve? Let’s start at the beginning of it all.
Carla Orosz: When I was asked, first, I was super honoured, mainly because I’m not Indigenous, and I made an assumption that that was the team that was going to be working on that show, so I felt honoured that I was brought in to work with Yvette [Nolan, co-creator/director] on it. I read the script, and that took a couple days to get through because the matter is so rich and heavy. Then it took me two weeks until I felt like I could put my hands into the art. As an artist, I always want to tell a story through a visual, I provide something that’s telling a story, and I didn't know... what story to tell. Some shows I know, it’s like: ‘make somebody laugh here’ and I know how to work with that, or a historical piece, where we’re going to go back in time to show you what it was like in 1920.... and in this one, I was like, ‘What’s the story?’ I didn’t even draw anything, I usually work through a sketchbook: I read the script, get an idea, and sketch stuff out. I didn’t do that with this one; I met with Yvette and Joel [Bernbaum, co-creator/interviewer/editor] and the projection designer Teagan for coffee, and then we just had that conversation.
AL: The conversation of..?
CO: Of what’s the story? What are we saying? What can I say? And Yvette and I have worked together twice now, so we have to be careful where we have coffee, because what we’re looking at we start to refer to, and then it becomes a part of what we’re creating. Where we were sitting, I had a good view of Victoria Bridge, and the more we talked about it, I was like, “It’s about the land, we’re really talking about the land,” and we’re talking about Saskatchewan, we need to tell the story about our province, and what’s happening. Then I thought, ok, what represents our land? And worked from that point. And this [trial] didn’t happen in Saskatoon, and so it was about defining are we talking about the Stanley trial, is that what we’re talking about? Or the province? And it came down to: yes, we’re talking about the whole province. Saskatoon is 'City of Bridges', and I’m viewing the bridge while we’re talking about this, so let’s look at bridges. It might not have been visible as an audience member, but it’s [the ramps on stage] the shape of Saskatchewan that becomes the bridge. So when I went into creating it, I researched the size of Saskatchewan, and scaled it down in proportion so this is the actual angle and shape. This is the actual correct angle and length. Would the audience know that? No [laughs]. But I needed to know that to feel like this is Saskatchewan. I wanted it to be clear that there are two things that happened.... there’s two... cultures isn’t the right word, but things are opposing each other. So one bridge has to go this way, and one bridge has to go that way, so it looks like we are colliding, and we think we are one unit and living in this shape of Saskatchewan, but we’re not gelled enough, we’re not working together, which is what this piece is bringing up. We are all living on the same land, but we’re not working together. So once the ramps of Saskatchewan bridges started, and we were happy with that, then the biggest questions became: what about the piano and the drum kit?
AL: And how to incorporate those into the stage?
CO: Yeah, and now I need to create room to make sure those fit on stage.
AL: Was it difficult? Or do you feel like you were able to incorporate it successfully?
CO: Some yes some no. I think the drum kit unit works very well where it is, and the piano does not. I don’t know where you sat when you saw the show—
AL: I was on the opposite side of the piano in the front.
CO: So you were on the best side [laughs].
AL: It still sounded beautiful!
CO: It did! And we talked a lot about what those instruments would look like, because everyone thought a keyboard would fit better into the space, but we talked in our first coffee talk about past, present, and future. I talked about how, I can see it all, how I’m living in the present, I have my generational family history I can bring into it, and I can see the history through their eyes of what Saskatchewan was like, and I have a young teenage daughter who I see the hope for the future, and stands up for all the things that come up in this play, the things she will not let go forward in her lifetime. So let’s put that into the play: the piano, is an old school upright piano, giving us the past, and the drums as part of the modern world and future world.
AL: Even the way the piano and drum kit sits on the stage are like the past and present. The piano is like on a school stage, and the drum kit is incorporated into one the Saskatchewan ramps in a kind of hard, square, edge way, like modern art.
CO: That all works for us in telling of the story, but the visual of it? Which I need to keep working on. The house left doesn’t get a view of the piano. When we incorporated the instruments into the set, Lancelot [Knight, co-creator/composer/sound designer] said, “wow...this looks like a rock show” and I was like, ok good, so it doesn’t just feel like a ‘theatrical stage.’
Photo credit: Olivia Swerhone-Wick
AL: You also worked on Penelopiad, and the design for that— with all the hanging fabric pieces— it was so gentle, but there was also so much constant movement in the pieces from the actors using them as props or the wind they created when running past them catching them. Comparatively, in Reasonable Doubt, nothing was moving in this set, but I found it incredible dynamic from the strong lines of the tipi poles, the ramp lines, even the soft lines of the canvas hide and the bridge ellipses, was that a conscious choice to create such movement from the stationary set pieces, and why?
CO: Yes absolutely, after we had the sharp lines of the ramp bridges, I always felt a need to put the tipi poles in, and then the cloth was the last piece. At first, we had video monitors at first on each pole, and I knew strong lines were really important—and Yvette and I love playing in the space above actors heads, we like that space and we always feel a need to till that—I wanted the projects to happen on video screens, because I thought about the projections more through the eyes of ‘media’, because we’re getting everything off of youtube, videos, screen news avenues of all sorts. But these screens were rectangles on top of all the other shapes and lines that were happening. So then I tried three weird shaped of screens, and that didn’t work. We [Carla and Yvette] often work in elements in three, so there’s three platforms, three poles, and I had three screens. I built the set first digitally on my computer, so at some meeting, I said, “Let me just take off the layer of the screens” and we all said “Ah! That’s better!” but there needs to be something there, I need to project on something.
AL: But the canvas was already there on the poles, wasn’t it?
CO: Not yet. It was just poles. We tend to play with things in the meetings with things that are just randomly there, so Yvette grabbed a Kleenex and was like, “What if we just really create this part of the tipi?” And so that’s what we did, we created a fragment of it. And then, after I built it all, I kind of realized that the tipi was kind of, hugging in the land of Saskatchewan.
AL: When I was watching the actors playing out the scenes, and performing bits of people that we interact with every single day, and performing it on the land ramps...the tipi encased the stories, but also expanded our vision upwards...maybe into the future we can’t see yet, but also to activate our imaginations. I thought that was really interesting, the way everyone was moving inside the area of the poles, and even if they were moving outside of them, they were still sharing in the same space.
CO: There was a lot of discussion about the poles, we couldn’t quite get the background projections to look how we wanted—the production design and I—and I wanted it to be an expansive sky. We talked about our land, and the land of living skies, so we need a big expansive sky. It came down to technical issues, and with what we had, we could only make it spread so far across the screen.
AL: The projection in the very back?
CO: Yeah the background projection, so the sky, the fiery scene, the wheat, and all that. We wanted it to really fill the space, and it couldn’t. So there was discussion about bringing in black fabric legs [side curtains], we can bring those in closer and it’ll make it look like the sky is full, and Yvette and I thought ‘No,’ because all we’re doing then is making the sky look smaller. They marked out for me where they could do it, but the pole was on an extreme angle, from the floor to the top, and then if a black curtain comes in and intersects with the pole, it intersects the line and the space, and doesn’t work because it needed to stay clean and open.
AL: So it was a challenge that never fully got resolved?
CO: Not really, no. Yvette and I have kept saying, ‘This is just the first time that this show is being produced’ and who knows about its future? And it’s hard as an artist, because it can feel like you're taking this experiment and putting it out in front of everyone to see [laughs], but then you get over that.
AL: You have to learn how to accept the limitations of space sometimes.
CO: You do, you absolutely do. And we’ve got it sort of framed out on the back screen to help that look, and then there’s nothing left to do about it.
AL: And I think there are so many people mentioning the open space and sky in the play, during the projection and without it, so even if we don’t have this full immersive sky, people in the audience are still immersed in it from their own emotions of living in this type of space, because this is place based. If this was an audience that wasn’t in a prairie, I think that resolving those specific technical challenges would be more important, because you wouldn’t have the emotional, lived experience of place.
CO: I agree. The audience that’s receiving it understands the space they’re living in, so they would know, but somebody who lives in maybe, a mountainous range of British Columbia…
AL: They’re going to need that context.
CO: Absolutely.
AL: What about the background pieces that were on the floor. I had a bit of a view of them, they looked painted, was it grass?
CO: We call them ground rows, and you tend to put a ground row when it’s an art something, or just a piece of black, something to hide something else, because sometimes the lighting designer will want to put some light behind them, and shoot them up onto the white cloth. What these ground rows represented for us were multiple things; one, was grass, another was wheat of the fields.
AL: Yeah, from where I was sitting they looked a little abstract, and loosely painted. There wasn’t a clear representation of what I was looking at, and that happens often in the landscape in the prairie, all those different types of tall grasses and crops kind of growing beside each other and mingling together.
CO: Yeah, and that was sort of our hope, that it wouldn’t define as one, but it would become all encompassing as parts of the land, so even if you just look at the silhouette of it, we hoped that it would sometimes look like the land you see rolling off in the distance. We also talked about it being a representation of the riverbank, so there were slight elements of blue tone in it, but we didn’t want it to become…
AL: One thing or the other?
CO: Yeah, which is why it had to be very, wishy-washy. And we created two layers of it visually, just to help it look not so flat, to add some depth.
AL: I have a question about the distance on stage: the stage is quite large for the number of actors on it, and the distance between the ensemble is exaggerated by the different levels of the land ramps, so what was important in the design process of grouping the actors or making space between them? There’s six actors, and the stage itself was quite accommodating, but then the height differences play with that space even more. As the set designer, why did you need to make such different levels, but also group people together on the same levels?
CO: That was definitely part of that first coffee shop conversation. Joel’s script alludes to there being different locations, two of which are courtroom and a classroom. And I went, “how am I going to… do you want an actual classroom over here?” and I kind of knew that wasn’t the answer of what they wanted, not a literal classroom with desks [laughs], and then Joel was like, “oh no I didn’t mean like make a classroom, these notes and the locations in the script are notes to know where I was during the interview process.” So that clarification helped me out a lot, because sometimes the playwright tells you exactly what you’re supposed to create.
Maquette by Carla Orosz
AL: So this was more open to interpretation and collaboration?
CO: Yes absolutely. And Yvette was very clear on finding some way to create a height difference; she wanted the court to be elevated so that the judge and jury are looking down, and to show that those on the stand were really being judged, and the option to make the height differences significant in some other scenes too. So I knew right away we were playing with levels. I had to find a way to do that, and the bridges helped a lot in that, but I could have very easily made it not a ramp, it could have been level, but that’s just not dynamic. And sometimes that’s the view of the bridge we get in the city, of it being on that angle. And the grouping of actors...hard to really define in this piece; when I’m designing, I can kind of go ‘oh, this one will be here, and this one maybe here,’ but in this piece I had no idea where she was going to put people other than the judge was going to be above, and I wanted to make sure I left the apron[front of stage] portion large enough that if she wanted all six of them up there they could fit, and all of them on the lowest ramp they would all fit there. I don’t ever figure that out until I start model building, and I have my tiny little people, and put them actually in the space in scale and ask myself, ‘How much space does one person take? When two people are in a conversation, how much space does that take for us to do that?’ So there were multiple sizes of the Saskatchewan bridge ramps to play with.
AL: I think in Saskatchewan—because this is a less densely populated province compared to other provinces—people are used to occupying a lot of space per one body, it's something that's not really apparent until you travel somewhere else and realize...the size of our unspoken personal bubble, the space we take for ourselves. So I noticed that on stage, often there was a lot of space between people, and between groupings of characters, and how it really feels like that day to day here.
CO: Yeah, like you say, until you travel somewhere where there’s a lot more people or density that we don’t deal with here, you don’t have as much of a context of what we’re doing. Another thing that it does when you have a larger space, and a space to fill, and you want it to feel more expansive, you put one person in that, and because of scale and proportion, the space feels bigger. You can kind of play with those aesthetics.
AL: And it’s so playful, because of course the bridges are not as big as the bridges [laughs], but I had heard there were bridges and tipi poles in the show before I attended, and I thought scaling the bridges down so much might make be dwarfed or absurd just because that's often what scaling up or down can create intentionally or not, but it doesn’t feel like that at all, they feel like their own representation, and so appropriately sized for the space while serving their function.
CO: I’m glad to hear that, because there is a process when designing them, questions like, ‘is this the right curve?’ draw it, cut it, and no, it’s not, so maybe I need a different radius, or maybe it’s more of an ellipse; working through those problems to get the arching of it all to feel appropriate. I think also the lighting under them helped to make them look a little more expansive at times.
AL: And I thought they were concrete, but I don’t think they are?
CO: No they aren't, but great, because that’s what we wanted people to think! [laughs]
AL: In the very last moment I saw a bit of a seam, and I was like ‘oohhhhhh.’ The way they were painted on seemed like concrete, but the gradual incline, paired with the ellipses and lighting underneath really made them feel ‘lighter’ as an object, considering the actual objects they represented, and when they paired with the poles going up that gave a breath of air and expansiveness, and the bridges were very grounding, they played off of each other in that way. What were the tipi poles and canvas are made of?
CO: So the canvas is muslin cloth, which is what an artist canvas would be. We sewed together pieces of it, and made this huge rectangle first, put on all of our layers of paint, and attached it to the poles. They gave me a rough idea of where it would land, and then there’s fencing wire on the outside edges and the top so I could actually shape and form it. Then it was a matter of cutting it, turning it over—some of it’s stitched and some of it’s pinned—and the outside I crafted, so it’s all stitched wire. Then there was a brave day [laughs] after the ramp was installed, and the cloth was kind of there, and they were like, “here are the scissors Carla,” and to go up to a large piece of cloth like that, and look at the model, and go, “Ok, lets start!” And I just started cutting it. So I started little by little, and kept cutting away more, because it is terrifying to think, 'if I screw this up, we have to start this all over again, or make a new plan.'
AL: So did you use your intuition? Lots of learned skill, with a little intuition? [laughs]
CO: Yes, all of that [laughs]. And the poles are actually cardboard tubing—sonotube—which are sleeved together to reach 26 feet, and inside of them is a guidewire that’s screwed down to the floor and then attached up on one of the flypipes to have something to stabilize it. Then on the outside of them, we took scraps from the muslin cloth that was cut off, and dipped them in paint and glued them in a way to make the texture of wood; the hard part of this one is that I know I could go in and do more, but just logistically I can’t get to them, they became inaccessible as soon as they were installed. And that’s something we couldn’t know until they were installed, and how they would look with the lights on them. Again it’s experimentation sometimes, and letting it go. And the platforms are all wood, two-by-fours, built like decks. I have to hear the actors, so if I can hear a bunch of creaking and walking, we need to find a different way.
AL: Yeah I definitely thought they were cement at first [laughs].
CO: And we wanted that kind of opposition to happen: the warmth of nature and the land, opposed to the hard, cold, industrial city sometimes. So what is it? I thought a lot of rural vs city, rural vs reserve, how do those things all play together?
AL: Some of the people interviewed in the play aren't thinking about city vs rural, which I think is a big theme of the play too, that we’re often pigeonholing and limiting our thought process into that, and it’s not that simple. Being able to bring those elements together on stage visually aided a lot in thinking through what characters were saying, in the way that hearing all those character monologues play off and challenge each other may help the audience open up new critical or curious space and thought processes. With that being said, is there anything else about the set or the show that you want to let people know?
CO: I mean, as I said when we were talking before you were asking questions, I think it’s important that everybody sees this if the opportunity arises. I think people are...aware of what’s happening, but also think that people are not fully listening and aware. I’ve had people say to me, “I don’t want to go see it, because I don’t want to relive that situation,” so if people could understand it’s not just about the trial. It’s about every… child, all of the characters talking at the end, just pull at my heartstrings being a mother, every kid should be given a chance. We should be rallying around each other, and supporting that. I think it’s important that people see it to raise awareness of all of that.
AL: It’s a space that’s been really intentionally created for people to go feel those feelings, and they shouldn’t have to miss out on these conversation because they feel fear about talking and listening.
CO: And that’s the other topic in there, is fear. All of this lack of communication, it’s coming from fear, and if we can help people feel a little more comfortable to be having those conversations, we can build a much better place to live together.
*Thank you to Carla Orosz and Colin Wolf for your time, kindness, and generosity.
1. Beatty, Gregory. "Difficult Conversations." Planet S Magazine. January 2020.
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