Woods: Set Design Review Into

¶ … Woods: Set design review

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim is a fairy-tale play that begins in a light-hearted and charming vein, and then gradually grows more sober and soul-searching in its second act. It is a challenging play for a set designer: he or she must convey this thematic fluidity and also handle the logistical details posed by a story with many different plots, all of which eventually intersect. The University Theatre's production of the musical solves this problem by beginning with a fairly static, picture-frame style design, and then swiftly shifts to a revolving set to allow the characters to interact with one another. In the woods, the characters are free to run, to dance, and to menace, depending on the needs of the story.

The curtain rises on what looks like three houses, all of which stand beside one another in a row, like storybooks on a shelf. The colors are bright, and the impression is one of quaintness, rather than that of the real world. The fact that a false cow beloved by Jack of "Jack and the Beanstalk" sits in the middle of the center house immediately clues the viewer that the production is styled around the visual conventions children's theater. There is even a kindly and somewhat overbearing narrator standing beside the three houses, who narrates the tale. The play opens looking like a kind of Never-Neverland, a fairytale kingdom. The only exception to the visual tone is the intrusion of the witch, who seems to appear from nowhere, and shoots electric sparks from her broom. Later in the play, the witch will appear as a disembodied voice, a manifestation of her great power.

When the characters go upon their quests -- and each has his or her own duty to perform -- they leave their respective houses and go 'into the woods.' The woods is conveyed through a darkened palate of lighting, and, more importantly, a revolving set which takes the different characters into the swirl of darkness. The motion of the set is meant to convey the confusing woods. The woods, the play gradually makes clear, is a metaphor for the internal turmoil all of the characters are experiencing. Jack does not want to sell his beloved Milky White, Cinderella is treated cruelly by her stepmother and stepsisters, and the baker and his wife wish to have a child. Once freed of their storybooks, the characters can easily run around the stage, and occasionally bump into one another. As the baker's wife says, when she accidentally encounters one of the Prince Charmings roaming the fairy kingdom: "I'm in the wrong story!" The characters, at least in the first act, have a sense of their own narratives, but cannot help but blunder into the stories of others because of the unconfined nature of the woods.

The indeterminate nature of the dark and shady woods even seems to make the characters look more similar: lit in the same manner, the stark contrasts between their clothing and appearances seem less defined than when they are in their individual houses. The use of a retractable plateau allows for the creation of new places in the woods, and also makes the woods seem like an ever-shifting place, where identity is continually disturbed and questioned. The impression is as if the viewer shifts suddenly from a community center theater production for children to the darkness of Les Miserables, another famous musical with a moving set.

The woods are not entirely a place of freedom, however. Set designer Aaron Kennedy makes use of multiple layers within the context of the scenery to convey different 'realms.' For example, Rapunzel, the adopted child of the witch, is kept high in a tower, far from the other characters. Until Rapunzel is cast out from the tower, she can only interact with others in a limited fashion, through her singing and letting down her glowing, golden hair. A lighted knothole represents the spirit of Cinderella's mother, who communicates with her daughter from the dead and helps her, until the forest is destroyed in the second act by the fall of a dead giant, represented by a giant foot.

During the second act, the interactions between the characters are even less controlled than those of the first act. The act begins with the three row houses, but these storybook dwellings are destroyed by the shaking of the earth. This symbolizes how the characters no longer interact with one another's stories in a limited way: they must all band together to fight the forces that destroy their community.