The Sets of Venice... Or Italy, Anyway.

Merchant, Part Deux

I've already given the background on my Artistic Direction in the Shakespeare Players' 2007 production of "The Merchant of Venice," in the entry about costuming, so I won't bore you with all that again.

When it came time for sets, we realized that the scenes were almost evenly split between scenes in the street in town, scenes at the heiress' estate, and scenes to be done in front of the curtain. We decided to make 3 large wall units, two of which were reversible, to accommodate both the city streets and the palatial home of Venice's most eligible bachelorette. For the city side of the walls, the director's mother and brothers did a half-beam stucco faux finish, and for Portia's house, the director and her brother did a marble faux finish. These finishes were ideal, as they were indefinitely reuse-able for the consistently budget-strapped Shakespeare Players.

There were two hinged wall units, so they were easy to rearrange. We did three basic layouts with the stucco sides: as the external corners of two building protruding from offstage on both sides, in a stairstep configuration along one side to imply two buildings butting up against one another, and with the front sides aligned, leaving a gap for a removable lintel to show the front door at the titular merchant's house.

The third wall unit was a flat 12 foot unit, in the marble finish, with an arched door in the middle. Whenever the marble side was visible, the walls were arranged in the same layout, with the door in the middle and the hinged units at the outside. The resulting "back wall" was 28 feet long and filled up the vast majority of our stage's width. The size and symmetry helped establish the grandiosity we were aiming for with Portia's house. The furniture within was swapped out between two arrangements to show different rooms within Portia's home- one was the room where she met suitors and presented them with a challenge to see if they would be a worthy mate. The other was an inner, more intimate chamber, and was much less formal.

I also painted six "tapestries" for the show. For the formal receiving room at Portia's house, we placed a set depicting male and female peafowl flanking the main door. This emphasized the obvious theme for that room: finding the right mate. For the less formal space in Portia's house, I painted the other four "tapestries" with pairs of birds: falcons, doves, storks, and pheasants, each of which carried symbolic importance in Shakespeare's day.

The final component of the set for "Merchant" was a backdrop. Rather than paint a specifically "Venice" scene, the director's father, various cast members, and I painted a more generic, more broadly useful, Italian mountainside town. We painted mountainous peninsulas coming in from both sides of the drop, to imply one of the many many Mediterranean inlets. We used bold turquoisey blues for the water and sky, various golds, greens and browns for the land, with gold, terra cotta, and ivory in the town . If you remember from the entry about the costuming of "Merchant," we used a similarly dichotomous color scheme there as well, putting the Jewish characters in turquoise, and the Italian characters in warm earth tones.

Perhaps one of the best known portions of the play is the test with which Portia presents her suitors. She shows them three "caskets," one of gold, one of silver, and one of lead. These boxes are referred to frequently throughout the show, and are important symbols for the whole production. During the last dress rehearsal, it came to light that the props master wasn't having any luck rounding up the boxes, or the articles they were to contain. I quickly became glad that I was done with sets and was down to a couple of accessories for the costumes. I spent that evening and the bulk of the next afternoon after work scouring town for suitable boxes and articles. Luckily, I found them, and if the paint was still drying when the curtain opened, the audience sure never knew.

Please note that the photos in this entry are from rehearsals and do not show completed sets or costumes.

Photography in this entry by James Ratchford.