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ShowbizU: Finding Inspiration for a Scenic Design- Adrian Jones

Name: ShowbizU: Finding Inspiration for a Scenic Design- Adrian Jones
Uploaded: 2014-03-04T20:14:38+00:00
Duration: 1 min 36 s
Channel: Tim Kashani
Description: In this interview excerpt, scenic designer Adrian Jones explains his collaborative approach to designing theatrical sets. He emphasizes starting…

4 Mar 2014 · 2 min

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1:36

In this interview excerpt, scenic designer Adrian Jones explains his collaborative approach to designing theatrical sets. He emphasizes starting conversations with directors by focusing on the story rather than presenting extensive visual research, using only occasional images or on‑the‑spot photos when helpful. Jones notes that while some projects demand rapid, image‑heavy development, he prefers a slower, narrative‑driven dialogue when time allows. He illustrates this philosophy with his work on the Goodspeed Musicals production of Damn Yankees, which has been re‑imagined with a Boston Red Sox setting at Fenway Park. To capture the iconic Green Monster, Jones drew inspiration from a recent New York Times photo essay that documented every pockmark and baseball smudge on the wall, using those textures as a conceptual springboard for the set design.

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I just end up talking about the play in the first meeting with the director. I don't— I rarely bring in a bunch of images and research. I often really just want to talk about the story, and I sometimes have ideas about what are interesting things that I've been looking at and things like that. Maybe if somebody's got an iPhone, we pull up some photos or something like that. There are cases where, you know, where the process is very quick and you have to kind of bring a ton of stuff in very quickly, but often if there is time, I prefer to, you know, to really talk about the story because I feel like that's the thing that gets lost, that conversation gets lost very quickly. I mean, I think that, you know, for example, I'm doing a production of Damn Yankees at Goodspeed Musicals, and one of the inspiring things for me with that was it's this new version of the play that was done— I forget when it was rewritten— but to be the Boston Red Sox as opposed to the Washington Senators. And so it's Fenway Park, and so we're doing the show, you know, the bulk of the show takes place in Fenway, and I was like, you know, we have to deal with Fenway in some way. And there was just recently this great piece in the New York Times. A photographer had just done this study of the Green Monster, and he'd taken photographs of every single pockmark in the Green Monster before they got painted over green again, and the kind of smudge of the baseball as it hit this piece of metal. And it was this beautiful photo essay in the Times, and that was the big jumping-off point for me for that show, just these gorgeous photographs. And how they kind of— this wall just became this textural kind of piece of living, organic thing that reflected the lives of the people around it. We're working on trying to find a way to do that in the set somehow.