Texas Shakespeare Festival

Van Cliburn Auditorium

June 28 – July 27, 2019

Directed by:  Leda Hoffman

Scenic Designer:  Jason Jamerson

Costume Designer:  Angelina Herin

Lighting Designer:  Alice Trent

 

Many are familiar with the movie version of Born Yesterday, and that familiarity makes the play a popular choice.  The story is timely and remains relevant.  A self-made junk seller is in a posh Washington D.C. hotel to negotiate a deal with a senator for legislation that will favor his business.  He brings Billie, his poorly-educated girlfriend.  Seeking to fix her rough edges and get some smarts into her, he hires Paul Verrall to educate her.  She takes to the learning quite well, and ends up turning against her sugar daddy and getting the better of him.

 

There is an honest reality to this play, and it was my design goal to maintain it.  My discussions with the director indicated that we had shared goals with respect to this.  We wouldn’t need vast soundscapes or extraneous additions.

 

My research started with figuring out the practical sources we would need, like the door buzzer and phone bell.  From a technical side, we needed to have ways for them to be operated from remote locations, including the stage managers booth at the back of the auditorium.  More important, however, was for me to determine available devices that would sound appropriate for that time period.  We were provided with a lovely phone that would fit within the world of this upscale hotel room, but we had to do some work with the ringer to make sure it was correct for the time period.  The same was true of the door buzzer, it would need to be something that they would use in that time period.  The buzzer was trickier to sort out, but we were able to take an available buzzer unit and adjust it to fit what would be correct for the time period.

 

Music of the time period would frame the preshow and intermission stretches.  A segment of music that Billie plays on the phonograph is prescriptive from the text, and it needed to shift gradually as the dialogue went on.  It needed to sound true to the device that would produce the sound, highlight the change of songs when they occurred, but also fade out of the way of the dialogue.  This was a very fun sequence to build.  In addition, we needed to work timing on a transition between act 2 and 3, which involved an on-stage cleanup with action from all the actors.  I found a great piece of period music that fit the transition nicely, and we spent time adjusting it so that it would end naturally just as the transition concluded.