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| Photo: Chris Bennion, courtesy of SCT |
Set designer Carey Wong has turned Seattle Children
Theatre's stage into the amazing world of the Borrowers. Fans of the
beloved series by Mary Norton know that Borrowers are very small people
who live under the floorboards and furnish their homes with items
"borrowed" from the "human beans" in the house.
This production adapts the first two books in the series, The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield, taking the tiny Clock family from their cozy home under the floorboards and into larger world.
The Borrowers opens Friday, Oct. 1, (with a public preview Thursday) and runs through Oct. 31 at SCT.
Wong recently discussed how he and SCT's technical crew created the Borrowers' world.
SCT is very good at creating illusions of smallness: like last year's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. How did you create the Borrower's world and make it feel real?
We decided early on that Borrowers are about 6" tall under the floor boards, so everything in their home was based on that scale. Of course, practically all of the furnishings and objects that the audience sees in their home had to be built from scratch because of this scale. In this production, their hearth, for example, is made from dominoes, while their dining table is made from a tall chess piece with the lid of a jar atop it. Their dinner plates are coins or Blue Willow"china from a doll's house. When they are forced outdoors, the Clock family encounters plants, insects, a bird and an animal that are all scaled accordingly as well.
What is the hardest thing to make look right for your audience?
Creating a fully realized world for this play that doesn't betray to the audience the challenges it posed to the artistic and technical teams.
Much of the early action swirls around Pod and Arrietty's encounters with "The Boy" -- do we see him and how big does he look in comparison to the Clocks?
Yes, we do see the Boy. When the Borrowers emerge above boards and encounter human beings, we decided to increase their size to make them more visible and expressive to the audience. The Boy still seems very large in comparison to Arrietty and Pod.
Which was harder to create: the home under the floorboards, the dollhouse, or their later journeys outside?
Both the home under the floorboards and the journey "afield" were a challenge. There is so much action that occurs in the home under the floorboards that it had to become a self-contained world to accommodate a number of stage tricks and effects. Once the Clocks begin their journey outside, they encounter a series of environments, creatures, and situations that required lots of creative problem solving among all of the artistic staff.
Did the illustrations of Beth and Joe Krush for the original books influence the design of the set or costumes?
Yes, I always try to keep in mind a book's original illustrations as the starting point to design a set at SCT, so the original Krush illustrations influenced the design of the set to a certain extent. Readers are familiar with these images, and so I wanted the sets to evoke many of the details found in these illustrations. However, for the sake of the play's action or the aesthetics or logistics of the Seattle Children's Theatre's production, I chose to follow my own inspiration when necessary.
This production adapts the first two books in the series, The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield, taking the tiny Clock family from their cozy home under the floorboards and into larger world.
The Borrowers opens Friday, Oct. 1, (with a public preview Thursday) and runs through Oct. 31 at SCT.
Wong recently discussed how he and SCT's technical crew created the Borrowers' world.
SCT is very good at creating illusions of smallness: like last year's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. How did you create the Borrower's world and make it feel real?
We decided early on that Borrowers are about 6" tall under the floor boards, so everything in their home was based on that scale. Of course, practically all of the furnishings and objects that the audience sees in their home had to be built from scratch because of this scale. In this production, their hearth, for example, is made from dominoes, while their dining table is made from a tall chess piece with the lid of a jar atop it. Their dinner plates are coins or Blue Willow"china from a doll's house. When they are forced outdoors, the Clock family encounters plants, insects, a bird and an animal that are all scaled accordingly as well.
What is the hardest thing to make look right for your audience?
Creating a fully realized world for this play that doesn't betray to the audience the challenges it posed to the artistic and technical teams.
Much of the early action swirls around Pod and Arrietty's encounters with "The Boy" -- do we see him and how big does he look in comparison to the Clocks?
Yes, we do see the Boy. When the Borrowers emerge above boards and encounter human beings, we decided to increase their size to make them more visible and expressive to the audience. The Boy still seems very large in comparison to Arrietty and Pod.
Which was harder to create: the home under the floorboards, the dollhouse, or their later journeys outside?
Both the home under the floorboards and the journey "afield" were a challenge. There is so much action that occurs in the home under the floorboards that it had to become a self-contained world to accommodate a number of stage tricks and effects. Once the Clocks begin their journey outside, they encounter a series of environments, creatures, and situations that required lots of creative problem solving among all of the artistic staff.
Did the illustrations of Beth and Joe Krush for the original books influence the design of the set or costumes?
Yes, I always try to keep in mind a book's original illustrations as the starting point to design a set at SCT, so the original Krush illustrations influenced the design of the set to a certain extent. Readers are familiar with these images, and so I wanted the sets to evoke many of the details found in these illustrations. However, for the sake of the play's action or the aesthetics or logistics of the Seattle Children's Theatre's production, I chose to follow my own inspiration when necessary.