In this interview, scenic designer Adrian Jones recounts his lifelong immersion in theater and film, beginning with assisting on his father's film sets and high‑school productions. A pivotal childhood memory was seeing Ming Cho Lee’s massive ice‑wall set for K2 on Broadway, which, along with the work of Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson at BAM, shaped his belief that set design should be sculptural and experiential rather than merely illustrative. Jones studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles before pursuing graduate work in New Haven, training in set, lighting, video, and occasional costume design. He launched his professional career with the now‑defunct New York company Synapse Productions, emphasizing the importance of new plays for creative growth. Over time he collaborated with notable directors such as Tom Lynch, Baz Luhrmann, Adrian Lobel, and Andy Jackness, moving from small downtown shows to larger regional productions. Jones stresses that his focus remains on set design, often integrating lighting and video but never working on those elements alone. He offers practical mentorship advice for assistants, highlighting initiative, problem‑solving, drafting and model‑making skills, and the ability to manage a production during emergencies, illustrating his own experiences handing over shows when personal crises arose.
Chapters
I'm one of those rare people who started doing theater in high school and kept doing it. My father made films when I was a kid, and I, and I loved film, uh, working. I was— I helped out as a PA on the art department on his sets and stuff like that, but I never was fully satisfied by it. I was always frustrated by the fact that never was everybody in the same room In college, I continued doing a lot of theater. And so, you know, when I was growing up in New York, you know, you have the best theater in the world. One of the biggest memories of my childhood in the theater and Broadway was seeing Ming Cho Lee's K2 on Broadway, this ice wall of, you know, 20, 25-foot-tall ice wall in the middle of a Broadway theater. They ripped out the floor, they put out the ceiling. You couldn't see the top of the wall. You couldn't see the bottom of the wall. And this, you know, the story with two actors took place on the face of the set. And it made an indelible impression on me. Some of the big inspirations for me were people like Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson. You know, seeing work of theirs at places like BAM, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where you saw something that was totally outside of what the traditional Broadway realm was. And as a designer, those pieces were the most exciting things. Because they were really, they were sculptural. They treated theater not as kind of a way to illustrate or to pretend, but as a way to experience. They were sculptural pieces, and they were rooted around dance and image-making in a way that you don't see often, and you still don't see often. And then yeah, coming through college, I did theater all through college. I went to college out here in Los Angeles at Occidental College, and then, then came back to the East Coast to go to graduate school a while after that. I was always interested in set design and then also lighting design, video design, and costume design to varying degrees at different times. And I still do a little bit of lighting design. A show of mine that I did in New York with Rich Maxwell is touring Europe that I did sets and lights for. I've done costumes, but very infrequently, in conjunction with sets. And I would never do lights or costumes alone. I would only do it in conjunction with a set. Set. So I've always been— my focus has always been on set design. My first step out of school was— I had been in New York. I moved back to New York from New Haven. And it was largely finding interesting people to work for, looking for people who were— and looking for people who were doing interesting work to design. I wound up doing a lot of shows with a company that's now defunct in New York called Synapse Productions, and we did a whole bunch of interesting little shows, small shows downtown. And I worked on some new plays here and there. And some of the most exciting stuff is always the new work. When you work on the small shows and you get out of school, I always tell people, always focus on the new work and people who are writing new work, because I feel like that's the thing that, as designers and as creative artists, it feeds us the most. So I worked on as much of that as I could. And then I was working for people like Tom Lynch and Baz Luhrmann and Adrian Lobel and Andy Jackness and people like that, who were really great to work for at different levels. As a designer, I mean, I got a handful— I had a handful of little shows in New York. And then I started getting decent-sized regional shows. And I started not doing less set design, maybe 2 or 3 years after I had been in graduate school. And then, you know, 4 or 5 years after grad school, I pretty much stopped doing any assisting, with a rare exception. But before that, I was kind of doing both. I would be in somebody's office, and I would run out to take a meeting during lunch, and come back, and, you know, the balancing act. And, you know, it's hard, actually. Sometimes, you know, you go out for tech and somebody needs you in their studio, and But most designers are understanding of that. Good people also have careers of their own, and they work around your schedule. If somebody to assist me, I'm looking for somebody who has initiative, who can look at a problem and solve the problem as a designer themselves. I think that when I was a good designer, I solved problems when I was assisting. When I was a good assistant, I solved problems for the designers I was working for. I saw something, I anticipated the problem, and I made the solution work within the design. When I did not do a good job as an assistant, I waited for somebody to tell me how to solve the problem, and I didn't solve the problem on my own. And I think that that's the biggest thing. Of course, there's things like, you know, know how to draft and know how to make a model. But those things, you know, I can handle a technical deficiency if you don't, if you're a self-starter coming into my studio and working from scratch on something. Sometimes, you know, I've had shows where I've had a family emergency and I've had to hand the whole show over to somebody. And some assistants can take that on and some assistants can't. I've said, you know, I'm gonna be around, you're gonna email me PDFs once every couple of days, and I'll look at them and I'll mark them up, and you're gonna draft the entire show, and I'm not gonna be doing any of it. And that happens. And, you know, in some cases, in the two recent cases where that's happened, I've had really good people helping me.
