Students learn theater design through the power of play

As a mechanical engineering and theater double major, senior Alayo Oloko often finds herself at the western end of MIT's campus in Building W97, where the academic program in theater at MIT is based.

During her time as an actor, designer, and technical crew member in student-driven theater at MIT, Oloko has overseen the chaos of "tech week," where design decisions and rehearsals come together on a pressure-cooker timeline. She calls theater a team sport: "If you mess something up or you drop the ball, it doesn't just impact you. It impacts the entire production and the entire end product," she recounts.

But just like team sports, theater is, at its heart, a kind of play, whether under the limelight, backstage, or in the classroom. "We're always laughing during rehearsals or technical meetings because you're always surrounded by a bunch of other creative people. And you're bouncing ideas off each other as you're all bonded together by a common goal," says Oloko.

Designing for theater

In the theater world, a team of designers, makers, and actors often bring a writer's script to the stage with the help of a director. Traditionally, design responsibilities in theater are taken on by different people - set, sound, lighting, and costume designers form the core of the design team. Just as in a sport, each team member is entrusted with bringing out their best while cooperating with the whole team.

Whether it's a rendition of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" or a more contemporary script, each theater designer has an opportunity to contribute something unique: a design informed by their personal experience. "If you feel it personally, an audience will also feel it personally," says Sara Brown, professional set designer, professor of theater at MIT, and a member of the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Faculty Advisory Council.

Theater designers can invoke their personal experiences to create worlds with "friction," a metaphor for the emotional work of individuals needed to grapple with new ideas presented in an artistic piece. "It is a world that has friction that then the actors have to deal with, or a director has to manage, or an audience has to manage," explains Brown.

This integration of personal experience in design proves critical for a cultural function of theater - to invite an audience to feel represented or empathize with different perspectives, and furthermore, to reflect the intricacies of real life.

However, digging into one's personal experience can be challenging for young designers. As with children roughhousing or building sandcastles, play is an opportunity to experiment in a safe environment and build social and emotional skills, yet it is not effortless.

Play in practice - exploring sound

Although professional theater production is notoriously high-stakes in practice, subject to constraints such as strict timelines and budgets, the classroom setting, by contrast, allows students to set aside real-world concerns and better embrace the imaginative and expressive process of play.

"We call them plays for a reason. It's not only sort of a play on words," says Christian Frederickson, sound designer and technical instructor in music and theater at MIT. "The process of learning it should be fun," he adds.

As a sound designer, Frederickson creates audio cues and music to accompany a live performance, making decisions on where to place these cues in time, and when it's better to let silence speak.

"Sound design for theater is not creating or not trying to duplicate reality. It's looking for ways to help the storytelling in - at least for me - the most direct and elegant way possible, and in our contemporary world there's a lot of noise. If we try to duplicate that in the theater, we get a mess. So it's about refining and looking for the most direct way to tell a story or help the audience have an emotional experience," he says.

The first lesson in Frederickson's class involves getting to know one's personal style. In his courses 21T.223 (Sound Design) and 21T.232 (Producing Podcasts), Frederickson introduces students to the fields through a "game" he calls Everything is an Instrument. "The reason I call it a 'game' is that I think it's fun, and I think my students think it's fun because there are no particular rules," he says.

In the game, Frederickson and his students take a short recording of a "mundane everyday object" such as a metal water bottle or sheet of paper. After demonstrating the capabilities of Adobe Audition (a digital audio workstation), he lets students loose to manipulate the audio sample and begin finding their own styles.

"If there are 20 students in the class, we get 20 completely different results from the same sample material," Frederickson says. "I can tell this student makes these really sparse, interesting, textural pieces, and then this person is always trying to turn their sample into something from musical theater."

Trained as a musician, Frederickson considers his sound designs to have a musical quality, though he may be composing with the sound of helicopters and explosions instead of instruments. By playing the game, students tap into their personal interests and experience to inform their sound designs, influencing the play.

Responding and resonating with design

"[Theater design] is not just asking you to fit yourself to a task. It's actually asking you to bring yourself to that task," says Sara Brown. This, to Brown, sets theater design apart from other design philosophies. To unlock one's personal experience, Brown asks designers to consider "first and foremost, how do you intersect with the material physically, personally?"

Like in Frederickson's game Everything is an Instrument, Brown introduces her classes to theater design by way of playing with mundane materials. During one of the first in-class exercises for class 21T.220 (Set Design), students in small teams rummage through bins full of scrap paper, fabric, and matboard, prompted by an evocative word to guide their vision and hands.

Set designers work from scripts and references to develop a plan for the overall set - everything from the type of flooring to adding walls and platforms. One traditional method of communicating a set design is to create a physical model. Working with a scale model of W97's black box theater space, students place their scrap materials into the model; evaluating their designs, these begin to take shape. Brown elaborates: "we start to see that when you make design decisions, you're making design decisions in response to a reality."

The unpretentious choice of materials and use of a prompt inspire set design students like rising seniors Verose Agbing and Alayo Oloko to make design choices without hesitation, thwarting the dreaded "blank-page anxiety" caused by overthinking.

For Oloko, this "quick-and-dirty prototyping" is essential to see if something works. "If it does, that's great. If it doesn't, OK, it didn't take too much time," she says.

But Brown's mention of "reality" is not to be confused with "real life." In fact, Brown encourages students to shed any notions of real-life constraints. Also involved with student theater outside of the classroom, Oloko prompts: "imagine what you could do if you could go crazy and then figure out which parts of that work within it … In your initial design, if you're limiting yourself by budget, you might overconstrain yourself without even realizing it."

"My catchphrase in the class became 'this is not OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] certified' because … in the beginning, I was definitely stuck on that notion of being able to stick with real life," says Agbing. Inspired by modern and experimental theater sets, Agbing recounts gradually letting go of these preconceptions, finding software an even more rewarding and flexible platform for theater design projects.

Set design students learn Vectorworks, an architecture modeling program, in conjunction with Twinmotion, a 3D visualization program, in a modern approach to theater design. "With the software, I was able to create this beautiful blend of … contrasting lighting and being able to manipulate that intensity was really important," observes Agbing.

How play connects us

While MIT Theater takes this playful approach to design, it doesn't mean its objectives are only fun and games. "I don't think that the stakes are lower in theater by any means," says Frederickson. As an educator, he sees theater at MIT as a safe setting for students to "explore individual expression" and "develop design skills that you didn't know that you needed or were going to use."

As theater aims not to replicate reality, it is a chance to "play pretend" for both designers and audiences to consider difficult ideas at a distance. The immersion into a fictionalized world is an opportunity for audiences to feel represented, entertain new ideas, and cultivate empathy. For theater designers, the process of designing a performance allows for the exploration of multifaceted personal experiences which may be challenging or complex.

Echoing Frederickson's sentiment, technical instructor and video designer Josh Higgason - who offers courses in Lighting Design (21T.221) and Interactive Design and Projection for Live Performance (21T.320) - finds that with his students, "there's a lot of learning of how to have empathy, how to have connection, how to foster connection, and how to talk about difficult things when we first start."

By the end of the term, equipped with the tools to thoughtfully express "big ideas and big emotions," theater designers and audiences become members of a larger community more able to handle friction and bridge differences. Higgason reflects: "One of [theater's] many purposes is to try and tell stories of people and individuals. But it also gets to stand in for these bigger, universal stories or these bigger, universal experiences."

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