Director: Summer Session
Scenic Designer: Andrea Corona
Costume Designer: Ayrika Johnson
Lighting Designer: Diana Herrera
Sound Designer: Aerik Harbert
Composer: Nat Houle
Photo Credit: Paul Kennedy
For this production of The Seagull we had both a sound designer and composer; as such I primarily wanted to support the show by presenting the setting (environment, time of day/year) naturalistically, leaving the emotional space open for the composer. With gaps of time separating the acts from one another, each act needed to have its own unique soundscape. Given that I was working with entirely naturalistic sounds, I wanted to explore what I could do to indicate just how much life was happening all around the characters while they stagnated; the world around them moves on, but they do not. I started with a concept that the soundscape would be reactive to character actions; a door to the exterior is opened slightly changing the loudness and clarity of the external environment, tensions rise in the middle of an argument on a summer day and cicadas buzz louder in response. I also planned on crafting a slightly different soundscape for each seating section with similar steady-state content sent to most places, but with spot cues coming from above or around the audience in different areas. Passage and pressure of time will also played a role, with changes to the environment like transitioning from sunset to dusk taking place over the course of an act to once again remind the characters that life continues on while they go nowhere.
All of this required a lot of coverage in front, above, and around the audience in order for me to localize sounds for seating sections and to wrap the audience in a cocoon of sound. Check out my show paperwork here for an idea of how I put the system together!
Act 1 takes place during summer time right at the cusp between afternoon and dusk. During the performance the ambience shifted in real time over a 20-minute period, crossfading different environmental effects to illustrate the passage of time along with changes in lighting. The demo is considerably shortened to emphasize the change.
Act 2 takes place the very next day during the afternoon. Since the ambience would be more static in terms of content, I played with shifting the presence of layers of sound, pushing buzzing cicadas up more when tensions rose, or fading them out to be replaced with wind as things returned to calm.
Act 3 had the fewest environmental sounds of them all, barring the incessant ticking of the grandfather clock marking the passage of time in a literal sense. Once again I tried to play with the ebb and flow of interpersonal conflict, adding pink noise and a pitched shifted version of the clock to the subwoofers to ever so slowly creep into the background and unsettle the audience whenever those moments came up.
Act 4 was in some ways the most active for sound. The ever present rain storm along with entrances and exits of characters allowed for easy environmental shifts, and low, rumbling thunder filled in to emphasize moments of conflict. Having the ever present sound of rain and storm made it all the more noticeable how quiet the room was as I faded all environmental sound out before the final major event of the play. No spoilers!