WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SET ONE OF AMERICA’S GREAT NATURALISTIC DRAMAS INSIDE A HISTORIC CHAPEL?
Production Designer Guy De Lancey takes us behind the scenes of Sea Dog Theater’s bold new staging of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! at the chapel at St. George's Episcopal Church (AKA, Sea Dog Theater).
With a career spanning theater, film, and visual arts, De Lancey approaches design as both an investigation and an invitation. His work—recently seen in BalletX’s acclaimed Maslow’s Peak—challenges audiences to look closer, feel deeper, and reimagine the relationship between story, space, and community.
Below, he shares his thoughts on transforming St. George’s historic chapel into an arena for Odets’ Depression-era Bronx family drama.
Q: How has the chapel’s history and architecture influenced your design choices for Awake and Sing!?
A: I know very little of the chapel’s history, other than intuitively through encountering the atmosphere of the space. It is clearly a layered palimpsest, provoking a textural and aural sense of temperature, as an aspect of presence and scale. The chapel, as a site-specific venue, provokes a counterintuitive response to the subject matter. Awake and Sing! being a classic American naturalistic drama, provides an immense challenge in staging, particularly in such an architecture. The chapel as a stage encourages a radical rethink of how to encounter naturalism and the expectation of a realistic setting.
Q: What opportunities and challenges come with transforming a sacred, communal space into a Depression-era Bronx home?
A: An opportunity to articulate and maintain the sense of claustrophobia and longing within the play necessitated rethinking the staging away from realism, allowing the performances, characters, and language to carry that aspect, encouraging a modernizing of the staging toward ideas articulated in new media dramaturgy, where the literal is less critical than poetic resonance. In dispensing with realism, the idea is to regard the stage not as a home but as an arena of social and interpersonal relations. This allows the opportunity to focus intensely on a stripped-down setting—no props, hardly any furniture—making space for the intensity of the emotional and motivational trajectories of the characters to be fully foregrounded. So, there is no fundamental transformation of sacred communal space into a literal Bronx home. The architecture and shape of the space are utilized as is, augmenting them to articulate the minimal poetic condition of the play. The sacred communal space is maintained, with staging, light, and a meta-textual visual layer of video portraiture of private emotional notes, making the actors always present to the audience, to the play, to its atmosphere, allowing a transformation in how the play is experienced.
Photo by Jeremy Varner of Varner Creative
Q: How does your design invite the audience to feel both the intimacy of family life and the larger social forces pressing in?
A: The design pares down and strips extraneous artifacts of realist staging. The claustrophobia or intimacy of family life is articulated in a large space through focusing the action—the interactions—under a metaphoric behavioral microscope. The intensity of the actors’ exchanges articulates intimacy. Light frames the relational shapes of the scenes, inspired by Edward Hopper, who uses characters in light in a way that indicates a longing for transformation, speaking to social and private forces pressing in. As a design element, the inclusion of cameras in other chapel areas, linked to onstage media sculptures, reveals private moments of despair, hope, anxiety, or frustration when characters exit, sharing with the audience the impossibility of private absence. Characters carry the emotional energy of a scene off stage and back on. There is no escape from the arena. Only longing.
Illustration by Edward Hopper
Q: What is the greatest challenge and greatest opportunity regarding working on this play under these circumstances?
A: The greatest challenge is, of course, the default requirements of ‘American naturalism or realism’. Cast size. The use schedule of the chapel. And how to effectively stage the play in a non-standard, site-specific way, to shake off the default expectations of such a piece, allowing the audience to feel something profound, while maintaining and enhancing the emotional value of the story.
Guy De Lancey is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and designer, often described as a “conceptual detective” for his ability to connect movement, technology, and creativity. He serves as Associate Director of the Movement Laboratory at Barnard College, Columbia University, where research and practice intersect in innovative ways.
His career spans theater, film, and education, with expertise in directing, scenography, cinematography, lighting, narrative design, process design, and interactive technology. Early in his career, he was awarded a research grant to attend Fabrica—the Benetton Arts and Communications Center in Italy—in collaboration with visionary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio.
De Lancey has worked extensively in the performing arts, both as a director and designer. Recently, he created scenic and projection design for Maslow’s Peak with BalletX in Philadelphia, a production widely praised for its visual impact. His artistic work has also been exhibited internationally, including at Signs and Symbols gallery in New York and The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Austria.