Theater Scene Has Designs on Robert Brill : Stage: His “restless imagination” in creating sets has put him heavily in demand, but the 27-year-old is taking it all in stride.

The hottest young designer in town is a 27-year-old UC San Diego graduate named Robert Brill.

Just how hot is Brill, sometimes affectionately referred to as “Robert Brilliant” by Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre?

You can ask him if you can catch him--not an easy job these days as he shuttles from the Old Globe, where he is designing “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” to the Sixth Avenue Playhouse, where he is designing Sledgehammer Theatre’s “Hamlet.” Both shows open tonight.

Or you might find him at Four Square Productions, where he is designing sets for “Killer Tomatoes Strike Back,” the third installment in the horror-spoof series, set to start shooting in San Diego this week. Or at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, where he is designing “Burn This,” set to open July 14. Or try him in his spare time, when he’s designing graphics and brochures.

His answer Monday morning in a peripatetic interview that moved from the Sixth Avenue Playhouse to the Old Globe was to point to his work: “I don’t know what to say about it. I didn’t plan it, and I don’t pound pavement.

“I hate talking about my work or trying to justify my work,” he said, looking just a wee bit nervous. “I hate being quoted.”

His idea of the ideal article about him would be a spread of pictures, with maybe some captions underneath, he explained.

The pictures in Brill’s case are worth a thousand words. Check out the versatility evident in “Hamlet” and “Lady Day.”

Brill is the resident set and lighting designer at Sledgehammer, and “Hamlet,” like his other work there, challenges the eyes with jarring images and angles. The stage thrusts far forward, shrinking the 200-seat theater to about 110 seats. A platform in the back supports an open coffin, where Hamlet’s father will be visible throughout the play. Wooden beams, from which newspaper clippings and letters--symbols of the past--may be dropped, come slanting down from the left near the front of the stage. A black metal rod that will support banners of the new leader--Claudius--lies in between.

It’s part of the cinematic aesthetic Brill has developed with Sledgehammer’s artistic director, Scott Feldsher, a deep design that allows the director to play with perspectives in a way comparable to the film maker’s close-up and long-distance view.

In contrast, “Lady Day” is an exaltation of reality in its subtlest form. Brill creates the feeling of a seedy Philadelphia bar where Billie Holiday gave one of her last performances. The wood and linoleum, all new, has been treated with five layers of stain to look weathered and beaten. The stage blends into the theater, bringing the audience in--literally. Some members will even find themselves sitting on stage.

True, Brill acknowledges that his first idea for “Lady Day” was to enclose the singer in a glass recording booth and have sound technicians add canned applause and music. But he was encouraged to go a more realistic route, which he describes as “equally valid and interesting.”

“The evening they wanted to provide the audience with was an evening with Billie Holiday. Maybe Sledgehammer Theatre will want to do it the other way someday,” he said, smiling.

O’Brien likes what he calls Brill’s “restless imagination.” It was after seeing Brill’s set for Sledgehammer’s “Woyzek: Blow Out the Sun”--several remarkable movie-set-like scenes built inside the abandoned Carnation Factory downtown, which O’Brien called “visually stunning”--that Brill was offered his first Old Globe assignment: the set for “The Granny.”

What he came up with was an off-center look of shifting floor planes that matched the off-center humor of the black comedy. The set left the actors with sore ankles from walking on the inclines after the first rehearsal, but they got used to it, according to Brill. And O’Brien was pleased.

“I was very determined that Robert do that set,” O’Brien said. “I think we’ve done everything with that Cassius Carter space that you can. But he put some top spin on it and didn’t settle for the obvious. He can do a wide range of things, but with that inevitable and genuine twist that lets you know you’re in the presence of a genuine talent.”

O’Brien is so confident of that talent that he nominated Brill for the prestigious Princess Grace scholarship, given to 10 to 12 young artists a year. It’s the same scholarship that funded “Lady Day” director Will Roberson at the Old Globe back in 1982. The winners will be announced in June.

“I think he is going to emerge as a major, major designer and I want to tie him carefully to home,” O’Brien said.

At this point, Brill doesn’t know just where home is or will be, saying he is open to where the offers come from. Born in Salinas to a Philippine mother and a half-Irish father, he was as quiet as a child as he now is as an adult, he said.

His mother was a cosmetician and his father a hairstylist. They divorced when he was in the fourth grade--a subject he prefers not to talk about--and he spent a lot of time living with grandparents, being introspective and amusing himself first with puppets and then with magic.

Magic, he speculates, is appealing to children because “it allows them to know things that no one else knows.”

Brill met Roberson 10 years ago when both were working for the Western Stage in Salinas. When Roberson heard that Brill was a magician, he encouraged Brill to turn to set design.

“It’s the same thing as being a magician,” Roberson recalls telling him. “You just make it look like something it’s not.”

Today, illusion is still what Brill finds most exciting about theater.

“When we’re achieving an illusion, you’re able to let the audience escape from reality for a moment,” he said. “And if you can escape for a moment, too, then you know you’ve succeeded.”

It took Brill several years to find his way, transferring from a junior college in Salinas to UC San Diego in 1987, where he was influenced by the work of then-faculty member Robert Israel and later by the ideas of classmates Feldsher and Ethan Feerst, with whom he began to work on Sledgehammer Theatre. Feldsher encouraged Brill’s love of illusion and theatricality. At Sledgehammer, Brill created designs that challenged and teased. It is a sensibility that continues in his work today: that odd dash of color--a teal blue in the “Lady Day” set that gave Roberson pause before he fell in love with it; those slightly askew angles of vision in “The Granny,” that clever use of scrims that can make a stage seem to double in size, as in Sledgehammer’s productions of “Quartet” and “Endgame.”

It’s a style that those who work with him still find hard to describe.

“We’re having a delicious time trying to categorize him,” O’Brien said. Roberson echoed the sentiment, saying of Brill’s work: “It defies categorization. It’s never what you expect it to be. It’s slightly perverse.”

But that “perversity” should not be construed as being “outrageous to be outrageous. It is germane to what’s going on,” said Feldsher, who has worked with Brill for five years now.

Brill’s splashy, statement-making sets form a curious contrast with his retiring and shy personality.

Mild-mannered and endlessly adaptable to budgets, Brill didn’t protest when told at the 11th hour that budget and time precluded the stage for “Hamlet” from being extended an additional four feet, as had been planned. He just went quiety back to the drawing board and came up with a new set. But Feldsher said he has also learned that when Brill does get upset, it’s best to listen.

Feldsher was trying to figure out the best way to suggest blood on the back wall of Sledgehammer’s set for “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now.” He thought he had the OK from Brill to paint the wall red. When Brill saw what Feldsher had done, Feldsher recalled, “he really lost it.”

“My girlfriend told me I looked like a dog who got hit in the head with the paper. I apologized, and, in a way that only Robert can, he said, ‘I guess you’re going to come in tomorrow and paint the wall.’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I did. But that night, before we left, he got down on his hands and knees and cleaned the ‘blood’ off the floor.”

What Brill eventually designed was a plastic sheet that would blend seamlessly with the wall and that could be painted and removed after each performance.

“Every project that I do I hope that I’m going to do something new and different, working on a new text or a new approach,” Brill said.

It’s been this fascination with exploring the new and the different that made him stick to his commitment to design Sledgehammer’s “Hamlet”--for which he said he is paid nothing--even while his workload of paying jobs has multiplied elsewhere.

He doesn’t think that is remarkable. He doesn’t even seem to think it’s so remarkable that he is working 20 hours a day, seven days a week on five jobs. The self-effacing fellow is not even so sure it’s going to last.