Editor: How do you work together?
Bartlett Sher: In some ways we are both historians, but I also think we share an important understanding of the relationship of space to text or music. I am always trying to figure out how the space operates the play. For The Light in the Piazza, Michael came up with a brilliant design-very fluid and expressive and transformative-that opened up the text. The relationship between the language (or the music) and the space is probably the central muscle of a really innovative interpretation. Anyone who saw Piazza will tell you how beautiful it was-their experience of the beauty of the music was connected to their physical relationship with its universe.

In the case of Awake and Sing! it was a little different, since the space was built on a specific historical context. We worked from the original design, by Boris Aronson, and our production was done at the Bel-asco, the theater where it was originally done. But Michael and I wanted to use the space to help us shift the play out of a naturalistic context into a poetic context. The interesting design accomplishment of Awake and Sing! was that by the end all the walls had flown away. We were down to just doors and a back wall. The minimal set meant that you were hearing the language in a different way.
ED: When was that moment when someone said, "What if the walls flew away?"
BS: We were sitting over there in that greenroom, and we said, "I love it, but it's all going to go away like that. We're going to make it leave." And then we talked about how to do it.
ED: How did you design The Light in the Piazza, which was performed in several different theaters?
BS: It was in Seattle, although that was a different production that I didn't direct, and then it was in Chicago, where we experimented with the version that came to Lincoln Center. When we got here, the Beaumont taught us something new about how the text was going to be expressed. When we did the play in Chicago, it was very symmetrical. It was like a box. And that was a response to the space of the Goodman Theatre, which is a traditional, straightforward, and very large proscenium. So, when it came to the Beaumont's thrust stage, we suddenly had to deal with a completely different space.
ED: I imagine that most people would say, "Do you start with a period, or with a physical place?" What you've been saying so far is that the space is more philosophical.
BS: Right. It's poetic space. It's also a little bit like a site-specific installation. You have to evaluate the nature of the space you're in.
ED: Where did you start with South Pacific?
BS: We've been working on it for almost a year. We were working on another show with Cathy Zuber, the costume designer, and the three of us would grab a little corner and just talk about who the people were, and the kind of space the Beaumont is, and one idea evolved out of another. South Pacific is one of those rare musicals that were written immediately following actual events. It was written in 1949, as a response to the war. It's almost like a national memory, an expression of survival, and for this reason it is a profoundly resonant show. So there are certain gestures that have to be made-to Rodgers & Hammerstein, to James Michener, and to this island way of life-this Bali Ha'i-ness, as we call it.
ED: How do you do this?
BS: We figured out a way for the audience to encounter Michener and Rodgers & Hammer-stein before the curtain's even gone up. Then, what Michael's done beautifully is basically reveal the set piece by piece. Like an island under occupation. You have to start with the pure nature of the island. So we start with a very raw and open space. Then an airplane comes in, and with it the war. The Americans land and take over. Michael Yeargan: But your big breakthrough was when we sat down and you said, "I have this image of this beautiful, empty space with a mound of sand at the back and there's one palm tree. And suddenly, when we reveal that, we hear all the guys singing, "Bloody Mary is the girl I love." In the distance is this native woman pushing a funny Mother Courage-like cart over the hill; she is being pursued and sort of taunted by the Seabees. We also discovered this series of blinds. If you look at something like the façade of de Becque's house by itself, it's sort of banal, but filtered through these native blinds there's a fantastic effect that evokes the island's purity and tranquillity.
BS: The blinds are layered so it gives you a little bit of distance.
MY: And the only time you ever see all the layers is when you go to Bali Ha'i and you're living this dreamlike state of being that is Bali Ha'i.
ED: Aren't musicals traditionally done on proscenium stages rather than thrusts?
MY: Yes, it's been a very big challenge to find ways that the set will open up and overlap in interesting ways. Instead of Lieutenant Cable disappearing and chang-ing into a new costume and going to Bali Ha'i, he stays in the middle of the stage and it changes around him, so that he's suddenly in Bali Ha'i.
BS: The other complicated part is the second act. There is this long radio scene, and you go into this almost collage-like structure where everything is suddenly overlapping. Many people cut or tighten it, but we're actually interested in how weird it is. We call the first act the romance act and the second the war act. The space needs to support that transition, so you have the juxtaposition of the boys, who came over the hill chasing Bloody Mary at the beginning of the show, now going back over the hill in full combat gear on their way back into the war to fight.
ED: Just as you did with Awake and Sing!, in South Pacific you're reviving something from a different time. How do you honor the original yet make it reflect the current time?
MY: The show still works, and because we're at war now it resonates like crazy.
BS: Also, the play summons a sort of memory of being under threat, and it celebrates the sacrifices our nation made. The musical has the beautiful, naïve, and powerful Amer-ican sound of Rodgers & Hammerstein, but since then there have been all these wars-Korea, Vietnam, Iraq-that we didn't get completely right. In a way, South Pacific is the beginning of that. These Americans encountering a people and a culture that they don't quite understand. It's interesting to go back and feel that experience.
ED: After you have these initial conversations, what do you do?
MY: I love research. I could almost just be a researcher and not do the design part. I've loved this show for years. I have a collection of National Geographics and things that I found on e-Bay that I've amassed over the years. As National Geo-graphic goes through the war years, there are color pictures of the real islands where Michener was based, the New Hebrides, as Vanuatu was called then, war maps, and photographs of daily life. So I amass all this information and then I start drawing, and try to figure out what pieces tell the story, and get at the truth of the place and the time. People have a conception of the South Pacific as being painted palm trees and hula girls. But the truth of it comes through in these photographs, and articles, and in Michener's own work. It is a rough world. The racism is confronted head-on in all these sources. And I think that this production is going to show more of that than has ever been shown before.
ED: So what happens after you have all these drawings?
BS: Michael gave me a series of sketches, like a storyboard. We didn't have much of a conversation; it was just his own impressions, because he knows the musical so well. Then the sketches were made into a white model, which is done on a very small scale so it's easy to play with. Then we go away and we don't think about it for a while. We did another show (laughter), The Skin of Our Teeth. Then we came back and spent several weeks going through it in some detail until we felt that we could go through all the transitions. We put on this recording from England that has all the music, and ran through our storyboard while double-checking all the elements. Then we sat down with André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, and Cathy Zuber, who has an incredibly sharp eye for scenic design. André, who's a very important collaborator, was very happy with it. Then there was another period off and I happened to be doing a show in New Haven, so I would go down every morning before rehearsal and spend two hours with Michael, and we'd talk through a cross section of each scene.
MY: And, while he was doing all that, we were working on quarter-inch scale models of the pieces we knew were in. My assistant Mikiko Suzuki had built tiny outdoor showers and palm trees. And we were starting to explore color, which is always very difficult. The color for Piazza was the most difficult part. We obsessed and obsessed and obses-sed over the color of the towers.
BS: And the floor.
MY: The floor probably more. (Laughter)
BS: Because we see it so much.
ED: The audience often doesn't realize how important the floor is.
MY: In the Beaumont, it really is the background.

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