Playbill: At the beginning of every creative process, all that exists is an empty stage. Using craft, imagination, and theatre magic, theatre designers bring a production to life, transporting an audience to worlds near and far.
It’s a challenging feat for any one production, but for many designers, a life in the theatre involves reinventing the wheel again and again, remaining inspired through a vast career.
12 comments:
I love Mimi Liens work so much. Her designs are such an inspiration to me that I have a picture of her on my vision board. I love the way that her designs incorperate the audience as an intergral part of the show. Her designs always have a lot of movement and plays with the soace in an interesting way. It was neat to hear about her design proccess and I loved when she said: "I try to create an environment that has a kind of tension, or magnetic pull, with the performance material. In order to do so, I harness everything from architecture, popular culture, and our visual environment as well as spatial properties such as volume, material, and sequence.” she considers literaly every aspect of the design space and sees each element as a tool to create a story.
I love Mimi Lien. I saw Great Comet on Broadway when I was in high school, and the set design and the experience overall is what made me want to do big, spectacular, live theatre. Mimi Lien has a background in architecture and installation art, and I think that really shows in her designs. From all the things I’ve learned about scenic design, creating a space that performers and the audience both have a unique relationship with to evoke the appropriate emotional response is the most important part of scenic design. Lien does a marvelous job doing just that, without adding additional fluff to the space – everything on stage has a significance and importance to the overall environment. The immersive and winding shape of Great Comet adds to chaos and high energy that the show has. I loved reading through the descriptions and insights of other sets that Lien has designed. It’s so cool that the set for Stop Hitting Yourself had set dressing that held the same meaning that a core message of the play also delivered. The dressing was just junk spray painted gold to add to the idea that the lavish lifestyle that the characters in the show lived did not actually have any value.
Mimi Lien is a fantastic designer with an excellent body of work. I really admire the way she thinks about theater and the way it affects audiences. They way she describes it as an alchemical product intrigues me. It points to how each production is made up of a unique combination of variables (including the audience), and that finding the right combination is key to a production’s success. She plays with the expectations of design, and the interplay of the audience and the stage in interesting ways. I really like how for Great Comet, the design was immersive and surrounded the audience in the warmth Malloy described in his research trip to Russia. I like how her design recontextualizes and modernizes Octoroon. Each design fits the production and gives the audience what is best for their view experience. This is the artistic pursuit that I appreciate of working in theater.
I love Mimi Lien and Great Comet so much. So much. She's an incredible designer and spreads magic to any project that she touches. I love the way she thinks about theatre as an experience for the audience, because too often I feel like designers will just put sets on stages and not really think about the relation to the set downstage of the plaster line. I love her quote about the interplay between space, movement, and event, and I think that captures and sums up so much of the magic of live performance. It's special to hear that now, knowing how much I miss that feeling in the air of knowing that you are collectively witnessing something so special that will never happen exactly this way again. Watching Great Comet was probably the first time I felt that in a theatre space, and that feeling lingers with me even today.
This article was really amazing. It was so fantastic to see all of the photos of the models and renderings, and then see the sets in action. Although they were all wildly different you can tell that Mimi is always incredibly imaginative and is thinking outside the box set. The photos from Natasha Piere and the Great Comet of 1812 we truly breathtaking. I still don't really know how the set worked! It looked so seamless with the theatre and it must have been such a large undertaking and executed so beautifully. If you have time I would watch the American Theatre Wing’s seminar on the decolonization of american theatre design. She was one of the panelists and was very eloquent on ways that we can promote anti-racism in theatre. I hope playbill keeps making these articles because they are really great and might inspire people to pursue theatre design!
This article was a really interesting read. I have almost no experience in scenic design & how their process works, so I loved seeing the photos, sketches, and models for the different shows. Particularly, The Great Comet set intrigued me with the 360-degree environment Lien designed– combining storytelling with creating a “visceral experience”. Seeing the model set go onto the stage in these photos was amazing as well. I can imagine the experience of designing and constructing this show was unlike most work the production team had done before. I also really appreciated Lien’s comment about her design process; thinking about theater as a civic space isn’t something I had heard of before, and I really like thinking about designing and creating for every single person who could be in the space– audience included. All in all, I would highly recommend this article to everyone, especially if you want to learn something new about scenic design.
I have to agree with Mimi Lien here, Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 had one of my favorite set designs on Broadway as well. For Florida Thespian competitions a few years back, before we all agreed to drop the piece, I was in a group for Production Team where we had to redesign our own version of The Great Comet. One of our main struggles was trying to find a new way to innovate the set, as it was already amazing in its fashion and function. Knowing that it was derived from Dave Malloy’s trip to Russia makes it feel even more accurate in its own way. As for many of the other sets on the list, I had never even heard of the show but going through the album of images was astounding. After seeing a set-less production of The Magic Flute, I never knew how cool it could look. And I did not, and still somewhat do not, know what Octoroon is about but the set pictures intrigue me so much that now I am going to do some research on it.
The first set described in the article that struck me was the set for Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. The full integration of the audience into a set is such a unique experience that I am surprised is not attempted more. I assume this setup means this particular performance must remain grounded in that theater, closing off other opportunities for the show, so that must be why this feat is not attempted more often. Still, I can only imagine how immersive the experience is for the audience, and how much of a challenge Mimi Lien must have faced as the scenic designer. I appreciate her remarks about the importance of an audience, and the sentiment that no matter what seats people sit in, they are still entitled to a full experience. I also noticed her versatility as a designer, going from the literal and extravagant to the simple and abstract with ease, making for a very dynamic portfolio of the examples shown in the article. Someday, I hope to also embody this level of versatility and be able to create widely different designs for different assignments.
I really love how Mimi Lien describes her work and her creative process. It’s like she has the scenic bible and is reading it to us. I’ve never had the words to describe what scenic design really means for a production, but she manages to sum it up perfectly in just a few phrases. It makes so much sense to include the audience as a crucial part of the design, because ultimately they’re the ones perceiving your work! I haven’t seen Great Comet but I was fascinated with the shape of the stage when I saw their Tony performance. It’s a genius way to get the audience curious right off the bat, and is especially immersive when the performers can get impossibly closer to the audience. I really admire how she’s able to put into words what that feeling of watching a theatrical performance is like, because it’s so hard to describe. I think she says it perfectly.
I absolutely love Mimi Lien’s creative process and thinking when it comes to production design. I consider her one of my biggest role models and idols as a Scenic Designer. The article was really fascinating as it broke down her creative process when it comes to set design, a way of thinking that not a lot of designers take part of. During my junior year summer program at Nyu, I had the pleasure of meeting her and talking about one of her designs for the show “the secret life of bees“ at the Atlantic theater company. The design was incredible and although it was on a smaller scale than The Great Comet, she was still able to transform the space and engage the audience through the physical world she provided on stage. What I like most about her approach is how she always keeps the audience in mind when designing. Theater itself is the symbiotic relationship of the performer end of the audience and when designing she always keeps in mind the needs of the audience and their relationship to the setting in front of them. I also had the pleasure of asking her and panel of scenic designers the final question for the American American theater wings decolonization of the theater seminar. It is really nice to know that a BIPOC female Scenic Designer is leading the game and she works to breaking the white colonial barriers that we face in the theatrical world. Mimi Lien Is not only crazily talented, but an extreme success at such a young age especially after winning the MacArthur fellowship in 2013, the only scenic designer to ever receive this accolade. I am really excited to see what other projects she is working on and I cannot wait for the day that I am sitting in front if another set designed by Mimi Lien.
Mimi Liens work is absolutely stunning and I don’t think there’s any other way of describing it for me. You can always tell that here work stems from her love and origins in architecture. I remember going to see The Great Comet on Broadway with my little brother and after the show we were both just taken back by the world in which she and the rest of the design team had created. It always feels as though she hasn’t just created or framed the world of the play but she has pulled the audience in. She and her designs feel to me as though she acts as the gate keeper to the world of the play and as you step in the building she unlocks the door and invites you to explore the story of the play with the characters and audience. I only hope more designers are able to take from her approach and techniques because this such and amazing way to view theatre.
These designs are some of the most beautiful, dynamic sets I have ever seen! First of all, I am so glad this article included so many pictures to accompany it. It really helped to put into perspective just how varied Lien’s work is. You could really never look at two of her sets and decide they came from the same artist. They range from minimalist and almost completely abstract to over the top and extravagant.
I was lucky enough to be able to see the Great Comet in person and it accomplished exactly what Lien said she set out to do. I was immersed and welcomed into the story to a degree I had never been before. I haven't seen any of her other works in person but I have definitely come across them online or in print without even realizing it. Hopefully I will be able to experience more of her work now that I have an increased awareness of it.
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