The Bells set model by designer Eugene Lee

How do you make a world of snow feel dark? How do you transform the brightness of a blizzardous white-out into the shadowy, forbidding reality which haunts a man’s guilty conscience? These are the kinds of questions the director and scenic designer of The Bells needed to ask themselves when creating the images that would encapsulate their stage design. “We wanted to create a parallel between the inner mind of Mathias and the dismal world he and these other desperate souls inhabit,” says Emily Mann, director.

Theresa Rebeck’s haunting script describes an inn in a forgotten land on the edge of nowhere, a place where the supernatural is as real as the cold. In McCarter Theatre’s production, renowned stage designer Eugene Lee (Last of the Boys, Wicked, Saturday Night Live) embodies this by creating a world of abstract reality. His color palette consists of shades of blacks and whites. The floor of the stage is as wayward in its many slants as the characters who traverse it. His snowy landscape is dark, and Mr. Lee creates an amalgam of the realistic and the representational which evokes a pervasive tone of desolation. Everything is meant to appear dead. The only colors which emerge in this frozen wasteland are those of blood. The inn, where most of the play’s action takes place, is represented as a complete structure at the start of the show, but as the mind of the central character Mathias begins to come apart, so too does the shape of this edifice. Finally, the cold dark wilderness encompassing the inn as well as the lives of the characters literally surrounds everything on the stage. “We are creating a small isolated island in this vast space,” says Christopher Nelson, McCarter Theatre’s Technical Director.

When asked how a team of carpenters and scenic artists approach a play like this, Nelson responds: “We see the designs and we say to ourselves: ‘How do we build it? How do we serve what the designer wants?’ That’s the approach our scene shop takes to create any show, to figure out ways to serve the designer’s vision.” For The Bells, Nelson’s crew of stage technicians conducted a series of tests weeks before rehearsals began. These experiments were about snow-- how to make it look like a blizzard is occurring on the McCarter stage. Nelson continued, “Creating Christmas Carol snow is one thing, but the Yukon blizzard and the darkness of this world is a much bigger challenge.”

The Bells set model by designer Eugene Lee

Interview with Eugene Lee, set designer:

What were some of the challenges you faced when designing a show that lives so narrowly between a physical and psychological reality?
I am not interested in naturalistic theater. This is about good and evil, black and white, hot and cold, life and death.

Do you find that designing a show where the supernatural is so present to be more freeing in ways than more naturalistic productions?
I never think about it this way. At best I prefer designing the way the audience sees the play. Like my production A Number, by Caryl Churchill, where the audience sits in a very raked medical classroom. When I can control that I start thinking about the general environment.

You chose to depict the dark, cold world of The Bells in tones of mostly black and white. What sort of response do you hope to evoke from your audience with the starkness represented?
A lot of colour never comes to mind when I think about this time. Maybe the best record is black and white photos! I always think of those pictures of men dragging their equipment over the high snow covered passes.

Black, endless night; white cold; red blood; gold; what could be better?