Our Performance Guide for A Streetcar Named Desire is now available for download. Here’s an excerpt; this is scenic designer Robert Mark Morgan talking about his process.

I find visual research to be tremendously important in creating a design. I tell my students at UC Berkeley that it’s the fuel that gets you through a process. I like to get started as early as possible on research. For me, images and research are a way to come up with a ‘visual language’ that a director and I can agree upon. One director’s idea of what ‘romantic’ looks like might be different from my own. For that reason, I usually have a lot of preliminary research that spans everything from paintings to photography. Later in the process, research is the well that I go to frequently when the rest of the creative team and crew need answers from me as to a specific look, texture, color, etc. A design can be thought of as a series of many, many decisions and, as the ‘snowball’ of people involved gets larger and larger, the questions get more and more specific…”what type of bedding do you want on the bed?, what type of trunk does Blanche bring in?, etc.”
The research has, for me, the answers within it – you just have to look closely.

…So much of the feeling of ‘Streetcar’ comes from the surroundings…the sound of the French Quarter, the Jazz, the heat, the mysteries of the night. It’s a city unlike any other. My hope is to create a design that captures the feeling and essence of New Orleans – without (in our case) necessarily re-creating New Orleans onstage.

…For this particular production, Jasson set us on a path that I find enormously interesting. He mentioned going for very sexy, very dangerous, and very wet. He wrote the following:
”I have rarely seen a Streetcar where the heat between Blanche and Stanley made everything believable. That’s a top priority for me.” So often this play is done in its traditional form, but I’ve been lucky in recent years to be involved on some interesting updates of the play that make William’s words even more poignant. That’s the beauty of theatre – we can create a ‘world’ onstage that approaches the same work in a somewhat different way. Bold choices make for exciting and interesting theatre.