McNulty Scenic Designs as Built
McNulty Scenic Design Renderings
Aesthetics
Theater is a sort of secular religious practice where communities come together to collectively imagine some shared expression of our humanity- of who we are or who we hope to become. Instead of contrived illusions on recorded media, separate and apart from us, theater exploits the live event of performance, acknowledging its pretense, and providing a structure and language to make-believe with one another. Theater’s medium then is the imaginations of the assembled audience. As co-creators in this shared imagining, the live audience (or polity) makes the theater democratic and communal by its very nature.
Good theater is made of aesthetic forms that remind us that we are pretending while inspiring the feeling of and participation in truth-seeking. This dynamic tension between truth and artifice is the liminal ground from which the imagination is stirred to make meaning out of the disparate elements of our experience. When we are made aware of our ability to make meaning from that which we know to be pretense, we gain an understanding of the humbling nature of humanity—that what we feel isn’t always based in truth, and that what we think we know may be motivated more by desire than veracity. This realization is the catharsis relieving us of the burdens embedded in our desire to exert control over our lives.
All of that civic purpose must be realized aesthetically. This aesthetic realization is the ongoing effort to discover the means by which stories might be told theatrically through overt manifestations of pretense- what is clearly pretending, not an effort to fool us into believing. It requires extensive collaboration, imagination, and practice, but it also requires acute judgement. For example, the compelling theatricality of masks and puppetry convey the epic and mythic, but they are probably a questionable means for interpreting the works of O’Neill or Williams. There is a complementary theatrical form for naturalistic styles of playwrighting, but it demands a subtlety similar to the language of the playwright. Generally, these forms are found in slight exaggerations of the designs and/or the theatrical manipulation of design elements as a metaphoric expression of theme or action. Regardless, I believe that one must strive to uncover with one’s collaborators a uniquely theatrical aesthetic, appropriate to each production. Performances must exceed some idyllic purism of “life-likeness” toward some greater truth that Picasso insisted art had to lie to realize. There must always be a reason that a performance is ephemeral and temporal, a reason that it must be experienced live, communally, in the moment, not recorded in illusive flickers projected on a screen.