Designer Stands Out Behind the Scenes

Don’t ask Richard L. Hay to design another set for Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors,” or “As You Like It,” for that matter.

But “Hamlet”?

“I would do ‘Hamlet’ forever,” said Hay, a smile spreading across his face. “People after all these years have figured there is no definitive answer to it. It’s always a search, an investigation.”

The search for Hamlet and other Shakespearean characters has sustained him for 51 years.

Hay was studying civil engineering and architecture at Stanford University in 1950 when his roommate invited him to spend the summer in Ashland helping out with a little hometown theater company that called itself the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

That first summer, Hay and his roommate, Bill Patton, who went on to become the festival’s executive director, made their living selling Fourth of July fireworks--the festival didn’t pay anything--in a stand Hay designed.

Over the next half-century, during which the festival has grown from a little local amusement to a Tony Award-winning national attraction, Hay has designed sets for 209 festival plays, including 112 by Shakespeare, completing the canon in 1978. He has done 84 plays for other companies.

“The [Shakespeare] plays are so rich and complex, there is so much in them that you never know everything you need to know about them, so they are always a challenge,” Hay said.

He designed all three of the festival’s theaters: the Elizabethan in 1959; the Angus Bowmer, named for the festival’s founder, in 1970; and the Black Swan in 1977. And he is working on a fourth theater now.

“We don’t make a move without Richard being part of it,” said artistic director Libby Appel. Which is quite an accolade for a man whose role is by definition in the background--a role Hay accepts without question.

“The stupidest thing you can do is do something that does not work for the director,” Hay said. “You sink yourself, and you sink the show. Ultimately you put your faith in the director.”

Jerry Turner, former festival artistic director, did a “Hamlet” with Hay more years ago than he cares to remember, as well as many other plays.

“He relies on directors to have pretty good notions of where they want to go,” Turner said of Hay. “Not in terms of the shape of a play, the shape of a design, but in terms of what the play is about.”

The set “has rather an important effect,” Turner added. “It’s the environment that the play takes shape in. If that isn’t quite right, then the set can become the dominant voice in the play.

“But I don’t think there is an easy rule on it. Someone once said to a great designer in the United States that he would like to see [‘Hamlet’] in a vast void. And this designer said, ‘What color is the void?’ It’s that kind of question.”

Six months before a play is to open, Hay prepares for the initial meeting with the director by reading the play a couple times and jotting down a few ideas. But the core design decisions can’t be made until the director expresses a concept.

“The whole process is one of making choices. ‘Is it going to be like this, or is it going to be like this?”’ Hay said.

In “Hamlet,” for example, a key choice is what sort of relationship the prince will have with his mother, which dictates the setting for the “Queen’s Closet Scene.” Will the room have a bed in it--and all the connotations that go with it--or simply a chair? Will it be in the small second-story stage or on the main stage?

When Hay did “Hamlet” with Appel last year, the artistic director wanted Elsinore to look like a prison, filled with creeping decay and intrigue. The design had to fit on the Elizabethan Theatre’s stage, a three-story edifice modeled after theaters of the Shakespearean period that is manipulated, but never obscured.

Art Created Within Limitations

“I had to make choices that closed off spaces and made small tight spaces with the suggestion of gates or fences or prison walls,” Hay recalled. “At the same time, you could kind of see through and see people on the other side, perhaps overhearing down stage.”

Is the Elizabethan Theatre too confining for a designer?

“One really never starts with zero anyplace,” Hay said. “All art is done within some kind of limitations.”

A former automobile showroom, the Black Swan theater has a pole in the middle of the stage that can never be eliminated, only disguised or incorporated into a design. Festival regulars look for the pole the way devotees of cartoonist Al Hirschfeld look for his daughter’s name, Nina, in his drawings.

The Bowmer Theatre offers the most freedom. When Hay designed a production of “King Lear” there, he drew on memories of huge stone monoliths he had seen while hiking in the Sierras. For a production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” Hay created a grittily realistic London slum, a fanciful Mayfair drawing room and a futuristic Art Deco munitions factory.

Though Hay never throws anything out, there is little room to store even old models--the earliest is Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” from 1980.

None of his old sets survive. Like a performance lingering only in memory, they are destroyed at the end of their run, simply because there is no room to store them.

“I used to fret about that,” Hay said. “I used to get nostalgic for a set. But some of these things are around for nine months, so they have a life.

“The advantage of this job as opposed to architecture is when you make a mistake, you know it’s going to go away and not be around 20 years to haunt you.”