DESIGN APPROACH

On the surface, Pentecost is a pretty straightforward project. It has one interior set, the inside of a church built around 1200 in the Romanesque style. Its in a small town off the main highway in a Balkan country. Edgar gives the place a sordid history, making it clear that the church is a metaphor for the country. As invading powers have taken over the country, the church changed purposes - a Byzantine church, a Catholic church, a Mosque, a stable for Napoleon's horses, a torture chamber for the Nazis and a Museum of the Proletariat for the Communists. Since the fall of communism, its been a warehouse and a dump.

The difficulty comes in a discovery made in the church. Behind a brick wall is a fresco done when the church was built. The painting resembles Giotto's Lamentation, but was painted before Giotto. The main characters, a pair of art historians, come to understand that Giotto indeed copied this painting, that the foundations of Western art should be placed on this painting and this place rather than on Giotto and Italy. The painting is uncovered, cleaned and prepared to be removed from the wall during the play. So while there are no set changes, there are "painting" changes.

As the characters debate what would be best for their country, leaving the painting in the church or moving it to the National Museum, a band of refugees enter seeking asylum. They hold the art folks hostage. When it looks like the refugees might harm the hostages, a rescue is made by blowing through a wall - the wall with the painting, of course, destroying the cultural history of the nation.

I placed the painting on the outside wall of the church in an apse, framed by a wall of romanesque arches. I wanted to emphasize the scale of both the painting and the church - it was representing the history of an entire country. I felt that a more rustic church would seem more real when scaled down in our theatre and fit best with the action of the play. The restorers and historians seem out of place in their finer clothes, but the band of refugees fit in.

The finished model helped show the production team just how a scenic idea could communicate one of the more prominent points of the play. The communists whitewashed everything - history, truth was buried under layers of paint, In fact, every occupant buried the previous owner's history.Every wall in the set was whitewashed, dirty with age and cracking, revealing history bit by bit.

© 2004 by Gion DeFrancesco