Getting my head wrapped around Atomic

This time of the year is always the craziest for me.  Shows fall back-to-back-to-back and I don't get much of a break in between.  American Idiot still has one more weekend in the run before we strike it on Sunday. Hedwig and the Angry Inch opens in about a week at Stray Dog Theatre. And I already have to start New Line's third show of the season, Atomic.  Rehearsals begin on April 4 and the set has to be substantially designed by then, even though I have 5 weeks before it loads.  And so for this show, my April and May will be busy because I am doing set AND lights for it.

Atomic is a story that is particularly interesting to me personally.  I am married to a science teacher for whom this subject is a specialty.  She travels the country doing professional development for other science teachers on nuclear chemistry.  So, discussions of nuclear science, the ethics of it, the history of it, happen regularly around the dinner table.  Insomuch as the science and scientists are well documented, the ethical questions originally posed by these people remain a point of contention.  And this bring me to why we are staging the show the way that we are...

The Marcelle is 37-feet wide and 50-feet long. The audience enters part way along the 50-foot wall.  When I designed the theater, I developed 5 or 6 seating arrangements just to understand how we might able to use the room.  One of the more interesting layouts lines seating risers along both 37' walls, facing each other, with the playing area down the middle of the room.  This arrangement really addresses the audience's intimate involvement with the show.  Essentially, the two sections of audience, while looking at the stage, see through to their counterparts on the opposite side.  Essentially, what we are doing is peeling the walls of the laboratory away and peering in, like a gallery, as these ethical discussions unfold.  The audience not only sees the actors react to each other, but they see the other audience members as they react.  This become personal.

An interesting bit of history about the Manhattan project is that it was so new and so top-secret that much of the work had to take place in facilities that had never before existed.  Some of the very early work took place in universities.  The first controlled nuclear reaction actually took place in a room under the bleachers of the squash field at the University of Chicago.  Not knowing if it would work and just how dangerous it was, the Enrico Fermi and team staged it in the middle of one of the largest and most populous cites in North America.  Fortunately, all went as expected or it could have been Chernobyl 40 years early...

Once the project was officially adopted by the government, the US Army Corps of Engineers built whole towns, much like a military base, completely encircled with heavy fences. These included labs, housing, dining, shopping; everything that a town of civilians would need.  Richland WA, Oak Ridge TN, Los Alamos NM were all designed and built for the express purpose of developing atomic technology. To this day, the US government operates national laboratories at these locations. These facilities are still churning out research that is super classified. Kathleen and I have been fortunate enough to have visited all but one of these facilities; Los Alamos.  It is on the list, we just haven't spent enough time in Albuquerque to squeeze it in, but I diverge... So, the facilities that our scientists used were brand new, designed specifically for this work, and furnished in the best of military drab green.

While the show is essentially a memory play taking place in the 1950's, the bulk of the action occurs from the late 1930's through the dropping of the bomb on Japan, and ultimately into the start of the cold war in the late 1940's.  So, the aesthetic is really 30-40's design features and a military color pallet.  Much takes place in institutional rooms at university or government facilities, so that helps narrow down the look.  Big windows, wooden doors with glass, hanging pendant lights and long tables or lab benches define the archetype of the 1940's laboratory.




One key location in the script that is not institutional is the "bar" that we go to several times.  An establishment for drinking would have very likely been built some years prior to when our story takes place. So, I look to bars of the 1930's, just after the fall of Prohibition. Heavy wood structures with brass accents, a back bar with bottles and a big mirror and chrome stools are some of the key elements of bars from this period.



 So, armed (pun intended) with this background and our very intimate seating layout, I set out to design Atomic...
R