School of Drama Faculty Tal Yarden on his Tony-nominated Design Work for Network
School of Drama Faculty member Tal Yarden discussed his Tony-nominated work for Best Lighting Design of a Play for Network on Broadway with Nadine Reumer (BFA, Drama, Class of 2019). Network was directed by Ivo van Hove, adapted by Lee Hall and stars Tony, Olivier, Emmy and Golden Globe winner Bryan Cranston.
The American Theater Wing’s Tony Awards were presented on June 9, 2019.
Thank you for taking the time to talk about your work on Network. You create, design, shoot, and direct visual content for theater and other immersive experiences. How would you describe what you do?
That’s a good question, and it’s not an easy question. I think of myself as an image maker, a theater maker. So much of the work I do is very collaborative with directors, other designers and performers especially when it comes to working with a camera on stage, which a lot of my work includes. It’s perhaps a new art form, perhaps an old art form, I don’t know the best way to think of it. A lot of people refer to it as live cinema but that means different things to different designers and artists. I think of what I do as creating a theatrical experience and I do that in collaboration with a lot of other theater artists.
I took your course in Projection Design at The New School and you spoke frequently about the value of collaboration. Network was created with two of your closest collaborators, Ivo van Hove (Tony nominee, Best Direction of a Play for Network) and Jan Versweyveld (who shares this Tony nomination with you). Where did this creative partnership begin?
That began back in 2001. Ivo and Jan were going to do a project at NYTW and I was introduced to them in conjunction with that project, which I didn’t end up doing, but they invited me to participate in a production of RENT that they were doing in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It was their first big, musical production. It was of great advantage to them that I was in New York City and could shoot a lot of the backgrounds and environments here. One of the very first things that we agreed on together was that the lead character, Mark, because he was a film student, would be carrying around the camera. We would see a lot of RENT through his eyes and his camera.
How has you collaboration with Ivo and Jan developed over time?
In theater and movies, people like a lot of definition and clarity in people’s roles. You always see a playbill that lists a director, set designer, lighting designer, video designer, etc. In reality, the way we work, is the way a lot of creative partnerships work. It’s a team effort. It’s a creative team. Everyone is engaged in creating what is hopefully a great work of art together. That means that if I have a great idea about set, I should express that. If the set designer has an idea about how to express something in the play through video they should express that. It’s very, very collaborative. The way I work with many people is often to meet with them in advance and often in a group. With Ivo and Jan, it’s always in a group. The three of us meet regularly and we’ll go through the whole production and create a visual dramaturgy — a term I discovered through them and like a lot. Essentially, it’s like making a storyboard, perhaps not drawing it all out, but writing out what the storyboard is. How is this production going to express itself visually? And that has to do with everything: the staging, the lighting, the props, the video.
Network is based on the 1976 film by Peter Finch by the same name and adapted for the stage by Lee Hall. You’ve worked extensively on adaptations and bringing film to the stage, and into the theater. What do you think works so well in that translation?
I grew up at a time where one primarily experienced film by going to a movie theater. You had to go discover that experience. I’ve always loved film and camera, loved the ability to shape light, an intimate experience with a character, to discover new terrain. A lot of the film I was particularly interested in was of a more experimental variety, that was very visceral, that really explored not just what could be captured through a lens, but also the actual medium itself and how it can be manipulated. Whether that was scratching on the film, or putting bleach on it… actually questioning the very texture and substance of these images. So, I’m a great lover of film, but I’m also very interested in the history of film and film is really born as a theatrical art, it’s born on stage. It’s an extension of magic. It’s an extension of the whole questioning of the persistence of image. How many images you can string in a row and convince someone that was live. To me that’s an extension of magic, and what we do as theatrical artists which is surprise an audience with a completely unexpected visual experience. So, for me they are very intertwined, film and theater, as they are for many actors and many directors. There is a very fluid boundary there. I don’t think of them as two different mediums, certainly as narrative scripts are really easy to translate back and forth to stage. It’s always about the subject matter, you know?
Where did you begin with your process when designing the video for Network?
We started with the screenplay. I had watched the film before but I read the screenplay, had a couple of meetings and then watched the film again. I tend to do that. Ivo and Jan occasionally but not always will watch the film, but I tend to watch it to be sure what I’m doing isn’t a direct duplication of anything that was already done, or if it is, that it’s very intentional. So, we read the screenplay, and we had lots of meetings, thinking about what the space would be and what the requirements of the space would be. There are scenes that took place in a bar and restaurant- Jan got the idea that we should include that on stage. We had done other projects where we had audience on stage so we had a sense of how that might work. The TV studio was front and center of course because so much happens there and the challenge was to find small places within that environment to suggest we’re in another office or in a boardroom.
Did you have any other specific inspirations outside of the film and the screenplay?
Visually it was very much looking at architecture of different TV studios, things like the BBC where you have the feeling that the anchor’s desk is the heartbeat of this huge monolithic organization. You have people always working in the background, the different screens with media, and you get the feeling of a network, this feeling of the hub. It was very important to build that out. One of the things that we had talked out very early on, and it was written into the screenplay, was using a real clock in a sense. We were going to put clocks on screens and have everything timed out. That was part of the driving force of the rhythm of the piece. I have over the years looked at many, many films, and I’m always interested in these long takes. Long, fluid, sort of Steadicam takes, and that was something I was definitely thinking about. How that may work in terms of moving around, and how those camera people end up performers in the show.
What is it like staging live cinema? Conceptually and technically?
Two sides of it. One, and often I’ll do this earlier rather than later, is to figure out the technical infrastructure. The theater needs to budget for that and figure out what that means to them. I come up with a technical flowchart with all of the different elements that I think will be necessary to accomplish what we want to accomplish. For NETWORK, I worked together with Jan to figure out how many screens we would need, the different sizes, and where they should be placed. I think about the different cameras I want to use, the different lenses, the space that’s available and the shots I want to get. Then I think about the kind of rigging that will allow us flexibility and fluidity of motion. Once I have all of these tools, and I’ve worked with these tools before- there’s an element of experience to this, in the rehearsal room- it’s like assembling jazz musicians, there’s a lot of improvisation.
When we first start in rehearsal, I’m the one with the camera always. I’ll start from the very first rehearsal since Ivo likes to start with the actors on their feet from day one. It’s a process that’s very methodical, working scene by scene, trying out different stagings. Usually I’ll watch what Ivo does one time around and then I’ll get onto the stage with a camera. I start looking for what I see on camera, and what’s going to be of value, thinking about how important the camera is at that moment. Do we need to capture someone’s text, or can the camera be more behind the scenes? When I think about multiple screens, I think of different cameras having different roles. So the rush and hub of the studio, the camera weaving in between different characters, is a prelude to Howard Beale’s seat at the news desk. I’m thinking about how I’m going to catch different bits of text and create a navigation script, so that once Ivo has placed all the actors I can pick up the different lines and introduce the different characters. It’s still collaborative and we go back and forth. I may suggest to him that there’s a line that could be great if he could have one actor use a different entrance so we can catch it. It’s very collaborative, and it’s working with the actors a lot as well. Actors always need to know when they’re on camera. A lot of times they’ll be behind the scenes and I’ll go to the actors and say “just so you know, you’re on camera now so you have to be doing something, be engaged.”
There is one big moment, during the “Mad as Hell” speech where the camera circles Howard Beale and catches this infinite loop behind him. How do you build these?
It’s called a video feedback loop and it’s something that I’ve experimented with before and I knew I wanted to experiment with it in this pivotal moment. It was a lot about working together with Bryan so that he could naturally discover his own momentum on stage. He is such an amazing actor, and he’s so knowledgeable about camera work. He knows at all times where the camera is and whether to play to it or not. So once he understood the effect that we were after, he could play to that and help shape what that experience would be. The idea of these cameras constantly revolving around the character of Howard Beale was something we wanted to use to express that he lived surrounded by the technological tools he used to communicate with his audience, but there’s also a sense of him being hounded by these tools and he can never escape them. The camera is always confronting him, whether he wants it or not.
For you personally, what is the value of storytelling through video on stage?
I don’t think it’s always necessary. Different stories have different ways of being told, right? There’s lots of value in video when its intention is purposeful. I often have discussions with artists who want to use video and I say, I don’t think you need this or it’s not for me because I don’t know what I would do that would be useful. So, for me I think it’s another tool. It’s not a necessary tool- it’s hard to imagine theater without light- but otherwise, it’s essentially a tool. You don’t really need set, or costume, and when you use them it’s because it’s part of the story you want to tell. I think video is really just the same.
