A scene from the Kennedy Center production of A Streetcar Named Desire, featured in the Tennessee Williams Explored festival Pictured: Patricia Clarkson (Blanche) and Adam Rothenberg (Stanley)

Set designer John Lee Beatty has a word of advice for anyone about to tackle Tennessee Williams: Don’t take him lightly. The Broadway veteran and Tony Award winner recently finished designing sets of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the Kennedy Center’s Tennessee Williams Explored festival, running through early August in Washington, D.C. Beatty says designing the plays was a “huge responsibility” given the playwright’s penchant for symbolism and for describing the atmosphere of his dramas in specific detail.

“Just about everything is symbolic,” Beatty says. “You’ve got to not only make sure the set looks right physically, but also that it conveys the dramatic impact that’s intended.”

Williams is known for his copious stage directions regarding the settings of his plays and their symbolism. Often, he prescribes the smallest details, such as the specific color of a beam of light or the billowing of a curtain far upstage. Most things, too, appear imbued with deeper meaning. The accumulation of details can overwhelm some designers, but for Beatty, it represents a wealth of opportunity. He likens Williams’ stage directions to the menu at a Chinese restaurant. “You take one thing from Column A and one thing from Column B, and on and on,” he says. “There’s just so much to choose from.”

That may be especially true with the acknowledged masterpieces that Beatty and his colleagues have been working on. These full-length productions are the centerpiece of the Kennedy Center festival, and each has a different director: Garry Hynes, Streetcar; Mark Lamos, Cat; and Gregory Mosher, Menagerie. While the productions don’t have a common design theme, they do share some important characteristics. Foremost is a sense of the characters’ entrapment in their immediate environment, whether it be Maggie and Brick locked in the bedroom of the plantation house, Blanche searching for a way out of Stanley and Stella’s New Orleans apartment, or Tom and Amanda forced to occupy the same cramped St. Louis tenement. A key to all three designs is the relationship between interior and exterior space. Beatty makes the argument that the two are of equal importance in Williams’ plays.

Typically, designs for The Glass Menagerie focus on the family apartment, with little attention to exteriors. By contrast, Beatty’s design places the Wingfields smack in the middle of urban St. Louis, surrounded by tall fiberglass building facades. A 14-foot drop between the apartment (a 34- by 18-foot playing space) and the street below (the trap room) highlights the family’s isolation. The stage floor surrounding the apartment has been entirely removed, allowing the audience to see the city’s buildings rising out of the basement, encircling the embattled trio.

“Tennessee Williams says being in the apartment is almost like being in a coffin, so we’re providing the images to reinforce that,” Beatty says. “The actors don’t have much room to move in or out of—they’re really trapped.”

That sense is reinforced by the decision to present only two rooms in the Wingfield apartment—the dining room and living room—and not the kitchen, as has been common (although the audience does see the kitchen doorway). The symbolically important fire escape stands stage left, but there is no other means of entry into and exit from the apartment.

This scene shows off John Lee Beatty’s clever bifurcated scenic design in A Streetcar Named Desire. Pictured: Adam Rothenberg (standing), Patricia Clarkson (right) and ensemble

While The Glass Menagerie design emphasizes tall exterior spaces in contrast to the Wingfields’ cramped apartment, the design for A Streetcar Named Desire ventures in another direction. The French Quarter facades and exterior stairways so typical of many Streetcar productions are gone. Instead, audiences see into a 36- x 14-foot interior playing space comprising a living room/dining room, bedroom and bathroom cubicle upstage left. The rooms have sharply raked ceilings (unlike Menagerie) that reflect the characters’ sense of confinement and, again, there is only one entrance/exit. Here, the outside world and its inhabitants—the doctor and the newspaper boy—appear and disappear like phantoms behind 15-foot-tall upstage windows, each of them barred. Stanley and Blanche play their game of cat and mouse on the single floor of a small apartment. With no exterior space, the audience can’t tell whether it’s a doctor or an old beau who waits outside for Blanche late in the play. Similarly, when Stanley calls for Stella at the very end, he has no stairs to climb—all he can do is shout at the ceiling.

John Lee Beatty’s sketch for the set of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, part of the Kennedy Center’s Tennessee Williams Explored festival

Beatty’s design for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is in some ways more typical and more impressionistic than the other designs. As in Menagerie, the action takes place on the second floor of a building, already confining the characters to a limited space. But light, air and movement are important here. The interior playing space—a large bedroom—is surrounded on three sides by a wooden veranda from where characters enter and exit (there is also a door stage-left). Twenty-four- to 28-foot alternating curtains and blinds give the impression of malleable walls, as the curtains sway in the wind and the blinds are raised and lowered. The audience is able to see through layers of opened shutters, transparent scrim and iridescent chiffon to important offstage action, while remaining observers of the interior space itself. Beatty notes with a trace of amusement that his Cat design may be closer to what people expect to see in Streetcar, with its typical open spaces, while his Streetcar is more like the typical Menagerie, comprising closed interiors.

Lighting, like spatial arrangement, has major symbolic importance in Williams’ plays. Beatty’s set designs are enhanced by the work of lighting designer Howell Binkley, who lit the Kennedy Center’s previous theater festival, 2002’s Sondheim Celebration. Together, they’ve worked to re-create the impressionistic atmosphere Williams favored. This is most apparent in Glass Menagerie and Streetcar, where rooms change color and texture, and walls seem to take on personality traits. Some of the lighting changes are subtle, others not so. Many of the visual effects in Menagerie, such as the father’s portrait appearing and disappearing, and wallpaper transforming into blue roses, are created by a layering process involving scrims, computer printing, paint and image projection. Other effects, such as the slow, drifting colors in Streetcar, are achieved with paint blocking and the use of automated High End Studio Colors. The overall effect is to create a kind of magical realism in which reality and illusion live side by side in the characters’ minds.

Although a few of Williams’ original set descriptions in Menagerie, Streetcar and Cat have been altered for the Kennedy Center festival, one imagines the playwright would be pleased. His desire for a new, impressionistic theater to replace “the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions” is certainly in evidence. And unlike Blanche’s Dallas millionaire, it isn’t just a dream.

Deryl Davis is a freelance arts writer based in Washington, D.C.

Sketch courtesy of the Kennedy Center
Photography by Joan Marcus