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labricoleuseDISCLAIMER AND SPOILER WARNING:
This post contains major SPOILERS for Marat/Sade, both in terms of a shocking scene and how a stage effect was achieved.
Caveat lector.
I mentioned in my prior post on the Nickleby flogging effect that during tech of Janos Szazs's production of Marat/Sade at the American Repertory Theatre, i was asked for "some type of appliance" by which a performer could sew his lips shut onstage with grotesque bloody realism from as close as 10', and that could be applied onstage in full view of the audience in a split second with his back turned without him exiting the stage. I promised i'd explain how, so here we go.
If you are not familiar with the show, the premise is that you are watching a play-within-a-play. The Marquis de Sade, after being convicted of crimes against nature, was confined to an insane asylum at Charenton. Facilities for the mentally ill being what they were at the time, he was in there with all manner of people--sex addicts, narcoleptics, schizophrenics, autistic people, former prostitutes with advanced syphilis, transvestites, anyone outside the norm whom society deemed "crazy." Because de Sade was an intelligent, educated aristocrat (just an unrepentant perv), he wrote and staged plays with the inmates as his theatrical company, as a means for occupying himself in the facility. This is actual history--it became the fashion in upper-class society to go see the performances, in fact. Marat/Sade is ostensibly one of these plays, the full title of which is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Every actor is playing an inmate with some type of mental disability or condition or characteristic for which they've been institutionalized, who is playing a role in a show about Jean-Paul Marat's assassination. At the beginning, period-costumed "aristocrats" come in and actually sit in the audience, and at the end, de Sade incites the inmates to riot and they pull those aristocrats onstage, some of the aristocrats and guards are beaten or slaughtered, and the inmates try to take over the asylum as the curtain falls.
In the defense of the entire production team, this was a completely unforeseen emergency problem. We knew from early on in the rehearsal process that this performer (the legendary Alvin Epstein, in the role of "The Herald") would be stitching his lips shut onstage in the finale riot. My manager had hired a makeup artist to design the effect using latex prosthetics, which the actor would then apply and literally stitch through onstage. It was only during tech that we discovered two problems: there was no means for him to get offstage to apply the prosthetics, and when the makeup tech demonstrated the effect for him in the dressing room, apparently it was so disgustingly realistic that he passed out.
So, obviously when you have a performer who is SUPREMELY discomfited by a stage effect, plus no actual means for enacting the effect in the time and circumstance required, you have to find another solution, and nobody (including me, in fact) wanted that solution to be "cut the lip-sewing effect." It was really an extremely important part of Epstein's Herald's character progression and his response to the riot. There just had to be some way to achieve the effect by instantaneous means which could accommodate a hemophobic performer.
How we wound up doing it really was a community effort.
The day we got a note on it, my manager came back from lunch with a thermosetting mouth guard like this one, intended to be worn for contact sports. She brought it into my office and said, "I don't know, i thought maybe you could do something with this." Then she set it down and left. I remember staring at it with my assistant, thinking, "Ew," and then getting back to the list of notes we had that we did know how to do--more distressing on costumes, fixing hats, rubberizing shoes. I didn't know how the mouth guard was going to work, but i figured it would come to me, and just went on mental autopilot.
At the ART, the Props department was in charge of blood (at the time, may not be the case now). They did a lot of bloody shows, and the props folks mixed the stage blood and made the heat-sealed custom-size blood packs and rigged most of the trigger effects. One of the propbuilders was next to come in, and she had some of the bite-triggered fake blood capsules that were going to be a part of the original latex prosthetic effect. She brought them up so we could see the size, saying she thought it might be useful.
I was T-pinning some hat-thing to a dolly head when it hit me how to do it. I distinctly recall sticking 3 T-pins in my mouth, point-in so just the crossbar of the T stuck out of my mouth vertically like stitches, and hopping around the shop, gesticulating wildly and going, "MMMMM! MMM MMM MMMMMMM MMM MM!!!" (I know we're often told never to put pins in our mouths, and that's good advice; this was research though, dangit.)
We fit the guard to the performer's bite, then cut away almost all of the ridges that run around the exterior of the teeth to avoid too much of a "puffy boxer mouth" look, leaving only a small ridge which helped contribute to the realism of the sewn-lips effect. The false stitches were T-shaped black wire inserts that went into the dense rubber in the middle of the guard, and on one wire we tied a long thick black heavy string with a large blunt-tipped needle strung onto it and secured with a knot. Blood capsules were preloaded into each side of the molar area of the bite before each show.
The whole rig fit into a small special vinyl-lined pocket in the costume, and in the melee of the final riot, the actor could surreptitiously pull the capsule-loaded bite guard out of the pocket, put it into his mouth and bite down to trigger the trickling blood effect, mime sewing a couple stitches and then wander along the front of the stage weeping and bleeding with the "needle and thread" dangling from the corner of his mouth. I have no photos, of either the appliance on its own or in-use, to my deep regret. Still, i think you can imagine it quite well just from description when you know what it was.
The whole stage was made of stainless steel with a huge trough running down the center of it (which you can see if you click on some of the production photos linked on the show site), the floor sloping on either side down toward the trough. At the end of the riot right before curtain, some of the guards turned actual firehoses on all the inmates as part of the melee, knocking them down with the high-powered jets of water and completely hosing down the entire stage. In the course of this mania, often most of the blood effect was rinsed away so that the performer didn't even actually have to look at much residual fake blood at the end of the night taking off his makeup. Win!
I have to say, even though I knew exactly how the effect was done, when i went to see the show I made a point of looking at it with a critical eye, and it was completely and totally disturbingly realistically disgusting in the best, most satisfying of ways. Definitely a theatrical experience i will never forget!
This post contains major SPOILERS for Marat/Sade, both in terms of a shocking scene and how a stage effect was achieved.
Caveat lector.
I mentioned in my prior post on the Nickleby flogging effect that during tech of Janos Szazs's production of Marat/Sade at the American Repertory Theatre, i was asked for "some type of appliance" by which a performer could sew his lips shut onstage with grotesque bloody realism from as close as 10', and that could be applied onstage in full view of the audience in a split second with his back turned without him exiting the stage. I promised i'd explain how, so here we go.
If you are not familiar with the show, the premise is that you are watching a play-within-a-play. The Marquis de Sade, after being convicted of crimes against nature, was confined to an insane asylum at Charenton. Facilities for the mentally ill being what they were at the time, he was in there with all manner of people--sex addicts, narcoleptics, schizophrenics, autistic people, former prostitutes with advanced syphilis, transvestites, anyone outside the norm whom society deemed "crazy." Because de Sade was an intelligent, educated aristocrat (just an unrepentant perv), he wrote and staged plays with the inmates as his theatrical company, as a means for occupying himself in the facility. This is actual history--it became the fashion in upper-class society to go see the performances, in fact. Marat/Sade is ostensibly one of these plays, the full title of which is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Every actor is playing an inmate with some type of mental disability or condition or characteristic for which they've been institutionalized, who is playing a role in a show about Jean-Paul Marat's assassination. At the beginning, period-costumed "aristocrats" come in and actually sit in the audience, and at the end, de Sade incites the inmates to riot and they pull those aristocrats onstage, some of the aristocrats and guards are beaten or slaughtered, and the inmates try to take over the asylum as the curtain falls.
In the defense of the entire production team, this was a completely unforeseen emergency problem. We knew from early on in the rehearsal process that this performer (the legendary Alvin Epstein, in the role of "The Herald") would be stitching his lips shut onstage in the finale riot. My manager had hired a makeup artist to design the effect using latex prosthetics, which the actor would then apply and literally stitch through onstage. It was only during tech that we discovered two problems: there was no means for him to get offstage to apply the prosthetics, and when the makeup tech demonstrated the effect for him in the dressing room, apparently it was so disgustingly realistic that he passed out.
So, obviously when you have a performer who is SUPREMELY discomfited by a stage effect, plus no actual means for enacting the effect in the time and circumstance required, you have to find another solution, and nobody (including me, in fact) wanted that solution to be "cut the lip-sewing effect." It was really an extremely important part of Epstein's Herald's character progression and his response to the riot. There just had to be some way to achieve the effect by instantaneous means which could accommodate a hemophobic performer.
How we wound up doing it really was a community effort.
The day we got a note on it, my manager came back from lunch with a thermosetting mouth guard like this one, intended to be worn for contact sports. She brought it into my office and said, "I don't know, i thought maybe you could do something with this." Then she set it down and left. I remember staring at it with my assistant, thinking, "Ew," and then getting back to the list of notes we had that we did know how to do--more distressing on costumes, fixing hats, rubberizing shoes. I didn't know how the mouth guard was going to work, but i figured it would come to me, and just went on mental autopilot.
At the ART, the Props department was in charge of blood (at the time, may not be the case now). They did a lot of bloody shows, and the props folks mixed the stage blood and made the heat-sealed custom-size blood packs and rigged most of the trigger effects. One of the propbuilders was next to come in, and she had some of the bite-triggered fake blood capsules that were going to be a part of the original latex prosthetic effect. She brought them up so we could see the size, saying she thought it might be useful.
I was T-pinning some hat-thing to a dolly head when it hit me how to do it. I distinctly recall sticking 3 T-pins in my mouth, point-in so just the crossbar of the T stuck out of my mouth vertically like stitches, and hopping around the shop, gesticulating wildly and going, "MMMMM! MMM MMM MMMMMMM MMM MM!!!" (I know we're often told never to put pins in our mouths, and that's good advice; this was research though, dangit.)
We fit the guard to the performer's bite, then cut away almost all of the ridges that run around the exterior of the teeth to avoid too much of a "puffy boxer mouth" look, leaving only a small ridge which helped contribute to the realism of the sewn-lips effect. The false stitches were T-shaped black wire inserts that went into the dense rubber in the middle of the guard, and on one wire we tied a long thick black heavy string with a large blunt-tipped needle strung onto it and secured with a knot. Blood capsules were preloaded into each side of the molar area of the bite before each show.
The whole rig fit into a small special vinyl-lined pocket in the costume, and in the melee of the final riot, the actor could surreptitiously pull the capsule-loaded bite guard out of the pocket, put it into his mouth and bite down to trigger the trickling blood effect, mime sewing a couple stitches and then wander along the front of the stage weeping and bleeding with the "needle and thread" dangling from the corner of his mouth. I have no photos, of either the appliance on its own or in-use, to my deep regret. Still, i think you can imagine it quite well just from description when you know what it was.
The whole stage was made of stainless steel with a huge trough running down the center of it (which you can see if you click on some of the production photos linked on the show site), the floor sloping on either side down toward the trough. At the end of the riot right before curtain, some of the guards turned actual firehoses on all the inmates as part of the melee, knocking them down with the high-powered jets of water and completely hosing down the entire stage. In the course of this mania, often most of the blood effect was rinsed away so that the performer didn't even actually have to look at much residual fake blood at the end of the night taking off his makeup. Win!
I have to say, even though I knew exactly how the effect was done, when i went to see the show I made a point of looking at it with a critical eye, and it was completely and totally disturbingly realistically disgusting in the best, most satisfying of ways. Definitely a theatrical experience i will never forget!
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-17 06:28 pm (UTC)Heh. Yet again you have captured the moment perfectly with your words.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 02:49 am (UTC)Like "we need erectile phalluses that can explode in a shower of confetti" or "we need a remote-controlled lactating bra" or "we need an actual taxidermy donkey head"...