Putting the Mind of a Brilliant and Challenging 15 Year Old On the Stage
By Director and Scenic Designer, Julian Wiles
The wonder of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is that the story is told from the perspective of Christopher Boone, a brilliant, but socially challenged 15 year old. He loves order, numbers, math, (or maths as the Brit’s say) and yet, he finds the ordinary everyday world chaotic and difficult to navigate. Showing this order and confusion became the first issue to consider when I began work on the set design. And in many ways, the set is a representation of Christopher’s mind and how it works in the most interesting and curious ways.
Often a design begins with a really rough pencil sketch. Above is what I sketched out for The Curious Incident. The floor is an ordered grid and as you will see. The grid lines light up. The set pieces are mostly cubes and are rearranged by the cast to represent everything from chairs to seats on the London tube to a spaceship! One of the real challenges of this script is that often, within seconds, we jump from one location to another. This precluded the use of realistic furniture and set pieces. In the end however, this design mirrored the ordered but often imaginative and abstract way in which Christopher’s mind works.
Though Christopher is at home in the world of numbers, but often lost in verbal and written communication, I surrounded the set with a sea of floating numbers and letters—generously created by Southern Lumber and Millwork Corp, one of the show’s sponsors. Interspersed among the letters are dozens and dozens of bare light bulbs representing stars. Christopher loves astronomy, and of course, the show begins with a curious incident in the night-time so these seem to make sense. They also will be used later to show how Christopher sometimes experiences anxiety and meltdowns from sensory overload. The sensory overload comes from crowds, too much noise at train stations, or just from a simple touch of someone. At that point, these and other lights become a firestorm, much like neurons firing in the brain.
And so from a simple sketch, we have this completed design. Making this sketch into a reality fell to our terrific production crew. Cody Rutledge, our scenic artist created a scale model of the set, did all the drafting, and supervised the actual construction. All of the wooden blocks and cubes and a wonderful desk were created by Courtney Gomez Odom, our Properties Master. Many elements were finished by Alex Odom, our new Master Carpenter. Jamie-Brooke Ruggio took charge of creating the “star lights” as well as the floor lighting for the grid. And Joshua Bristow assisted in creating the projections that appear on the screen upstage throughout the show.
In the end, we have a wonderfully realized, imaginative set. Contrary to popular belief, we’re not given the set design from the playwright nor the producers in New York. But that makes it fun to create our own inventive take on each show we produce. The Curious Incident was a challenge, but in the end, one of the most rewarding sets I’ve had the privilege to design.
Performances of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time run Feb. 6 – 24 at the Historic Dock Street Theatre. For ticket, click here.