Dane Laffrey:
The work that I’m the proudest of had an immensely simple, scaled-back muscularity about it.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, set designer Dane Laffrey talks about his career and his design for the musical Maybe Happy Ending.
Dane Laffrey:
Every minute and 17 seconds, the set is moving.
Debbie Millman:
Maybe Happy Ending is a musical about two different but lifelike robots who fall in love. The show premiered in South Korea in 2016. And in late 2024, it opened on Broadway in New York City, where it has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including Best Scenic Design of a Musical by Dane Laffrey. The innovative set fluidly morphs around the two robots as they embark on a journey in Seoul set in the near future.
The set design is anything but set. It’s a tour de force and one of the most extraordinary stages I’ve ever witnessed. Dane Laffrey has been designing sets on Broadway and around the world for two decades. And his work includes the sets for Parade, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Spring Awakening, and so much more. Dane Laffrey, welcome to Design Matters.
Dane Laffrey:
Thanks so much, Debbie. I’m thrilled to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Dane, I’ve read that since you were a kid, you’ve had a strange affinity for World War II movies from the 1960s. Wondering why that particular genre?
Dane Laffrey:
That’s an extraordinary question. I think there is something I found immensely transporting about those films. With some exceptions, they’re not great cinema. I admit to having slightly peculiar taste in some areas like this. But there’s something about those films that I think, as I’ve come back to them later in life, which I’m semi-embarrassed to admit I do, there’s an amazing artifice around it. A lot of those films were shot on the backlot, and it’s clear at the end of a film that was about the Battle of the Bulge, that they’re definitely shooting in southern California for some tank battle.
There’s something interesting about that, the artifice and nostalgia, and how those things relate to each other. But mostly it’s just because, I don’t know, there’s something about those movies that I’ve always liked.
Debbie Millman:
You were born in Michigan, but have stated that you grew up around the Midwest. Where in the Midwest and why so elusive?
Dane Laffrey:
Well, my father, he’s still alive, but when he worked, he worked. He was a sort of university administrator, had a kind of weird professional wanderlust, I guess. And so he never wanted to or did stay in a job for more than a few years. And so as a result, the family was kind of moved around, and it tended to be the Midwest. So as you say, I was born in Michigan and there was a stint in Washington DC, which is not the Midwest, and then there was Wisconsin, and then there was also a stint in Western Canada and Edmonton, which is where I think I saw my first theatrical experience with that place or seeing theater in a way that really struck me.
And then there was Indiana for a while, and then I ended up going to boarding school back in Michigan, which was… Indiana didn’t work out so well for me, so I was saved a little bit.
Debbie Millman:
Now you’ve described yourself as a bad student. Really?
Dane Laffrey:
I was. I was pretty bad. I think there was an inflection point, sort of in the middle of high school. I became very involved in the sort of local community theater. And my recollection is that that was where my attention was going, and I think I just was like, “Well, this is what I should be doing.” And the other stuff didn’t feel so important. But there was a moment where I could have had a really different path I think if I hadn’t been taken out of this kind of middling public school in a small town in Indiana and sent to this really extraordinary arts boarding school where suddenly I only got A’s there and I was doing academic classes and I was doing things that were…
I was being properly challenged, I think is one thing, but also I think I felt like, “I understand what I’m doing here and I’m surrounded by people who seem to have the same sense of purpose that I have.” Which is not the standard sense of purpose of a 15 or 16-year-old, I suppose.
Debbie Millman:
Once you became interested in the theater, were you first considering acting, or were you always drawn to design?
Dane Laffrey:
No. Well, I think most theater kids, which I would consider myself, start with acting because that’s the thing you can do. And I think that began for me in junior high school. And I think at that time I thought, “well, that’s quite good. Maybe that’ll be good for me.” And then I think in high school, I sort of lost interest in it. And certainly then, when I made the momentous leap to the community theater, I don’t think I was getting the roles. No, I suppose I did do a little acting there. And I think maybe that was also exciting, but I think I wanted to be there so much, and I wanted to be in the building.
And it felt energizing and interesting, and it was largely run by younger adults, people who had fairly recently graduated college, I suppose. And I think I was more comfortable with people of that age. And so I think I was just happy to do anything they would let me do. And the first thing they somehow… There seemed to be some gap where nobody wanted to deal with the sound design. So I was, “Well, I’ll do that.” I put my hand up as well, “I’ll deal with the sound design.” I don’t know anything about it. And I was really abysmal, I’m certain, but I was just desperate to be on…
I liked to be present for the performances, and I liked the idea of being out at night, and all of that felt very thrilling and exciting. So it pretty quickly morphed, but it wasn’t until again, when I moved on into this second half of high school, that that felt more focused or that I really found my way towards what I do now.
Debbie Millman:
During your senior year at boarding school, your roommate was an acting student named Michael Arden, who has gone on to become a lifelong friend and collaborator. Do you remember your first impression of him? Did you have any sense at all that this was going to be the significant relationship that it’s been?
Dane Laffrey:
No, I don’t think so immediately. I think we were immediately close and friendly, and I think connected with each other in that way. He actually appeared at Interlochen in the middle of, I think, my junior year. So he came a little bit later, but it was a very small place and a smaller still theater department inside of a high school that only had 400 kids at the time, or something, all kind of locked away in the woods in northern Michigan. I wish I could remember the details, but there’s no spark, but we did decide that we wanted to be roommates. That wasn’t just a random assignment.
We said at the end of our junior year, “Well, we will be roommates next year.” And I think as we sort of existed in our tiny little cinder block room together for a year, and especially in a year in which we were applying for college and trying to figure out what we were going to do and dreaming a lot about a potential future that I think there were lots of dreams and schemes and thoughts, and I don’t remember specifically too many of them were, but we definitely were very connected at that time. But then afterwards, we went our separate ways, as many people who go after high school and into college do.
Debbie Millman:
After Interlochen, you decided to study in Australia at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. What drew you there, and what was that experience like?
Dane Laffrey:
It was amazing, but first, I did something that really didn’t succeed, which is that I just applied for schools in the States. And because I was at Interlochen, and they had really amazing kind of college counseling and a very deep knowledge about all of the kind of training programs. Although admittedly, I was somewhat anomalous as a designer in that space that was… I think I potentially was the only person who had that major when I graduated. So they had the knowledge that they had, but I was a little bit on my own and I sort of looked at what the better programs were and I tried to pick one for a sort BFA program.
I think I was pretty clear that I wanted to train, I wanted to be trained in my craft. Michael got into Juilliard, and I think what I actually wanted was to also get into Juilliard, but Juilliard doesn’t train designers. And so I was kind of looking for a version of that. And I do recall being pretty unclear about what to do. And a number of schools were pretty enthusiastic about taking me because again, at this point, I’m a sort of 17-year-old who could… I don’t think I could do very many things, but I had a strong and clear sense of exactly what I wanted to do. And I was probably a little bit ahead of the curve as far as some of the skillset stuff.
And so they were all excited and fawning around. And again, I didn’t have a especially clear sense of what I should do, so I just picked one. I think they maybe were the one that offered me the most scholarship, or it seemed like the facilities were the nicest. But it ended up being at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio. And I was the only one from the department to go there. I didn’t have any friends there. And I went, and I lasted about a week. I moved to Cincinnati, and it was immediately clear that this wasn’t going to work. And I felt as though I had been thrust back in time, and I was suddenly back in this kind of gen ed, public high school thing that really didn’t mesh well with me and that I didn’t understand.
And about a week went by, and the person who had, I think it was the head of the design department, maybe, and he’d been the person who’d been kind of trying to get me to go there. I think I had a class with him. And after the class, he said, “Do you want to go to lunch?” And I said, “Sure.” And he said, “This isn’t going to work for you, is it?” I remember this very distinctly. I said, “No, I don’t think it is.” And he said, “I don’t think it is either. I want to tell you this because I think we can get most of your tuition money back if you withdraw before the two weeks or three weeks,” or whatever it was.
And so I did, and my parents supported that decision, I think somewhat grudgingly, but at this point, they knew me well enough to know that I was just going to do whatever I needed to do and they were behind that. And so then I started looking abroad because I felt like I’d exhausted my options in the States, and that’s when I found NIDA, which was the National Institute of Dramatic Art. It looked to be exactly what I wanted it to be. So I told my parents this crazy idea, and my father, who I said was a university administrator. He was a study abroad advisor, so he was keen on this idea and had some connections at the affiliated university.
And so I flew down there with this sort of preposterous model box. It was like a scale model in a steamer trunk that we bought at Target, of Cabaret. And I went in for this interview and got the thing out, and I glued it back together, it’s definitely broke on the flight or whatever. And my now person, who I consider my mentor, Peter Cook, just ripped it to shreds. He absolutely eviscerated me and the work. I mean, I was horrified because my parents had flown me to Australia to do this thing, and I thought, “Oh my God. Well, this is a catastrophe and I have no options.” And I really felt like, “This is going to be terrible.”
And then he called the next day and said, “I’d love you to join the program.” And I thought, “He was right. The work was bad.” I just never heard that before. And it was kind of a revelation and so important and sort of the very beginning of a pedagogy that I found immensely valuable, actually. But it was startling. And so it proved to be all of the things I wanted it to be, I think. It was essential, I think in this training model for him to teach us how to edit ourselves and how to not be precious about the work and how to actually recognize what a good idea is and to develop taste, which is so hard.
I think you do have to sort of be exposed to things and talk about them critically and have a dialectic, and it was so amazing for all of that, as well as all of just the nitty-gritty. And what it actually boils down to is that it was a master’s program. It was structured exactly like an MFA, but it happened to be a bachelor’s degree, and that was the best possible thing. That’s actually what I was looking for. I was ready to just get on with it.
Debbie Millman:
You said this about Peter Cook’s training. His training was rigorous, relentless, punishing, and exhausting. And as such, he produced designers who are rigorous and relentless and never stop pushing for excellence and originality. And you go on to state that 20 years after graduating, you still hear his voice in the back of your head daily. What is he saying to you?
Dane Laffrey:
It’s kind of the devil on your shoulder a little bit, but it’s always about looking critically at things, and that’s what we’re supposed to do. Any designer, I think, really is… It needs to sit back and not spend so much time appreciating the work. You’ve got to sit down and go like, “What is this?” And constantly reevaluate it. And that’s what it’s all about. I think it’s that skill and knowing when to hang on to something and trust that the idea just hasn’t worked itself out yet, but it’s a good idea. And that could be in a physical manifestation or an intellectual manifestation or whatever, or when something’s not that [inaudible 00:15:37] to move on.
I think that’s a really important thing to be able to bring into collaborations because the work that we do is the opposite of the artist and the garrett, right? It’s a fully collaborative… There’s a lot of groupthink involved, and I think that’s a really important thing to bring to bear as you’re navigating those sorts of interpersonal artistic relationships.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that designers don’t really get a big break, and I found that to be true in lots of different design disciplines. But was there ever something that felt like a real turning point for you professionally?
Dane Laffrey:
There is, but I think it’s much more recent, and I feel like it has come with the industry recognizing Michael and I as a kind of artistic unit. And we now also share a producing company, so we’re also a kind of a producing unit. And that has actually helped people to kind of frame that for themselves because it’s a slightly unusual relationship. To me that has felt like the big shift where I’m in more conversations about work earlier and more globally. And that has really felt like it because I think my path now and going forward as one that is not about being a gun for hire and is actually about building on a strong foundation of a single collaboration that is continuing to yield work that I’m the most interested and in a way of working that I’m the most interested in.
And it actually is something that brings me back to the earliest parts of my career, where, after graduating from NIDA, which was a three-year program, I felt that I needed to stay in Australia for a little bit because I only knew people there. It was something that I kind of acknowledged as a sacrifice when I went down there in the first place. It was like, “Well, I’m not going to make any connections.” I think they talk a lot, but you talk a lot about that when you’re talking about going to college, about making connections with people. And I was like, “Well, I’m going to make connections, but I’m going to make connections with a bunch of Australian people, and if I ever have to go back, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
And I did realize, I think pretty early on there, that I did want to go back, that the industry there is a little smaller than I felt could really sustain as many designers as were coming into the industry. And I had a much bigger pond to swim in, and I had the ability to be there. So I thought, “Well, I will go back to the States. I will go to New York, but I’m going to need to do some work before I return. I need to build up a portfolio. I need to do some projects so I can show people something. Otherwise, I think I’ll be a little stuck.” And so I stayed for a couple of years to just do some work, and I ended up really only working with one person.
And it was an amazing time, and he was a really brilliant director called Anthony Skewes, who’s still a very close friend of mine. And we did 3, 4, 5 projects in close succession. We met, he directed I think a show that I designed in my final year there. And then we subsequently just kept working together and it really was an analogous collaboration to what I have with Michael, and it was, let’s say, the second most valuable to me artistically. And so I’ve realized that that’s actually what I thrive on. That’s what drives me. I don’t do so well in situations where it’s constantly new collaborators.
I really only want to be doing this one thing. And so that’s a long way of answering that question. I think that has felt like the turning point, which also just coincides with more time in the industry and knowing more people. I mean, the Broadway community is small, but it’s not tiny. And gradually just with more time in it, you sort of really feel like you get to know the world of it a little bit better and vice versa.
Debbie Millman:
You initially thought your Broadway debut was going to be the Sam Shepard play, Fool for Love at the Freedmen, but Deaf West’s Spring Awakening opened a couple of weeks earlier. So you had two shows on Broadway at the same time, right out of the gate. In Spring Awakening, your design, How to Accommodate Two Languages at Once: Spoken English and American Sign Language. How did that inform and affect your design choices?
Dane Laffrey:
We wanted to make a space that could hold a lot of complex visual information as it concerned communication, and as such, I think the space wanted to be able to recede, and so it had a kind of cold industrial quality. I think we wanted to… The stuff that is exclusively in American Sign language is also subtitled for the hearing audience or audience who doesn’t speak ASL. And so we needed architectural opportunities dotted around to do that, that wouldn’t get buried.
I think that design, as it concerned the dual languages, was just a lot about kind of visual restraint and keeping it simple enough, and then it had the right energy and it didn’t feel like spare and wan, but that it sort of had a quiet about it.
Debbie Millman:
In 2018, you designed the set for the Tony Award-winning play Once on This Island, and the set transformed Circle In The Square into a post-hurricane Haitian landscape, and you went on a research trip to Port-au-Prince, which you said changed the direction of what you wanted to do. And I was wondering if you can talk about in what way that happened.
Dane Laffrey:
This is a project with Michael Arden, and we had been talking about it for some time, and I think Once on This Island is specifically set on Haiti. And it’s alluded to in the story, and it’s a little bit more like allegorical in the text, but we want it to be really specific about it because that’s a real place and it’s incredibly interesting and it unlocks the characters who are based in the Voodoo religion. What that tiny nation has gone through is complex and challenging and ripe, and we felt like, “Well, if we’re going to tell this story, we just have to be honest about where it’s taking place.” So that was a start.
And so we came in with a bunch of research that was a lot about hurricane devastation and earthquake devastation and felt like, “Well, this is about this community and this is their landscape and this is where they are and this is how we’re going to tell the story.” And there was a big idea about it being reorchestrated for non-traditional instruments was a big seed of the visual language. And we worked with this group called Bang on a Can that kind of makes instruments out of trash basically. And we thought, “Well, this is really where it’s at.”
But so we had gone pretty far in the process, and I believe by the time we went to Haiti, we knew we had a theater and we knew were doing it in Circle In The Square, and we were pretty far along in the process and we went down there and we felt that we had to go. We thought this was like, “We got to see this place.” And that was a time, very fortunately in Haiti, where it was reasonably safe to go there, which is I think not the case anymore, would not be possible. So we were able to go, and it was incredible because it looked like all the things and it looks extraordinary.
Debbie Millman:
Port-au-Prince is amazing.
Dane Laffrey:
It looks absolutely extraordinary in this kind of city that’s half destroyed, colonial ruins, and some entirely intact colonial buildings in a sort of well-heeled subset of the social strata who literally live up on the mountain. And it’s quite separate from the other stuff. But what really struck us about it visually is that it was constantly being reconstructed that in the most beautiful, inventive, creative ways, colorful and lush and improvised a bit, but always moving forward. And that was the part we were missing. We were kind of stuck in the devastation.
And what we were missing was the idea that no, no, no, the storm has happened, the earthquake has happened, and then we immediately start rebuilding the space. And so it really… The container held, the idea held, but that all of the detail changed. It felt like, “We’re not in a ruin. We’re in a ruin that something is being done to very actively.” So it had that quality to it, and it was so invaluable. I mean also just some of the things we were able to experience there were completely wild.
Debbie Millman:
My in-laws are from Haiti, and my wife is first-generation American, so Haiti is a big part of our lives. We saw the show when it first came out. We actually sat in the front row, and the play was set in the round. So we literally felt as if we were in the play. I mean, we were in the play.
Dane Laffrey:
You definitely were.
Debbie Millman:
I mean sand on our shoes and so incredibly immersive. But I really appreciated what you said about the devastation along with something else, and I do think that that’s a lot of hope for what can still be, because it is really one of the most beautiful places on the planet. How are you thinking about the round space and the sight lines and this immersive experience that the audience was having while the play was actually running?
Dane Laffrey:
We imagined it from the very beginning for that theater. Circle In The Square is the only Broadway theater that is not a conventional proscenium or mostly a conventional proscenium. And it’s a theater that can function in the round, and it’s very, very intimate, and it is perfect for a sort of experiential immersive approach because everybody kind of walks in the same doors and the whole space is laid out before you, and then you have to maneuver through it to get to your seat. And there’s very little separation between what is the stage in the audience, and we try to collapse that even further.
It was always baked into the idea that everybody would sit in this circle to hear this story and the opportunities for just putting it around everyone, and especially with the tactileness, as you say, of having your feet in the sand is a meaningful idea, I think. So these events, flooding, earthquake where it felt like they were happening to the theater not being placed inside the theater, so we made it look like one of these [inaudible 00:27:07] had flooded and was being held back with sandbags, but then you had that humidity in the air of the water and you kind of were getting it in every direction.
There was a lot of wind we used to give you that feeling, and all of those things are uniquely possible in that space because you just are there and you’re part of it.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about one more production that you worked on before we talk about Maybe Happy Ending. And I’m not going to be able to even remotely do justice to how many questions I actually have about this particular production, but I’m going to at least try to get one or two in just to make sure people know that you worked on this one as well, which is the revival of the play Parade. It’s a harrowing play about the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish American man in 1915.
Interesting in that you used actual historical photographs and projections, and we see how that evolves to your most recent work. The scale of the stage had a very intimate feel to it. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you approached scale in that particular design.
Dane Laffrey:
Part of it is that Parade was born out of a significant limitation in that it began its life as part of the Encores series. Encores are, let’s call them semi-staged or staged semi-productions of musicals. This was not that. This was everybody, nobody was holding a script, everybody was doing the thing, but they’re done on a really, really small budget in an incredibly short amount of time. And so part of the vocabulary of Parade was simply born out of necessary economy of scale, and it felt like our greatest strength visually was actually the people. Not just because there’s so many of them and that they populate something and create a visual landscape, but because the show is dealing so much with the idea of mob mentality or the idea of a jury, your peers making decisions about you.
There’s so many sort of pieces of connective tissue that felt really valuable there, and to just sort of have them all present most of the time, and therefore further compressing quite a small space and forcing most of the action up onto this further elevated platform always felt like energetically right for the piece. But again, also, Michael stages things so beautifully and collaborated with choreographers that we work with a lot, Lauren Yalango-Grant and Cree Grant. And they just conjured that whole world out of nothing. And I thought it was really magnificent. And I will say not every director would know what to do with that space. In fact, I would venture that most directors would not. It was exposed, it was spare. That’s really, really challenging to deal with.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve spoken about the idea that simplicity, rather than scale or cost, can be the most powerful tool in design, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that.
Dane Laffrey:
Well, I think it can. I mean, ultimately, the theatrical contract with an audience sets you up for success in this way. They are there to receive a story. They understand it is not actually happening, and that their imagination is an incredibly powerful tool, so long as the work is presented confidently and it provides opportunity to unlock the imagination, to seed imagery, to provide a framework that allows you to fill in the gaps. And I think it can be incredibly powerful and essentialized, but it’s challenging.
It’s hard, and it cuts a little bit against the kind of American obsession with naturalism in theatrical space, and it’s something that you have to work at a little bit, but it can be really, really extraordinary. I mean, some of my work that I’m the proudest of had an immensely simple, scaled-back muscularity about it.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk about your brand new play, Maybe Happy Ending. And for our listeners, I want to share that I’m going to be biased with some of my questions, I think, because honestly, this is one of the best plays I’ve ever seen in my life, and I have been going to Broadway since I was 13 years old, and you all know that I’m now in my sixties. That’s a lot of plays. So let’s talk about the play, Dane.
Dane Laffrey:
Let’s do it.
Debbie Millman:
The show is about two retired helper robots called Helper Bots. They’re named Oliver and Claire, but the set is not really sci-fi oriented. In fact, it feels what I’m going to be calling a bit, post mid-century modern nostalgic with a very, of the moment visual gestalt. Don’t know if that’s in any way what you intended, but that’s the sense that I got. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach designing this very unusual, very innovative set?
Dane Laffrey:
There’s a few things and you’ve hit on a bunch of the important parts. It’s a story that we need to weigh into because it’s something we don’t immediately know. It is an imagined near future. I think the circumstances involving sentient AI beings navigating the world is increasingly close to us and something that feels increasingly believable, but nonetheless, there was a gap to bridge. So I think we knew that in presenting this world, we wanted to lean away from the need to mythologize a kind of sci-fi universe and instead really focus closely on the characters and their lives and as such, present them inside spaces.
And their two sort of apartments are really important part of the story, mostly in that they’re not supposed to leave them. They’ve basically been placed there until such a time as they can’t turn on anymore. Those places felt like something we could hold onto, that didn’t feel like they had this sort of burnished quality of a sci-fi architecture, that instead they felt a little having fallen into disrepair, that it had a kind of roughness about it that I think is really relatable. Conjuring that aspect of the world is an important thing. The other thing that for those who see it and will know that it moves a lot at a tremendous pace, and that’s baked into the writing.
I think when I read it, I was like, “Oh my.” To really do this justice and because it is so much about two beings deciding to boldly leave the space that they’re not supposed to leave and go on an adventure. And it felt like we had to really take the audience with them, that this is about an experience opening up and expanding and really taking these beings beyond what they thought was possible. And so we wanted to try and give the audience a similar experience. So we needed to build a machine that would do that, that would really be able to convey this idea and convey these wonderful helper bots on an amazing journey and take the audience with them.
And so I believe really strongly that in theater design where you are frequently needing to present multiple places in one evening, that all of those places have the same kind of visual value that they are… Well, these are the main sets, and then these are these other little sets that are a bit of a throwaway, and there’s a tradition in musical theater of the kind of well-made scenes that are written to be done in one, in front of a curtain so that the set can be changed behind it then you go back to the big set. I sort of reject that idea in contemporary theater making. I think that if you’re going to do 75 locations, those 75 locations have to have a set of equal value.
So we needed a set of tools that would allow us to do that, which is a huge ask. It’s an enormous problem. So another important aspect of it that is also again just written in is the idea that we go inside these people’s minds. We are let into their memory bank to see really critical pieces of information. It’s how we learn about them. It’s information that they share with each other, and that is something that we knew we had to do. There are entire characters that only exist in this format.
So a video element, an element that was going to be digital on some level felt like it was going to be a part of this world, and that we would need to address that and find a way to completely integrate it into the rest of the design so that it felt indistinguishable from the physical elements. And that’s something we worked really, really hard to do. So those were the sort of ingredients sitting in the pot before we even put the pot on the stove that we knew we had to address, come to terms with.
Debbie Millman:
Maybe Happy Ending has perhaps the most technological visual beauty I’ve seen in a Broadway show, but it’s a real counterpoint to the deep humanity embedded in this story about robots. And the design in many ways seems to erase the boundaries between technology and humanity. There are dream sequences, time sequences, erasure sequences, atmospheric sequences that are just breathtaking. Where did these ideas come from and how were you able to bring them to life?
Dane Laffrey:
Well, first, thank you. That’s an incredibly lovely assessment of this work. Again, I think basically everything you described is asked for in the story. And I love the way that you’re talking about the sort of tension between the coolness of the technological world, the literal and figurative kind of neon edge on it all mixed with the most surprisingly human story, which I think is the magic of the show is that you come in thinking you’re going to see a story about robots and you were really holding the mirror up instead, I think that’s a wonderful-
Debbie Millman:
A story about love.
Dane Laffrey:
Exactly, exactly. And so that tension, I love and it feels really important, and I think it’s important that these helper bots feel it. They lack agency in the world, and it’s something that they learn to have, and they make decisions for themselves, which is not something that they’re “programmed” to do. And so they’re navigating a world that really moves around them, that is an idea that I think is woven through the design in an important way. And some of the other… Again, being inside their memories was something that we had to do.
And it was so wonderful because it allowed us to create a visual vocabulary in the video with this immensely talented George Reeve, who is the video designer on the show and my co Tony nominee is that we use those memories, those flashbacks to show the audience how the helper bots see the world and the way that they process things and the way that they kind of myopically focus on the human being in front of them, and that the background is not a thing that they process. And so when we use video, if you look closely at it, it’s treated in exactly the same way. It’s not a photorealistic backdrop, it’s not in the place of scenery.
It is a deliberately digital thing that is precisely the same way that they process the world. And now we’re giving the audience that opportunity. That was really a gift here because it’s one of the hardest things to do as video becomes more and more a part of really of scenic design, actually, because now we’re what? Even five years ago, certainly 10 years ago, was really more like about projection. It was about projecting things on surfaces. Now the surfaces are all LED, and it’s all… So it is physically manifested in the space, and so it really becomes scenic design.
And I’ve taken a much greater interest in it recently because it’s becoming impossible to parse the two things. And I think the point is, you shouldn’t. If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to make it all one thing, and it can be really hard to add digital ingredients to physical space. And I think the opportunity of the relationship between technology as an idea in this show was incredibly helpful in that way.
Debbie Millman:
I remember, I think it was about 20 years ago, seeing Closer on Broadway, and that had a lot of technological innovation embedded in it, but it was really about two characters communicating on two screens, and that felt so mind-blowing. But the interesting thing about Maybe Happy Ending, and I don’t know if this was intentional, but you not only get into the minds and hearts of these robots in a very tangible way, so you go into their internal dialogue, their internal lives, but then there are scenes that take you out into the world so much bigger. The fireflies sequence, which just makes you feel like you are sitting above planet Earth.
I’m sure you did that intentionally, but I just had to bring that up because it was one of the things that I found so remarkable about the sets.
Dane Laffrey:
I mean, I think a big part of what we’re doing is about edge and boundary, that everything up until a point is framed by irises basically, which are kind of… This is-
Debbie Millman:
You have to tell us what that is because a big part, I mean, I’ve read about them, but I think it’s really important for my listeners to know what these irises are.
Dane Laffrey:
Totally. So an iris is kind of an old-fashioned theatrical idea, but it is basically two planes moving horizontally towards the center and one plane moving vertically from out of sight to the floor, and it creates an expanding and contracting frame. And we use them a bunch. We have three of them, and they do a lot of heavy lifting. I mean, they’re a really important part of the machine I was discussing that is about conveyance, but they’re also really about edge and boundary and scale in that we really begin the show in this incredibly tight close-up on a plant, this living thing. It’s also how the show ends, and then it expands a little bit-
Debbie Millman:
Practically another character in this show.
Dane Laffrey:
Indeed, he’s become famous at this point. So we start there and we expand a little bit more and we expand a little bit more. And it introduces a vocabulary that has this sort of cellular vocabulary, almost like a graphic novel, and also some… There’s the filmic reference point. I mean, they can create parallax when moving with several other planes of things that are also moving. And they’re quite amazing things. And again, it’s a nostalgic theatrical idea that is made modern feeling by the fact that they’re lined with these kinds of neon edges that also expand and contract kind of inch by inch as they go, which is some great tech that’s gotten better even since the first time we did it.
But they put everything in this frame, but the frame gets bigger and the frame gets bigger, and then when they leave their homes, it gets bigger still, and it keeps going. And then there’s this amazing moment where it doesn’t exist anymore, and you’re in a field of fireflies that has no edge, it has no boundary, and it is this sort of turning point of the show. It’s a big apotheosis moment, and it’s very emotional, I think.
Debbie Millman:
I was weeping.
Dane Laffrey:
It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. It’s largely conjured by, again, not unlike Parade, by the power of a volume of bodies in space, not to give too much away, but something that has been completely denied to the audience and then something that has been taken away, a boundary that’s taken away. I think there’s some alchemy there that’s pretty powerful.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that one of the things that not only sets this production apart and is a feature in much of the work that you do with Michael Arden is your shared willingness to push dramatic sequences to the limit demanding the kind of precision and timing that leaves no margin for error. And I’ve witnessed that now. And you go on to say that it makes your shows very nerve-wracking for you to watch. How do you manage that kind of stress?
Dane Laffrey:
Not well is the answer. I mean, I really don’t like to sit during the… I prefer to stand for whatever reason… I can’t do anything if something goes wrong. Either something-
Debbie Millman:
Does anything ever go wrong? Does it ever?
Dane Laffrey:
Almost never, almost never.
Debbie Millman:
Good, good.
Dane Laffrey:
But I never want that idea to be misconstrued that we are flippant about safety because we are not. That’s not what we’re talking about.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, no, not at all.
Dane Laffrey:
Nor is it about something that’s unsustainable, because the most important thing about making theater, especially in the commercial space, is about its repeatability in every way. And so what it is though is about taking things, just building things that are intricate and challenging. And if they fail, it’s hard to recover from. It’s hard to get to the next thing. And when you’re moving, and I think our count in Maybe Happy Ending is something like 75 distinct scenic moves, and the show is a hundred minutes long, so every minute and 17 seconds, the set is moving. And so creating situations where the wheels could fall off the bus is a little nerve-wracking.
But also I think it’s essential because I want to believe, and I think it’s true, that there are moments, maybe many moments in Maybe Happy Ending, that the audience cannot understand spatially. They really just cannot parse what’s going on. And I love that. I am really interested in that. I think it’s exciting theatrically. It’s certainly exciting theatrically for me, but I don’t think it’s that wonky. I think an audience can feel the thrill of something that is like, “I don’t know what just happened, but here we are, and here we are again. And here we are again.”
And this is something about that, again, all going back to this core of an idea that we really wanted to take the audience on something that felt profoundly like a journey. An amazing, amazing eye-opening journey, just like the characters do. And so it felt necessary to do that. But we also, as I say, it is a bit of a feature of Michael and my work. You mentioned earlier Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, which we did on Broadway a couple of years ago, and is also a film, and that in many ways shares some DNA with Maybe Happy Ending in terms of how it moves. The difference being that that show is done almost in complete darkness. It’s largely lit by candles or these tiny surgical little shafts of light.
And so this space is just morphing around this person in a way that the audience can’t see. It’s a little more perceptible in Maybe Happy Ending, but there’s similar ideas about just many, many, we call them axes of automation, of things moving in planes or rotating or flying or irising or whatever, all happening at once in a very, very carefully honed relationship to one another. And then with actors in the middle of it and lighting and video, and then you get these sequences, that can be pretty extraordinary. I watch that show and I know that my heart rate goes up. I can feel it. This is what happens to me. It’s often in theater, actually,
Even if the show’s not that complex or something, there’s a heightened thing if it’s my thing. And also sometimes when it’s other people’s things, sometimes I just kind of physiologically react, but-
Debbie Millman:
[Inaudible 00:49:40] live. You’re in the moment. Anything could happen.
Dane Laffrey:
That’s right. And that’s a particular show, where I know all of the things that are coming next, and I just go like, “Oh, God.” I really have to buckle up for it. But it’s fun, it’s okay.
Debbie Millman:
Dane, I have one last question for you. I read that you’re working on upcoming productions of The Lost Boys on Broadway and Hercules in London, and you said that you also want to expand into other mediums, including film and opera and installation, any of those genres on the horizon?
Dane Laffrey:
I’ll break that down. I think the expansion that I’m really interested in at the moment is actually around producing. I find it to be somewhat anomalous in the American theater as compared to the American film industry or the American television industry, where the creatives do not have producing stake inherently, that’s baked in for TV writers, it’s baked in for-
Debbie Millman:
Actors.
Dane Laffrey:
People who created TV shows. That’s baked in for a lot of actors. It’s not happening in the theater in a real way. It happens a little bit more in the UK.
Debbie Millman:
You co-produced Parade, right? Is that correct?
Dane Laffrey:
We did. As well as Maybe Happy Ending. We also co-produced Sunset Boulevard this year and The Roommate, and that’s feeling very interesting to me because I think there’s a siloing that can happen between the creative side and the producing side that I find, and I think that Michael finds… He’s my producing partner as well as my creative partner.
We both find that a little counterproductive, and we find that when we are able to have more holistic conversation around every aspect of what’s happening from the creative side to the business side, and the inevitable and profound intersection of those things in the commercial theater, we get a better result and something more sustainable and more interesting is made, and people understand it a little bit better. And so I’m very, very interested in that.
Debbie Millman:
Dane Laffrey, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Dane Laffrey:
Thank you. It was an immense pleasure.
Debbie Millman:
To learn more about Dane’s work, you can go to his website at danelaffrey.com. To see more of Dane’s work, go to the Broadway show, Maybe Happy Ending. This is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced for TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
