This season OSF welcomes five new scenic designers who are creating the physical worlds for four of the five productions opening at the top of the season, as well as one of the outdoor shows:

• Collette Pollard, based in Chicago, is set desiger for Great Expectations.
• Mariana Sanchez, a designer with a background in architecture and now based in New York, has created the set for The River Bride.
• Regina García, also based in Chicago, has designed the set for The Yeomen of the Guard.
•  Los Angeles-based Sara Ryung Clement created both the set and the costumes for Vietgone.
• In June, Hamlet, designed by Laura Jellinek, will open in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre.

For Artistic Director Bill Rauch, having seven female scenic designers here this year—Rachel Hauck and Sibyl Wickersheimer are returning to OSF for Roe and Richard II, respectively—was “no accident,” he said. “Female designers are vastly underrepresented in our field, and we want to continue to expand opportunities for the extraordinary women working in the American theatre today in all design disciplines at OSF.”

The present and future do look brighter for women in scenic design as they gain greater visibility and recognition. García notes that when she was working on her MFA in 2000 she knew of only a handful of women designers who were actively working in the field regionally. Fifteen years later, she personally knows at least 20. She and the other women designing this season have taught or currently are teaching in undergraduate or graduate programs, and often find more women than men in their classes. Anecdotally, while men still seem to rise up the ladder more quickly, established women designers are growing a network of support and providing opportunities for younger women entering the field.

Each of these designers is paired with a director she’s never worked with before. Theatrical artists frequently work with new directors and teams, but the demands of OSF’s repertory schedule can place unique pressures on the teams and their designs. The set must break into pieces that can be shifted on and off the stage daily by the stage operations crew for between 36 and 120 performances over six to nine months. Sets must fit into storage backstage with two or three others. In a new twist, since more shows are touring to other theatres, all sets are now being designed to easily break down for transport.

The designers have varying but often similar approaches to a new project. Here’s a brief look at their processes as they dove into their projects and changed their designs as they learned more about the demands of OSF’s rep format and collaborated with their design teams.

As they researched 19th-century London, Collette Pollard and director Penny Metropulos gathered reams of visual imagery to help define texture and color. “It was important to look at the historical world in terms of texture,” Pollard says. The common element they found in their research and in the story was wooden planks—in the prison ships (known as “hulks”), the village churchyard, the Gargery home, Miss Havisham’s house. The planks also serve as ramps and walkways to help physicalize the journeys of the characters and create a space so the story can move forward.

Of course, theatre being theatre, Pollard notes, “It’s a huge wood-plank set, and there’s not a single wood plank onstage.” Real two-inch-thick planks would be too heavy to move in rep and have less integrity over the required spans, so the Scene Shop built steel-framed, stress-skin platforms, painted and textured to look like wood, which can support the actors and limit the amount of structure needed to satisfy the span.

The set is big. The scene shop affectionately dubbed the back wall, “The Great Wall,” but it can be broken down. Pollard’s first design was less so. “You don’t learn rep until you do it here at OSF,” she says. “I had a fully submitted and fully modeled design. It was beautiful, but I pulled the plug. The amount of work the staff would have to do and the load-in for rep wasn’t worth it.” The textures of the world and the space for journeys didn’t change with the newer design, however, and she’s pleased with the set and the amazing work of the shops. “The set sits in the space and feels like it belongs,” she explains, “and also it presents a world beyond the stage.”

Mariana Sanchez says director Laurie Woolery jump-started their collaborative process when she brought all the designers to New York for a two-day brainstorming session last June. “That was the epitome of working with Laurie, that collaborative experience we had at the beginning of the design process.”

When Sanchez first read the play, which takes place in a village on the Amazon River, her initial thoughts on the design were related to water, even imagining actual water onstage. Told that would not be possible, she came up with other ideas using color, projection and imagery that could be more easily dealt with by OSF crews.

The set has a cylindrical design with a round forestage and a diaphanous curtain around the remainder of the stage. “We found in the surrounding curtain the possibility for containment and change,” Sanchez says, “and the fluidity of the material worked as a metaphor for water.” The floor is painted a lush blue-green to also convey the idea of a river.

“Our original design was very ‘hard,’ ” she explains. “It was full of straight lines and hard walls. The straight lines looked good on paper, but then they didn’t move ahead with the story. We said, what would happen if we try the opposite? Suddenly it felt like we had the solution we were looking for.”

Playwright Marisela Treviño Orta describes the play as a cautionary fairy tale, and the set design seeks to capture both the lightness and the darkness of the story. “Portraying a small village in Latin America made me think about the duality of Latin American life,” Sanchez explains, “economic struggle versus a naturally rich and lush world, engrained traditions versus a constant aspiration for the outside world. All these contradictions are imprinted in the architecture and in the objects of daily life. I hope some of this duality comes through in the set.”

Regina García has known director Sean Graney for many years, but this is the first time she has worked with him. She describes herself as the “rookie” on a team that has frequently worked together. “I’ve had to catch up a little and negotiate my way through the many discoveries they’ve made as a team in the treatment of Gilbert and Sullivan’s work.” Among those treatments is Graney’s use of a “promenade” area on the stage, where up to 75 audience members, sitting on low wooden platforms, interact with actors throughout the performance—and move when needed. (View a video about promenade seating here.)

Graney has discovered certain scenic elements that assist him in this kind of storytelling, including a raised mini-stage area, benches and a walkway—in this set dubbed the passarelle (French for footbridge or walkway). “There are three main elevation heights in the space and they are spread around evenly for the safety and comfort of the audience and flexibility for the actors in their storytelling,” García says.

Like Graney’s other G&S productions, Yeomen is not set in its original period; this show has a Wild West theme. Graney requested a red-and-orange palette, which delighted García, as those are her two favorite colors. The set offers an exuberant collage of patterns, including one of García’s favorite, a 17th-century Spanish/Caribbean tile motif. She adjusted the colors to match the palette and folded them into the floor and backdrop.

The anchor of the set is a house unit—reminiscent of the multiple-use buildings that sprang up across the West in the 19th century. Other fun elements include horses, signs, stars, games—even an onstage saloon for patrons to purchase drinks. “It’s a playground,” says García, laughing, “a playful romp that celebrates Gilbert and Sullivan.”

Sara Ryung Clement starts her design process by compiling images—some that are dramaturgically specific, others that resonate emotionally for her. After receiving feedback about the images from director May Adrales and the team, she started on some rough drafting and the model. “I really believe that the model answers most questions—it either works or it doesn’t,” says Clement. “May and I are based on opposite coasts, but were fortunate to have several meetings where we were able to look at the model in person.”

Like Yeomen, this show will run in the Thomas Theatre in a “thrust” configuration (one that extends into the audience on three sides). A road dominates the set. “There are many locations in the play,” Clement says, “and the story cuts back and forth to a motorcycle road trip, so the road is central. And the other locations—Saigon and Arkansas, for example—are landmarks on this bigger adventure.”

Asked why they decided to rake—or steeply angle—the stage in this intimate theatre, Clement explained that given the road imagery, they wanted to play with perspective and hope that the rake adds expansiveness to the outdoor vistas.

The director was also interested in seeing the upstage area as a collage of different pieces from the story. Among them is a building based on the old gatehouse from Fort Chaffee, the Vietnamese refugee camp in Arkansas where the two main characters meet.

What does Clement hope audiences will experience? “The thing I love most about Vietgone is that it upends so many expectations. I hope we have created a space that builds on that high potential and that when the audience walks in the space they feel a sense of anticipation.”

Laura Jellinek and director Lisa Peterson’s early discussions started with musician Scott Kelly (from the band Neurosis), knowing he would be performing onstage—and playing the Gravedigger—and would need a space to perform. “We also had a lot of conversations about cages, both literal and metaphoric, and the set design came out of a meeting of those two worlds,” Jellinek explained.

At the time of this writing, the set is not yet built, but a photo of the model shows a design dominated by the musician’s deck, extending from the central area of the second floor of the Allen Elizabethan Theatre stage (called the outer above). Downstage and connected to the outer above is a twisted, off-center collection of metal ramps, platforms and partial enclosures that look much like cages. A tall metal ladder joins the stage and a small porch off the stage-left gable window.

Designing for the outdoor stage is not easy, Jellinek said. “There are some practical challenges (storage space, being outdoors, sightlines), but the biggest challenge is how to interact with the existing architecture. The façade is so present that whether you are riffing off of it or adding elements that contrast with it, you are always in conversation with it.”