Nolan Schoenle
When conceptualizing this project, lead designer Justin Thomas wanted me and the other two assistant designers to delve into Christopher's headspace. As an autistically-coded (but never explicitly stated) British teenager, Christopher has a complex mind that we needed to portray onstage in a sensitive manner. These discussions led us to examine the end of the play wherein Christopher expresses his love of a math problem about the side lengths of a right triangle. We decided to translate the logic of the proof into right angles, clean lines, and strong visual binaries. To achieve this, we designed walls and a deck with strongly delineated areas of matte grey and glossed grey in a checkerboard pattern.
Since the play shows the audience not only a third-person view of Christopher’s world but also a first-person one, the creative team decided to place the audience within the world of Christopher’s mind so they could experience the world as he does. Thus, we designed the walls which surrounded the audience to echo the checkerboard motif and placed a row of mobile storage cubes and benches in front of the first row of the audience on two sides of the deep thrust to blur the line between the audience and the action.
As an assistant designer, much of my work involved doing research for the projections. Because Stephens’s adaptation moves so quickly, the creative team wanted a set that would allow actors to use the space and their bodies to establish place and time and the projections needed to support this. Because of Christopher’s attention to detail, we began our visual research looking at engineering blueprints; however, we discovered them to be too busy and decided to think about images with the line-drawing quality of a blueprint but with less detail. We found ourselves drawn to the chalk drawings that Christopher does on the deck throughout the show and decided to mirror this simple, hand-drawn style in the projections. To do this, we looked for imagery that would be realistic to the physical settings and then slightly abstracted it by tracing/outlining only the important elements. While we confined the location sketches to the back wall, we filled the space with images of stars and flying numbers to illustrate the difference between seeing the world through Christopher’s limited viewpoint and being present in his the complex space of his mind. By enveloping the audience in this headspace, the creative team endeavored to help the audience understand and empathize with Christopher’s lived experiences.
Anjali Jain
The bulk of the decisions that were made for the set and projections of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time were an attempt to be in service to Christopher’s mind. As is explained in the script, Christopher has the resources of the theatre at his disposal, and it is the job of the designers to make those resources accessible to the characters and storytellers for the show. In this, we had to make decisions based off of the character codes left for us in the script. For example, Christopher does not like the color yellow, and would not use it in a positive light while telling his story. However, at some point in the design process, Siobhan’s chair was drafted as being made of yellow plastic. We, as designers, had to maintain Christopher’s side of things, and thus, we had to redesign that element of the production.
This play is challenging in that the set and projections must both be at the forefront of the storytelling without cancelling the work that each of them does. Scenes moved rapidly, and the set up for each scene needed to be efficient, but concrete. Christopher heavily depends on both elements for the imaging of described scenes, but the setting up of Christopher’s scenes were not the most important part of the story; Christopher was. Walking that balance was difficult; creating muted yet nuanced set pieces, which could double as projection screens drove decisions that were made around paint colors and textures, as well as patterns. It was essential to both convey patterns that would translate well in Christopher’s mind, while still allowing room for complex projections to set the location for each scene.
The world of projections were born out of combining precise, architectural, highly measured drawings, and blending them with more artistic ideation of the world. Our tracings of photographs to create measured, yet nuanced images was an attempt to mirror the ways that Christopher might see the world—in which everything is seen, both the hyper-realistic, mathematic qualities, and the artistic qualities.
One of the challenges of this production was the creation of Christopher’s headspace as an autistically-coded individual. As assistant designers then, our task was not to do extensive research in which we could, at the end of it all, proclaim ourselves experts on how to craft an autistic-coded character and headspace for an audience to experience. Rather, we had to work with the codes that we offered in the script, and map out the world of a character written to show an experience as an outsider.
Ahon Gooptu
When we, the three students, came on to the project, there were many discussions that had already been had between the director and the designers. They had already decided that they wished to place the audience in Christopher’s mind as he sees the world instead of having them as the omnipresent third-person. Nonetheless we approached the text with fresh minds and sought to find research images that fit with our respective understandings of Christopher’s mind. Thus the accuracy of the angles in Christopher’s visualizations as well as the imperfections around him had to balanced in our design.
In terms of scenic design, I wanted the audience to find instances of familiarity in the production so that it might be easier for them to relate to the world we were attempting to create before them. Attributing a simple representation of the familiar stereotypical American high school floor to Christopher’s British school allowed us to instantaneously bring the audience into our world. This then gave us the leeway to introduce the unfamiliar in the form of projections and consequently guide them through the real world outside Christopher’s mind. Christopher’s mind also provided us the freedom to take familiar patterns, like a checkerboard or chessboard, and then flip it in the form of various other permutations to fit Christopher’s vision
Tackling projections in the form of clear-cut sketches and casual doodles brought out a contrast in terms of introducing Christopher’s world within London. I enjoyed digitally recreating London landmarks to aide the audience geographically move with the characters during the show. Detailing the ceiling of the subway station, maintaining the parallels on travelators, cutting precise right angles at steps – needless to say, sketching the projections took patience and persistence. There was a marked difference between the crisp sketches with accurate angles and the more doodle-like paper napkin drawings to differentiate actual locations from places in Christopher’s mind.
A challenge that I personally tried to overcome during the process was visualizing the design from the audience’s perspective. As someone with primarily acting experience, my default was to imagine the world around me rather than in front of me. The 3D model of the full set and our Vectorworks file helped me imagine onstage movement and visualize multifaceted uses of scenic and projection elements. Once we had our ideas in the form of sketches and digital files, we could play with them and figure out what worked with what and then really bring Christopher’s mind to life.