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The first time she saw the shipwreck, Rachel Hauck began to cry.
It was during rehearsals at the Berkeley Repertory Theater for the premiere in 2022 of “Swept Away,” a jukebox musical based on the songs of the Avett Brothers about a 19th-century shipwreck off the coast of New Bedford, Mass. The cast and crew had assembled to stage a dry run of the show’s spectacular action centerpiece: a full-scale re-creation of the capsizing of the whaler, which overturns onstage to reveal a slender wooden lifeboat, where the remainder of the show takes place.
As a feat of conceptual ingenuity and mechanical engineering, the moment was astonishing — a scene of such extraordinary scale and intensity that, when it occurred nightly during the show’s short run on Broadway last year, the audience would break into thunderous applause. It was too much for Hauck, the set designer, who watched that California dress rehearsal with tears streaming down her face.
“It was the emotional journey of it all,” Hauck, 64, said recently, once again tearing up. “I don’t know quite how to articulate this, but it’s space and physical objects and emotion, and how those things lift.”
Hauck’s grand vision of the sinking ship was so important to the impact of the musical that it’s impossible to imagine “Swept Away” without it. But in fact, nothing of the kind was suggested in the musical’s original book, by John Logan.
“In the script, it’s like, ‘The boat sinks.’ That’s it. Literally,” Michael Mayer, the show’s director, said. “Rachel had this ingenious and beautiful idea of how to do the shipwreck. And this is the reason why you go to Rachel Hauck for these kinds of complicated shows where there’s a giant transformation.”
Her concept was essentially to build the wooden deck of an authentic period whaler onto a sort of drawbridge mechanism, so that it could be sharply canted during the onset of a violent storm. Using mirrors, complex lighting cues, fog and other pyrotechnics, the ship appears to actually sink onstage, and the lifeboat, carrying the four surviving sailors, seems to materialize out of nowhere. It replaces the former set so seamlessly that the audience members can barely comprehend what they’ve just seen. “It’s a magical effect,” Mayer said. “Rachel has a truly original mind.”
It seems especially original by comparison to the prevailing norms of Broadway. It’s common for modern musicals and stage shows to rely on video projections for scale, or to lean stripped-down and abstract, with a tendency toward understatement. By contrast, Hauck’s big, complicated sets seem almost defiantly extravagant.
Her signature style is a kind of naturalistic maximalism — her sets are imposing and spectacular but plausible at the same time.
“A lot of the design on Broadway and Off Broadway shows these days tend toward either very spare or minimalist, like the current Broadway revival of ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ which basically doesn’t even have a set,” said Kenji Fujishima, a film and theater critic. “For me, it was very refreshing to see something like Rachel Hauck’s work, which feels very analogue by comparison.”
As Hauck describes it, her eyes have always been bigger than her budget. “I always saw things on this great big scale,” she said, “and I’m always interested in the emotional power of space and environment and how architecture affects the body.”
Hauck knew that she wanted to work in set design as far back as freshman year of high school in Irvine, Calif., when she helped paint canvas flats for a school production of William Inge’s “Picnic.” Working with crafts and models, Hauck said, “was just the greatest thing in the whole world.” Though it was traditionally a male-dominated field, she realized that set design could be “my little pocket,” her niche, in the theater.
She honed her craft at U.C.L.A., where she said a found-art class with the sculptor Nancy Rubins taught her “the fundamental principle of sculptural space and objects speaking from their own power,” or, to put it more simply, the idea that when it comes to objects and sets, you’ve “got to let it be what it is.”
For the play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s 2017 political drama about discrimination and the history of the United States, Hauck built a replica of an American Legion Hall that is remarkable in its mundane authenticity. Faithfully rendering the flimsy wooden panels and faded carpeting of a stifling room, she then exaggerated it with more than 150 framed photographs of veterans. As the show unfolded, the faces — all of them of men — seemed to stare down at Schreck, who starred in the play, adding a layer of intimidation.
Once, after watching a play she had worked on, Hauck’s father said that her job didn’t seem very hard. She took it as a compliment, eventually. “It took me two weeks to realize, that’s how you know you got it right: It looks effortless,” she said. “It just looks like the right thing.”
It was her work on Anaïs Mitchell’s musical “Hadestown” that brought Hauck a new level of renown. A retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the story is divided between two distinct settings: a 1920s-style jazz bar and a factory-like underworld, each jam-packed with authentic detail and teeming with life. The former is inspired by the famous New Orleans speakeasy the Preservation Hall, and Hauck said that the resemblance was so strong that when the owners of the Preservation Hall saw the show, they couldn’t believe it. “Wait, this is our bar, but it’s not our bar,” Hauck recalls them telling her.
Much like “Swept Away,” “Hadestown” features a dazzling mid-show transition, as the speakeasy cracks open to reveal the underworld within it — another impressive showcase of technical engineering that involves a sophisticated turntable system and complex pyrotechnics. And like the wreck at the heart of “Swept Away,” the “Hadestown” transformation wasn’t in the original script, either — it was Hauck’s invention.
“When Anaïs wrote that first draft, there’s no transition,” Hauck said. “It was just like, ‘Now we’re in the underworld.’” It’s as difficult to imagine “Hadestown” without that shift as it is to picture “Swept Away” without the wreckage. Both are a testament to the power of Hauck’s creative vision.
“Swept Away” earned a rave review from The New York Times when it opened at the Longacre Theater this past November — the critic Jesse Green enthused that he was “fully entertained and harrowed.” But other reviews were mixed, and the cost of running such an expensive show proved too steep. The producers announced that it would end its Broadway run less than a month after opening. (In a final act befitting Broadway, the announcement prompted a surge in ticket sales, leading to a two-week extension.) In May, Hauck received a Tony Award nomination for Best Scenic Design of a Musical, tying a bow on an experience that, while short-lived, was clearly a triumph.
She is moving on to a new play about Galileo with the director Michael Mayer and the choreographer David Neumann, who did the choreography for “Swept Away” and “Hadestown.” The show is set during the Renaissance, and its sets will include parts of Florence and the Vatican; its first iteration, staged back at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, features steel and plexiglass, and is built around a kind of stacked structure whose floors are revealed at different times throughout the show.
To judge by models and drawings of the set, it’s as sophisticated as anything Hauck has done before, though she was quick to downplay the complexity. “Nothing moves in this one,” she said with a laugh.
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