"A Memory Playground for Lost Boys": AMP Talks Designing the Set for The Outsiders
Creating a "Kinetic Space that Moves Through Time"
Photo by Matthew Murphy
When the musical adaptation of The Outsiders debuted this spring, it stunned audiences with its heartfelt score, deeply emotional performances and muscular choreography. The rumble in the rain scene alone is one of the most memorable and astonishing moments in modern Broadway history. The show would go on to win four Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Direction, Best Lightning Design, and Best Sound Design.
Equally fascinating is the Tony-nominated set design. While many musicals on Broadway today rely on elaborate sets, sometimes combined with digital effects, AMP Scenography, a design collective featuring for this project the work of Brazilian designer Tatiana Kahvegian, decided on a largely static set whose components—a truck tire, an old car, and a backdrop—could be used in various ways. The car can be an old rust heap that the Greasers fool around in or imagine themselves driving, the sofa which Ponyboy and his brothers and friends sit against in the Curtis living room, or the heart of Ponyboy’s bedroom. The backdrop can be the screen of a drive-in, the exterior wall of someone’s house, the interior wall of a church.
Even as the backdrop defines the parameters of the story, the Greasers’ essential experience as outsiders, AMP and Kahvegian’s set design ends up creating a space in which the characters themselves build their world.
I had the chance to email AMP and Kahvegian about their work on Outsiders and their collective approach.
Thanks so much for agreeing to do this. I’m really intrigued by the idea of a collective design group. How does that work?
Photo by Matthew Murphy
When referring to AMP as a design collective, it highlights our unified approach as a team of multiple designers working together to create the scenography for a stage production. AMP was created by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones with the aim of uplifting emerging and underrepresented designers through equitable collaborations. The Outsiders is AMP’s first design as a collective and Tatiana Kahvegian, a Brazilian designer of Armenian descent, is AMP’s first collaborator. Brett and Christine will collaborate with different featured partners for each AMP project.
Working collectively, like we did, feels like a microcosmos of the collective that is Theater. We believe that our joined voices and efforts surpass the individual contributions of each member. We all were actively involved in every stage of the process from the first conceptual conversations to the opening of the show. As a team, we offered support to each other at various stages, adapting our roles as necessary. Working collectively allows us to immerse ourselves fully in the production and creative process while also accommodating the demands of our personal lives when needed.
Tatiana, how did you get connected to AMP?
I met Christine and Brett at NYU, where I did my master's degree - they were both my teachers. About two years ago, when they joined the production team of The Outsiders, they reached out to me to invite me to co-design the scenography with them as part of their brand new collective, AMP. It has been such a joy to work together. I feel very honored to be the first designer featured by AMP and hope the collective can serve as a model and inspire new ways of working collaboratively in theater.
What excited you as a collective about The Outsiders?
Photo by Matthew Murphy
It felt special to be part of creating the theatrical version of a story that is dear to so many people and that has had such an impact on teenagers all around the world. From very early on in the project, we knew that [director] Danya Taymor and AMP shared the excitement and desire to create a show that felt immediate, dynamic, physical, vulnerable, and poetically real.
Going in, what did you see as the big challenges?
One of our challenges was to make sure that we were creating a space that translated the grittiness and rawness of the story, one that felt connected to the novel and like its own complete world to be experienced live.
Integrating the rain to the set and show was likely the biggest technical challenge.
The Curtis family living room. [Photo by Matthew Murphy]
[The New York Times did a great piece on the rumble in the rain, which includes conversation about the synthetic rubber material AMP used for the floor, which somehow allowed for this elaborately choreographed fight sequence to happen in the rain without becoming dangerous for the actors, and also enabled the gallons of water to drain away.]
What made having a largely static set seem like the right choice?
Photo by Matthew Murphy
We refer to the design as a “memory playground for lost boys”, as all of these combined places—the drive-in, the playground, the park, the home, the church— reside in Ponyboy’s memory. By confining the entirety of the narrative to a single setting comprised of multiple spaces, we affirm that this story is filtered through Ponyboy’s recollections.
We were interested in finding elements that would allow our performers to interact kinetically with the environment. The core structure remains the same, but many elements are manipulated by performers to evoke different locations throughout the show (tires, wooden boards, sheets of fabric).
We use the term “Scenography” to describe more accurately the form or process of scenic design. When considering the physical design of a production we are creating a kinetic space that moves through time, has its own beginning, middle and end, and is deeply entwined with how bodies move through space. We see Scenography as akin to choreography or cinematography. It is the art and practice of designing theatrical space.
I’m fascinated by the backdrop. It serves as so many different things—outside of a house, back wall of a church, movie theater. And other than at the end, it always conveys that sense of the characters being on the outside, even when in fact they’re inside (as in the church).
How did that design idea come about? And how is it that even in moments when the characters are inside something (like the church) they still feel like they're on the outside?
The idea for the back wall begins with evoking the drive-in, one of the rare locations where both the Greasers and the Socs can coexist. There is a famous drive-in movie theater in Tulsa called the Admiral Twin, that was (and still is) a local hangout for teens, and was the inspiration for the Nightly Double Drive-In depicted in the novel.
Once we had established the main elements in the space: the back of the Drive-In structure, the jungle gym, the car as the Curtis boys’ home, the dirt floor of the playground, then we began to consider how the elements could transform over time to take us through the story. The back wall of the space, for us, is a poetic collage of all of these locations, so simple shifts in lighting can be used to conjure these various places, which constantly shift between indoors and outdoors.
At the end with that golden light streaming in, suddenly it feels like the characters are no longer isolated from the world, but at its center. Clearly the golden light is a big part of that. Were things done to the backdrop, as well? It’s an incredible magic trick to have the same set able to function in such opposite ways.
At the beginning of the story, the wall represents the known world of Tulsa. As the show progresses boards are removed, and a church window appears. The wall becomes the manifestation of the church and a delivery system for the fire special effects to illustrate the burning of the church in a visceral, elemental way.
Photo by Matthew Murphy
By the end of the story, Ponyboy has glimpsed the other side, and their ideas about family and friendship, love, and loss have been forever altered. Dally rips a hole in the wall, a physical scar that is motivated by his suffering, leaving behind both this destruction and a glimpse of what's beyond. This suffering that motivates the empty spaces allows us to see the sky behind it, and at the very end, the sky feels like it is wrapping around us in gold.
I adore the car. It definitely conveys the sense of being on the other side of the tracks as part of the outdoor scenes. But then it’s also the heart of Ponyboy’s room, where it creates a more magical feeling. And it's this thing that characters can leap on for action moments or lay on for more intimate ones. There are also moments the Greasers sit in it like it's an actual car, but it has no wheels, which is a perfect metaphor. It’s just incredibly versatile.
How did you come up with that?
Photo by Matthew Murphy
An early draft of the script described cars driving on and off stage like they would in the movie version. That was a daunting prospect and Danya at one point suggested there was a way to do the show with no cars. Yet, it’s hard to imagine NO cars in the show. It became clear early on that cars could be used in lateral rather than literal ways. It was important to us that as key symbols of the status and culture of the Greasers and the Soc’s, they be present onstage.
The cars are actual and metaphorical embodiments of the world of each gang. In the spirit of creating a poetic landscape, letting the run-down Greaser car exist as an anchor for the Curtis home, as well as at the center of the Greaser’s world, allowed us to show the contrast with the Soc car which enters shiny and new from a world on the other side of town that the Greasers don’t have access to.
In your work do you often try to see how a piece can function on so many levels?
Here the car has been turned into Ponyboy’s bed. [Photo by Matthew Murphy]
It is always the most fun to invent all the ways space and objects can transform. The Curtis car was generous in its uses! [Book writer] Adam Rapp pointed out that the car also symbolizes the death of their parents who died when a train hit their car and stalled on the train tracks. They are as stuck in their grief, as the car is stalled in the dirt.
Your design work has a great subtlety. The metaphors are there in the set design, but you don’t hit us over the head with them. It’s more like you’re trying to build an overall experience or feeling in us. Why did that feel important for this show?
Theater is live. Theater is dangerous. We are passionate about creating spaces that engage the audience in imaginatively co-creating the world of the story with the performers. By building key elements like a train or a hospital bed with tires and planks, we acknowledge the theatricality of our shared endeavor to generate live transformative interactions.
We created a set of tools for Taymor and the Kupermans [the choreographers] to use, played with them in the model, and then made sure that these elements were in workshops and rehearsals from the beginning so that they could fully explore their potential. This is a memory play and we experience the story through Ponyboy, through the lens of his feelings. We were more interested in the space conveying and evoking the emotional qualities of the world than the literal facts of the locations.
Thanks so much to AMP and Tatiana Kahvegian, and congratulations again on a tremendous piece of work.
Coming Soon: Pre-Existing Condition! The set designers of Illinoise! And Cats!