BD Wong in Herringbone. Photo by Richard Termine.

Installing the set for Herringbone in the Berlind Theatre

Installing the set for Herringbone.

If you saw Herringbone, I’m sure you noticed the concentric turntables that brought the entire set to life, moving pianos, trunks and doors in a seemingly effortless motion around the stage.  It may have looked easy, but I can promise it wasn’t.  Our fantastic production staff put in an enormous amount of hours to make Eugene Lee’s set come to life, so I wanted to share a few photos to show you how they did it.

The Berlind Theatre isn’t build with any turntables (or trapdoors) in it, so anytime we do something like that, we have to raise the stage floor to build the gear into it.  In this case, an entire new floor was built, with two independently operated motorized steel-framed turntables that were controlled from offstage through a rather sophisticated computer system (and a human operator who ran the system).  The motors for the system are the same motors we use to drive the two houses in A Christmas Carol.  In the pictures at right, you can see the turntables as they were first installed in the Berlind Theatre, prior to the plywood flooring being built on top of them.  You’ll notice the Herringbone sign and the door frame, which sits on its own rotating circle platform within the inner turntable.  At center is a plug, which is stationary.

When I took these photos, the production staff was testing out the turntable mechanism.  During the production, each turntable cue was called by the show’s production stage manager (Cheryl Mintz) over headset to the turntable operator, who then executed it.  There was also a warning light that she could turn on remotely to tell him to get ready, and then could turn off when it was time to run the turntable at its programmed speed and to its programmed destination.  To make things fun, the production staff installed the lightbulb for the cue light inside a pink flamingo—so during tech there was a pink flamingo in the audience section that kept lighting up right before any set pieces moved.  It was a bit disconcerting at first, but you got used to it quick!  During performances, the flamingo (and the operator) moved backstage.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under Behind the Scenes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.