ShowbizU: Scenic Designer David Gallo

You know, it's funny when you say, where did I start? I mean, I suppose you would have to kind of decide how far down the rabbit hole you really wanted to go. You know, I was born in the mid-1960s and had a military family. So fortunate for me, I suppose I grew up overseas and in the, you know, in the 1970s, which was a time when there wasn't a real cross-cultural thing. You know, I mean, I lived in Madrid, you know, talking about living in Madrid in 1970. '74, culturally and politically and all of that, you know, I wasn't completely aware of everything that was going on, but it was a country very much in its raw state. And so family vacations, rather than to, say, a place like, oh, I don't know, the Grand Canyon, we would go to Toledo, you know, or we would go to, you know, some sort of interesting, you know, location, Casa del Sol. Morocco, Northern Africa. I mean, these were family vacations. You know, we had a— it was the military. My parents brought their suburban station wagon over because the military moved your car, and we would load it up with whatever, and just like Americans, but we were going to, you know, interesting places to me, you know. So I think that that informed my direction a little more than it might. And then it wasn't until many years later I started to do gain an interest in film. And I talk about this in some other publications, but it was the movie Star Wars that was sort of groundbreaking for me in so many ways. Sort of led me to the idea of design, you know, because George Lucas, who, you know, wrote and directed the film, did an amazing thing that he took all of the art department, just went through, gathered up all of the art department, materials and just published it. I mean, how did that happen? And so when I was a kid, I was getting these books, flipping through them, and there was the original sketches. You could watch the development of an idea all the way from a napkin to a fully articulated puppet. And then I went into a stage, and then I said, oh, this is even better. Um, 1980, my freshman year of high school, the very first day, I, uh, met a teacher who thought that theater would be a good fit for me. And so they were doing Pippin, and I went to the theater that Saturday and never left. Literally, they couldn't find me for years. I mean, truthfully, they would call— attendants, they would call my mother saying, where's your son? He didn't come to school today. And she'd say, no, he's around the stage somewhere. You can find him. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for me through high school and such to, I thought, be a full theater professional. So I summer stocked one year, and while I was a summer stock there, I stole the draftings out of the dumpster, and I would replicate the drawings. I didn't even have a drawing table, but I bought a T-square and some paper, and I would actually replicate the scale drawings with my own scale rule and my own triangle and my own little T-square. So that was kind of when I learned how to draw, that sort of thing. And I'd go to the library and I'd take books out, and a lot of the books were textbooks written 40, 50, 60 years earlier, but it didn't mean anything to me. So I was learning a lot of very sort of old technique. I thought it was sort of cool years later that I was learning a lot of primal stuff when it comes to making theater. But then I went to SUNY Purchase for scenic design and spent 4 years there but didn't graduate. I think the biggest shock was that I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life doing Williams and Shakespeare and Chekhov. I mean, I honestly got— if you come to me in 1986, I would never believe you if you told me that the rest of my life wasn't going to be Molière plays. It wouldn't make any sense to me because I was doing Molière plays. Everybody I knew was doing Molière plays. It's all we did in school. I mean, not all, you know, we were very well-rounded, but you know, you have to read that stuff. It's the classic stuff. Can you imagine the shock to— oh, I'm not going to be playing Cherry Orchard for the rest of my life? And now I just got offered a Shakespeare recently and I met with the director only, no other reason. She came, she said, I sort of heard you can't do it. And I wasn't insulting. I really wanted to meet this woman. She had done amazing shit. She was a lot younger than me and I was just in awe of her. He said, "Well, it's cool to come here, but why?" I said, "Because you asked me!" Nobody asked me. I went to a very strong conservatory training theater program, so it wasn't very book-heavy at all. It was constantly in production, so, and it was basically right about there. So, it's 19 and a half minutes that way, you know, so the immersion into New York City was started day one. There wasn't a huge separation so much between a SUNY Purchase student and the real world. At least there was enough of a connection that a lot of things weren't a shock. There was always that phrase, "In New York." The very first thing I did in New York, which never really meant anything to me because this is me, but you know, I was Long Island. I went to high school on Long Island, but the very first thing I did in this city was a huge success. Production of Makanaw with Michael Greif at Naked Angels, which was again, was really weird. I mean, it was like, it was like one of the very first things that I did and then moved to the Public and I got a Drama Desk Award nomination. I didn't even go to the ceremony because I had nothing to wear. Well, you know, it was like, you were all like poor theater kids, you know, and there I was in my little apartment designing some sets and building it in this little tiny Chelsea place and painting it all. And next thing you know, we were doing it at the Public. It was the strangest thing. It separated me from a lot of life. I think that I would have benefited more. I would have benefited more maybe. I was not a meteoric rise to success, but I didn't really have a low— or I didn't start anywhere near the bottom in the sense that I knew a lot of people, had a lot of job prospects when I started in this town. I mean, I had a couple of really successful things early. How the hell that happened? But I was. Not all the time, but it happened a couple times. And, um, it was weird. I mean, it was cool, but the directors, you know, usually, usually directors were more established than me, so it was kind of like fulfilling something. But they were great collaborations.