At the Metropolitan Opera, the set of “Innocence” goes on a journey.
In the beginning, a rotating midcentury building contains a two-story restaurant. As the set revolves, various spaces are revealed: downstairs and upstairs dining rooms, a kitchen, a closet, a reception area, a patio.
Then, through the metamorphosing scenic design by Chloe Lamford, the spaces transform. The downstairs dining room becomes a school cafeteria; the upstairs dining room, a classroom. Tasteful art on the walls is replaced by bulletin boards, and the reception desk becomes a trophy display.
From the audience’s point of view, these scene transitions can seem like a series of magic tricks. The opera, composed by Kaija Saariaho, proceeds at a rapid clip for an hour and 45 minutes. And Simon Stone’s production matches the music’s swiftness in ways that people might not even realize in the moment.
Pulling all that off has required meticulous planning, and the precise and diligent work of a dynamic team of props wranglers and stage managers. Whenever a part of the set faces away from the audience, they quietly and hurriedly make adjustments both small and large to the mise-en-scène. Then they make themselves scarce, just in time for the room to rotate into view again.
This is an unusually involved and pressurized operation for the Met, which has eight stage managers on staff; seven of them are working on “Innocence.” (One of them is covering everyone’s role in case someone calls out.) There is also a team of 16 props workers on the production, working at every performance.
“It doesn’t stop,” said the stage manager Terry Ganley. “It just keeps going, like a roller coaster. Once you get on it, you’re on.”
Jason Hamilton, the head of the Met’s props team, said that in a normal production, his colleagues work on a set for just a few rehearsals, refining cues. “They’re not involved much in the rehearsal process,” he added. “In ‘Innocence’ the main four props team members really had to learn and understand the show. They needed to know what was happening around them at all times.”
Lamford said that the props and stage management teams “are absolutely instrumental to the emotional journey of the piece.” Her work can be seen in two productions in New York right now: “Innocence” at the Met and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway. Her designs for both shows allow the past and the present to collide. “Salesman” unfurls in a cavernous garage, a metaphorical space where Willy Loman loses himself in golden-hued remembrances. The past intrudes on the present in “Innocence,” too, but with nightmare logic, transforming the space itself.
“We wanted to be able to travel back in time from the restaurant to the schoolrooms,” Lamford said, “but how could we do it in a way that felt seamless, not relying on big scene changes that would hold up the opera? Simon really is virtuosic in how he can direct a production that is constantly in motion. His provocation was, could we magically change the rooms as the set rotates?”
In the story of “Innocence,” which grapples with a school shooting and its effects years later, the scenic shifts might suggest the inescapability of past events and the resurfacing of trauma. “It is a haunted space,” Lamford said, “a poetic landscape for the opera to unfurl in.”
It’s also consistent with Stone’s fascination with scenographic sleight of hand. His adaptation of “Yerma,” staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2018, featured a floor that, during brief blackouts between scenes, changed beneath the actors’ feet to reflect the cycle of the seasons. Much earlier in his career, his production of “Thyestes” in Australia featured the miraculous appearance of a table tennis match in progress.
Before each performance of “Innocence,” the props and stage management teams get ready to lavishly decorate a wedding banquet. They create the floral arrangements, inflate heart-shaped helium balloons and fresh-press all the linens. Napkins are folded into roses, and real cake, purchased from a nearby Morton Wiliams, is frosted and decorated.
When the show starts, and the set starts rotating to the sound of Saariaho’s restless score, the real intense work begins.
While several scene transitions involve only minor bits of business — setting the soup bowls, removing the wine bottles, collecting a discarded cigarette — there are times when an entire room undergoes a change of identity.
The restaurant-to-classroom transition is one of the show’s most dramatic. Plates, cups and silverware are wrapped up in the tablecloths and whisked away, along with the seating. Bulletin boards and classroom chairs — items concealed until now in a hidden room — are put in place.
The set continues to rotate during the transition, so the change needs to happen fast — in about 95 seconds. In fact, the props team can’t physically escape the scene in time. They’re dressed as students, so that they can sit down when the next scene begins. “I had to assign four people who were basically willing to be a part of the cast,” Hamilton said.
In another major transition, with the stage managers guiding traffic, the props team removes tables and chairs and balloons, five paintings, a wooden divider screen and various other pieces, installing four school poster boards, six cafeteria tables with 12 benches and assorted school paraphernalia. At the same time, a crew of electricians removes the standing lamp and fabric shades on the wall lights and replaces five lampshades. All of it is done in near-complete darkness.
At the final dress rehearsal, a view of the scene backstage looked utterly chaotic, like a poorly planned burglary. But, about a half-rotation of the set later, the audience beheld a school cafeteria which moments ago had been a wedding party.
“Everyone has to know where everything is, and they have to do it quietly and in the dark,” Hamilton said. “There’s nothing but a thin wall between them and the audience.”
The set, like a character, keeps on evolving throughout the show. As stark truths come to light, the school spaces are stripped, too. Part of the job for the props team is to leave fresh blood from the shooting on windows and walls during each performance.
Mistakes can happen, Ganley admitted. “What’s more harrowing is if the automation of the set does not work.” But whatever goes wrong, it is dealt with, briskly. “You just do what you need to do.”
More accustomed to lurking behind the scenes, the props team and stage managers are so clearly essential to “Innocence” that some of them, despite being free to go, take bows at the end. “It’s been rewarding for me and for them to be a bigger part of the production,” Hamilton said.
And then, once the audience leaves, it’s time to clean up the blood.
The post From a Wedding to a School in 90 Seconds: Backstage Magic at the Met appeared first on New York Times.
