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Set design -- more magic photo by Jim Craven Laura Knapp, a props artisan for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, works on the detailing of an Egyptian sarcophagus to be used in "The Man Who Came to Dinner," one of the plays in the festival's 2000 season. OSF workers build wide array of movable pieces for 2000 season By BILL VARBLE What Patrick Bonney has in mind is rain. Torrents of rain falling on the stage of the Angus Bowmer Theatre. On a December day the theater is still except for the workers onstage, but it's less than two months until the opening of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2000 season. As workers grapple with pieces of sets designed for Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana" and Moss and Hart's "The Man Who Came to Dinner," Bonney, a scenic artist, has his attention fixed on some black PVC pipe fastened to a big plywood curtain. He says an impeller will push water from 65-gallon holding tanks through the PVC to solenoid-controlled sprinklers mounted above the stage. The idea is for rain to fall all over the stage, not just in one plane, from light sprinkles right up to a cloudburst. "We'll be able to make the rain dance," Bonney says. When OSF begins its annual winter hiatus in November, the festival's scene shop has been in high gear for a month creating sets for the next year's plays. Carpenters and other workers labor in wood, metal and paint shops on the hillside behind the Black Swan Theatre to create a Danish castle, a middle-class American home, ancient Troy. It's all about magic. "Designers and directors say they want it to happen magically," construction supervisor Brad Galusha says. "They never want to see a stagehand." Galusha's job is to build whatever designers and directors envision. One of the main challenges is to divide very large things into manageable sections. Most sets wheel about on dollies or can be moved by hand by a couple of stagehands. There's no room in the shops for the sets for the 11 plays the festival will present next year, and there's little room to store them other than backstage. So Galusha and fellow set honcho Bruce Jennings must plan for a whole season of building and storing sets, using almost every inch of space backstage out of the audience's line of sight. That means taking into account the logistics of a theater in which five plays are presented during the season, including matinee and evening performances of different plays on most days. In the scene shop, which looks like a cross between a construction site and a home improvement store, 20-foot steel frames await facades of theatrical gauze, a burlap that changes appearance in different lights. In an adjacent room, props artisan Laura Knapp sticks felt details onto a polystyrene mummy she's making for "The Man Who Came to Dinner." The mummy, which kind of looks like King Tut, will be finished off with an epoxy putty and covered with a flexible white glue. "The best part is sitting in the audience and whispering to my husband, `I made that,"' says Knapp, of Medford. The biggest challenge this year? That's easy, Galusha says: controlling all that rain. The "Iguana" set will be built with a system of drains and gutters to carry water to a central drain. The sloping floor now sits strewn about the shop _ big wedges of plywood. "The key is to make it effective but not destroy the stage," Galusha says. Bonney says special sealers, tempered wood and plastic sheeting should do just that. These things seem to go in phases, he says. "A couple years ago we had trees. This year it's weather." Another example: a snow machine for "The Man Who Came to Dinner." This is a tube with holes in it and a motor to spin it. In action it will spit plastic "snowflakes" in amounts ranging from flurries to your basic blizzard. Galusha has spent 18 seasons making magic here. Before that he renovated homes, and later sailboat interiors, in Southern California. He says one of the hardest plays ever was "Blood Wedding," for which designer Richard Hay called for rope curtains with miles of rope that had to be dyed and cobwebbed and had to travel on and off the stage. Last year in a performance of Shakespeare's "Othello," the electricity went off just before Desdemona was to slide onstage in a bed driven by a motorized dolly. During intermission Galusha and several others worked furiously to disassemble the motor system so the bed could be moved by hand. When they'd almost completed the chore, the power came back on, and they had to put everything back together again. "I don't know what we'd have done if the power went off again," he says. It didn't, and Desdemona showed up on cue. It's not usually that exciting. Galusha likes to sit in the audience during the first couple of performances of a new play. What he's looking for are the oohs and ahs of an audience reacting to a stunning set. "That's the payoff," he says. "The actors get theirs later. I don't have to wait." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA