See Rock City
Photo Credit: Renee McVety
See Rock City is a 4-person straight play that opened January 5th, 2019 as part of the 18-19 season of Venice Theatre, directed by Peter Ivanov.
Set in the small town of Corbine, Kentucky during the tail end of World War II, See Rock City is the second play in a trilogy written by Arlene Hutton that follows the story of Raleigh and May as they continue to find their places in life. Much of the plot has many parallels to our current world and I personally found the play to be really open ended in its interpretation of how it could apply to any family’s struggles at any point in American history.
When I began work on this show, I was coming off of a long production of South Pacific that I designed and mixed, and was eager to turn my attention to different forms of audio expression. The mental energy that would normally be allocated to equalizing 20 vocal microphones could now be used for other things as this play was performed in a 92-seat black box theatre with no mics. Since this was my second show with Peter Ivanov, and the first being the first show in the trilogy, Last Train to Nibroc, we knew each other’s strengths quite well, and had little if any concerns about where we would land artistically in the direction we wanted the sound to go in. After some discussion, I decided to install a 5.0 surround system (a subwoofer just wasn’t necessary) in the space in the pursuit of sound localization.
The set (designed by Brian Freeman) was the front porch of a lower-middle class family a few blocks away from the center of town, not necessarily in a heavily populated area, but not out in the boonies. All 6 scenes took place on and around the porch, and the characters make many references to the cars driving by on the street and the world outside of the porch, that which blends into the black paint of the ceiling and walls just beyond the set. I wanted to bring that world to life and give the audience a sense of the three-dimensional space these characters were in, which is what led me to localized audio through 5 speakers.
The main left and right speakers were hung in the left and right corners of the room framing the top of the set, angled slightly inwards in a very conventional style. The back left and right speakers were hung directly over the left and right audience pods. In a conventional 5 speaker surround-sound system, the last speaker would be used as a center channel, however I chose to place this speaker in a small piece of scenery behind the fence to the backyard. This implied workshop was referenced constantly throughout the show, talking about May’s father who was always toiling away at various projects.
The first 4 channels were used to maximize the immersion of ambient loops that I sourced and/or created for each of the 6 scenes, corresponding to the time of day. The result was a feeling of really being inside the scene with the actors as opposed to watching the scene take place from a traditional audience position. The workshop speaker emitted many curated radio broadcasts from WWII, evoking feelings of dread, anxiety, levity, and grave seriousness as we progress through the last 2 years of the war. The workshop speaker also emitted all kinds of hammering, sawing, and tool sounds to further the illusion of a character building furniture while keeping up with the current events.
The radio broadcasts facilitated the scene changes and communicated various passages of time, all the while presenting the exact opposite of the feelings of the main characters throughout the plot. At the top of the show, we hear messages of the D-Day invasion and the stress it’s putting on the soldiers and those who are at home worrying about them. May and Raleigh enter fresh off of their honeymoon, excited to begin the rest of their lives together. By the end of the story, we hear the genuine hope in the voice of an announcer talking about children in Poland finally knowing what an orange might taste like now that the bloodshed is over, while May and Raleigh realize that their respective “proper” places in life at this moment are not together, and they must leave to pursue their true needs. This juxtaposition furthers the notion that these characters don’t belong in the world they find themselves in, and have to find ways to adapt.