Backstage Visionaries

Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words is selling Maggie Calomiris and Graye Smith way short.

Together they comprise the graphics department of South Coast Repertory. It is their job to take the many thousands of words in a play and colorfully translate them into a single picture.

Working in a shared upstairs cubicle at the Costa Mesa theater, Calomiris and Smith design artful, computer-generated logos that are used in newspaper ads and on 20,000 postcards sent out before each production to entice prospective ticket buyers.

The object is to intrigue at a glance. Attract the eye, and the customer may follow--first to the brief accompanying text describing the play, and then, South Coast managers hope, to the box office.

The graphics-design duo has been working on play logos since 1996, when South Coast’s leaders decided to stop using outside illustrators for their advertising and bring the work in-house.

Their most recent credits are Smith’s board-game concept for the current Mainstage play, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and Calomiris’ gaudy cartoon of Satan trying to ensnare a barefoot fiddler--the logo for the upcoming Second Stage production, “Tom Walker.”

They start with the script. Smith, an art-school graduate, likes to steam through a play in one sitting before beginning to sketch his ideas. Calomiris, who started her theater career as a costume designer, likes to jot notes in the script margin as she reads along. She has been the graphics coordinator at South Coast since 1987. But only after Smith arrived in 1996--his first job after earning a fine arts degree in painting from Cal Poly Pomona--did her duties expand to creating logos that try to embody the mood, sensibility and theme of a play.

“We don’t want to give away too much about the play, but we want to give enough to create interest,” said Smith, who deliberately left out the most astonishing feature of “Kimberly Akimbo”--the fact that its central character is a 16-year-old with a rare disease that ages her rapidly, making her look and feel like a 70-year-old. That, Smith said, would have been too literal-minded. Instead, he homed in on a scene in which Kimberly’s beyond-dysfunctional family sits down to play the board game, “Trouble.” The logo Smith devised envisions each character as a piece on a game board.

Like mounting the play, creating a logo for it is a collaborative process. The graphics experts come up with an idea, then run it by David Emmes, South Coast’s producing artistic director. That begins a process of tweaking, discussion and sometimes instructions to go back to the drawing board. Coming up with a finished design can take a hair-pulling month, or an inspired 15 minutes--Smith’s all-time instant “slam dunk,” achieved with his colorful stick-figure logo for last year’s production of “Art.”

One of Calomiris’ biggest brain teasers was the current Second Stage play, “The Lonesome West.” The show is an odd combination of humor and horror, in which two funny but incredibly small-minded, battling brothers in rural Ireland fight each other to the point of fratricide.

Calomiris hit upon the idea of an arm-wrestling match to illustrate the conflict, but finding a way to get at the humor was the trick. In the end, she levitated images of the play’s two other characters--a priest and a young girl--and used bright, splashy colors to illuminate the show’s lighter side.

The two artists generate ideas through comradely competition. Each typically tries to fashion a sketch, then sees which one Emmes prefers. Then the artist who had the initial idea will follow it through to completion--although there have been instances when the finished logos were a combination of ideas from both.

“It’s better if you have more minds working on it,” said Calomiris. “You get inspiration. You see something [the other did] and it triggers an idea.”

Sometimes, Smith said, he will glance at Calomiris’ computer screen, be impressed by what she has done with a given play, and move on to another project, thinking, ‘You’ve got it nailed.’ ” Besides the logos, the two work on the graphics for such things as brochures and invitations to fund-raising events.

The most visible part of their jobs, the show logos, are mailed to thousands, seen on posters outside the theater box office and splashed across South Coast’s newspaper advertising. But this, the artists say, is one job in the theater that garners no applause. The two can’t recall ever having gotten a compliment--or, for that matter, feedback--from a theatergoer. The opinions that really count are those of Emmes, artistic director Martin Benson and artistic associate Mark Rucker.

“If they say it’s good, it’s good enough for us,” Smith said.

There have been high points, though. Playwright Richard Greenberg dropped by and told Smith how much he liked the logo for “Everett Beekin,” Greenberg’s unusually structured play set first in 1940s New York City and then in 1990s Orange County.

Smith said the collaborative spirit was at play in that one: South Coast’s dramaturge Jerry Patch suggested painter David Hockney’s visions of Southern California as a model for the contemporary half. To suggest 1940s-era New York City, the artists used a storefront with a sign in the window advertising two-cent egg creams, an idea proposed by Madeline Porter, assistant director of public relations and advertising.

“I’ve never been to New York, so I had to quiz people,” said Smith, who grew up in Wyoming before moving to Bakersfield for high school.

John Olive offered in-person kudos for Calomiris’ graphic for “The Summer Moon,” Olive’s sweetly poetic play about the first Japanese auto salesman dispatched to sell cars in America. Calomiris used the Internet--a frequent source of images for both artists--to research the look of the 1950s Datsun pickup truck that figures prominently in the play.

Emmes said there are some naysayers--”occasionally” a director or playwright will complain that a logo doesn’t capture his or her creative vision. “Sometimes there are differences of opinion. We don’t tell the playwright how to write his play, and presumably the playwright doesn’t tell us how to market the play.

“We just think it’s important that there’s a visual metaphor for what the play might hold in store” for the audience, Emmes said.

Smith and Calomiris said their discipline as logo makers has its own superstars--they have Web sites bookmarked so they can follow the work of their peers, including illustrators such as James McMullen, who does logos for Lincoln Center, and Jody Hewgill of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

“You see what the masters are doing and you learn from them, see how they develop ideas,” said Smith.

“I steal from everybody,” confessed Calomiris.

The South Coast logo creators try to avoid repeating themselves. When they have to come up with an image for oft-produced chestnuts such as “Of Mice and Men” or “True West,” they strive for something a little different than others have done.

Calomiris said one of her favorite designs--one that came easily--was the reel of film spooling out of a toaster for “True West,” another brotherly combat play. In Sam Shepard’s script, siblings vie to write a screenplay--and one of them steals dozens of toasters and makes mounds of toast.

Smith recently broke new ground with his logo for “Much Ado About Nothing.” He had the luxury of knowing in advance from director Rucker that a key to the production would be the casting of “Scarlet Pimpernel” star Douglas Sills as Benedick and South Coast regular Nike Doukas as Beatrice, the sparring leads in Shakespeare’s comedy.

So, for the first time, working from a photo of the two stars taken by Rucker, Smith did a portrait logo. He also captured with Art-Deco touches the glamorous splash of old-time Hollywood glitz the director aimed to bring to the show.

There was just one hitch: To meet advertising and mailing deadlines, the logo--as with most of their logos--had to be finished at least seven weeks before the play opened. Smith drew a cleanshaven Sills--who turned up sporting a mustache for his turn as Benedick.

“I have no say in that,” Smith said with a shrug.

Smith yearned to know what the actors thought about his portraiture. But even an artist bold enough to try to define a Shakespearean classic with a few strokes of his computer mouse can decide that discretion is the better part of valor.

“I wanted to talk to Doug and Nike,” Smith said, “but I could never quite get up the courage.”