Costume Sketches by Clint Ramos for The Rose Tattoo


BEN STANTON—LIGHTING DESIGN Passion and superstition surround Tennessee Williams’s beautiful and funny play The Rose Tattoo. In approaching the design for this piece, we have tried to build a world filled with mystery, emotional tension, and potential. A close-knit environment that has boundaries but also allows for new opportunity to walk right through the front door. Our set designer Mark Wendland has done a magnificent job of honoring the many demands of this text—giving us an interior space that showcases Serafina’s eclectic nature and an exterior world that gives us clues about the time and place in which this story takes place. Surrounding all of this, Mark has designed huge, panoramic projection surfaces on which our projection designer Lucy Mackinnon tells us a story of a seaside town with never-ending sunsets, and waves that are both comforting and an uneasy reminder of time passing and youth slipping away. Our protagonist is both terrified of and driven by her passion, and this idea helped me find the vocabulary for the lighting design. I try to create mystery through the use of shadows and moments of darkness, while also maintaining a slightly surreal nostalgic beauty to the world around them. I want to help the audience feel the intensity of the fear and longing at the heart of this play. Serafina is a force of nature, at once cautious and wild, superstitious and a rebel. She wants something to come through that door but is terrified of what that will be.


LUCY MACKINNON—PROJECTION DESIGN The video design of The Rose Tattoo is intentionally simple. I have filled three video screens with images of the ocean. The screens are massive and monolithic, like the ocean itself. Hanging inside and as backdrop to Mark Wendland’s otherwise delicate, earthy, off-kilter set, they reflect the contrast between the chaotic and unbalanced inner life of the show’s main character, Serafina, and the stable, comparatively simple and beautiful world around her. At the same time, the video reflects Serafina with its extreme romanticism, saturated colors, and essential beauty.


FITZ PATTON—SOUND DESIGN The Rose Tattoo is a landscape of the human soul played out on the border between land and sea in which love, loss, age, and youth find transformation against a backdrop of blazing sunlight. Its reckless passion and old-world feel for the beyond that binds the young and old is best expanded in music. The play lays the foundation. The composer stands there and lifts these improbably powerful poles of life into the air to be heard another way, through music. There is no way to do more or to be more than the play itself, so the composer is free to fly as high as he can, to find in the poetic light of music that which can’t be expressed in any other way but which must be expressed.•


THE ROSE TATTOO UPSTAGE GUIDE


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