Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really
By Kate Hamill
Direction: Dr. Radhica Ganapathy
Scenic Design: Daney Brookover
Costume Design: Spencer Lawlor
Lighting Design: Koltin Davis
Sound Design: Professor Alan McEwen
Technical Direction: Abby Bender
This was the first production I technical directed for WVU at the historic Metropolitan Theatre, an over 100 year old venue with a mixture of rope and sandbag as well as motorized linesets. BFA student Daney Brookover's capstone scenic design featured a large castle on a turntable, which took up all of my efforts. I worked with my first ATD on this production in the form of BFA student Dylan Burmeister- Morrison.
Renderings and model by
Daney Brookover
Dr. Ganapathy's direction presentation gave Ms. Brookover a starting point that was very much represented in the initial design: drama/spectacle, scale, old world, movement/revolving. The centerpiece of the world was to be a spinning, curved castle with two levels, supported all around by gothic arches featuring flowing fabric as well as two jackknife platforms to represent Lucy Westenra's bedroom as well as Renfield's cell in the asylum.
Dracula was alloted an initial budget of $5,000, with 300 build hours and 150 load-in hours. The budgeting process for this show took around five passes and boosts in all of the budgetary categories. The approved budget was within the new goal of $7,000, with 450 build hours and 225 load-in hours. Due to the budgeting process taking place over the summer, the approved budget came a mere six weeks before school was to start, leaving myself and my assistant with little time to draft.
The finalized groundplan had eliminated the jackknife platforms as well as made the castle more angular in nature, which helped cut down on the money and time needed to build it. The ATD's units were everything but the turntable and the castle, leaving us with a pretty even split in the amount of drafting we had to do, if not in number of units.
Mockup of the castle went well, but there were several learning moments for me that I carried through into future builds. I trusted too much in the material fitting together exactly as it did in AutoCAD, leading to a need to take off several pieces of facing on the upper level and replace them to make the seams easier for the paint department to hide.
I also hadn't planned the foam quoining stones well enough, and mistakenly assumed that 3M Fastbond (green glue) would still be active after sitting overnight, which resulted in every single quoining stone needing to be remade and reapplied while paints was trying to get the rest of the castle painted at the same time.
Trucking the set downtown to the venue went great, and install went smoothly as well. Getting the turntable spinning with the castle on top of it was a highlight of the process for me, as I had never been TD on a show with a turntable before.
A learning curve for me was with the turntable itself: my lack of experience meant that I had to learn how to make the table spin the direction I wanted on the fly, and Spikemark (the operation software we were using) doesn't have a simple button to change the direction of a cue. I had to learn that the software thinks of the position of the turntable as one on a spiral with infinite degrees, rather than a single circle with only 360.
All photos on this page were taken by me
After opening, a note about the turntable stopping mid-cue appeared. Faculty TD Professor Steven Neuenschwander and I ran hundreds of cues and weren't able to duplicate the issue. I stayed backstage during a performance and found out that there was a positioning fault that was due to additional weight from cast and furniture that was causing the drive wheel to slip. We were able to tighten up the drive wheel and the rest of the run continued without incident.