Episode 4: Holly Breuer

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the theatre for young audiences industry. Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional to hear their stories about the audition, rehearsal, and development process of theatre for young audiences. Each of them have bridged the path from youth to adulthood while living in worlds created for children. My guests have mounted shows small enough to fit in a minivan to productions so big they travel by caravan. You can join the conversation by emailing PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or messaging @PipeAndDrapeStories on Instagram. On Episode 4 of Pipe and Drape, my guest shares the secrets behind the podcast’s namesake. Our conversation reveals the reasons many children’s theatre companies use a pipe and drape set model when touring shows out to their audiences. My guest bridged the gap between earning her MFA and entering the gig economy by transforming small, ordinary spaces into big extraordinary worlds for young audiences. Thank you for listening with me today.

S: Today’s guest is scenic designer, Holly Breuer. Holly’s design work has been seen across the country, be at a national tours with TheaterworksUSA and the Barter Players, or regionally at the Adirondack Theatre Festival, Hangar Theater, Birmingham Children's Theatre and the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival. She has taught students at a middle school, high school and collegiate level from the edge of Kansas to Pennsylvania. She created and built the worlds in which I played during my time performing in Barter Theatre’s summer repertory in the Appalachian Mountains. And today Holly is joining me from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to discuss her work designing the three show touring rep for the Barter Players. Holly, welcome. 

HOLLY BREUER: Thank you, Stephen. It's nice to be here. 

S: I am so glad to have you on this because there is so much magic that you have made for all of these companies. And having had the opportunity to play on the sets that you built…I just…specifically like the way that they move, be it physically the way that pieces are moving or the movement that you have painted into the structures, or even at one point (it was during the Sleeping Beauty set) you had these spools, these threads that went up and down from the stage and they twisted, and the way that light would hit them, they completely transformed the space. And it was like moving the audience around and revealing things. It was just, it was so spectacular and people have had the pleasure of seeing your work across the country. And so they need to know how you got to this point where you are making magic for kids in this way. What were you doing as a kid to entertain yourself as far as games or doodles you would draw or things that you would make? 

H: So what's really interesting for me in my journey is that I did not formally self-select technical theatre or anything like that until very late in high school. And I always thought it was a sort of random path to go down. And as I've gotten older and looked back at my childhood mementos and photos from my mother's house and things like that, I have found this through line of activities and projects that make it sort of so that how could I have ended up in anything other than technical theatre and design? So for example, my little sister and I used to set up a fake restaurant with all of my grandmother's canned goods in the basement and we had a play photography studio and we would write and perform skits in the backyard at my grandparents’ gazebo. And I never at the time, or as a teenager…you don't really look back on the games that you play as having any kind of serious impact, you’re just like, ‘Oh, I was just such a silly child.’ But looking back on those as an adult I came to this realization that, ‘Oh, I was making preps and I was painting cardboard scenery.’ And I was doing all of these things that ended up becoming so intrinsic to my artistic lifestyle as a grown human. Creativity has always been a part of my existence. My parents, when we were, probably late middle school, we were the family on the block who put a haunted house in our garage for Christmas (or for Halloween. I mean.) So like we didn't go trick or treating. We charged the neighborhood kids a piece of candy to come into our garage and stick their hand in cold spaghetti, that kind of stuff, you know? So it was, it was always, the creativity was always there. One of the things that attracted me as a high schooler to theatre was the comradery of being backstage. And what took me then down the path of design was the way that it combined all of the things that I was interested in. So fine, art, architecture, construction, green construction, which is a whole new thing in the last fifteen/twenty years: the idea of trying to use recycled materials and found objects and materials and things like that. There didn't really seem to be a career path that would allow me to do all of those things outside of theatre. 

S: Do you remember seeing theater as a kid? Of course you were doing it on Halloween in a way. But as far as seeing shows, either in your school's gymnacafetorium or an arena, spectacular?

H: Elementary school experience was very STEM focused. This was not a time when steam was a thing that you talked about in elementary education. So the idea of the science, technology, math, all those sorts of things, the arts hadn't been integrated in into that yet. And so much of my primary school focus was not theatrical or really artistic. I think I maybe had one or two art classes in my particular elementary school, we didn't have touring shows that came through. We had science fairs and things like that. My earliest experiences with theatre were through my family. My grandparents were members of the community theater in our town in Pennsylvania. And so I spent my summers going to see community theater versions of Anne Get Your Gun and Oklahoma and all…The Music Man and all of those, the great American songbook. And I always found it fascinating. I was never one of those people who wanted to be on stage performing. So for me, I was always intrigued by the idea that they were creating worlds that were both very real and very fake at the same time. And I found the dichotomy of that really kind of intriguing. And even as a kid sort of, ‘Oh, is that, is that a real door or is that door made of cardboard or wood? Like how does that work? Like, does it really lock when the actor goes out of it? When the actor flips the light switch, are they really turning the light on in the room?’ and learning that no, they weren’t; the actors just touching the wall near where the light switch is, and a technician at a lighting board is pushing a button making a light somewhere else to go on. I liked that trickery and the idea that most people in the audience weren't thinking about that or weren’t paying attention to that. And so theatre was always there. I didn't really think about it as a career that people picked or that I would pick for a while.

S: What propelled your decision to focus on it in college? 

H: I did the very practical thing when applying for colleges and I applied to several schools for science-y nerd things and several schools for random theatre arts things sort of thinking, ‘Oh, you know I'm not that great. Like, no, one's going to look at my high school theatre portfolio, and it's going to be fine I'm going to go to science school and be an environmental scientist or something. It'll be great.’ And I ended up having fantastic interviews and portfolio reviews, and I probably over-prepared as an eighteen year old. But I got into all of these theatre schools and was fortunate enough to get very generous offers from several of them. And I guess I just realized I would never be as happy doing anything else as I was when I was creating things in a team. It seemed that other adults agreed with me so I went off on the path. 

S: So when you were in school and you were taking these classes in building and designing, was touring something that was covered in any of your classes…building shows for tour? 

H: No. And since graduating both undergraduate and I have a MFA in scene design and education as well, one of the things that I have worked to do is incorporate it into the curriculums I create because it wasn’t. When I was in undergraduate, there was a group of students…there was a class that the actors took that created a show, toured it to the local schools, but the scenery, the designs were all done by the professional staff, not by any of the students, and the idea designing shows to be able to move in such a small way…it was never something that was part of my curriculum. Now that's changed a lot at a lot of colleges nowadays, partially because of the way the Broadway touring world has become so large. So there are a lot of technical theatre programs that are starting to incorporate more education on moving scenery, on programmable scenery, on the way things go into a truck. But the way Broadway puts things…I mean, they're putting things into an eighteen-wheeler or fourteen eighteen-wheelers and they have a lot more leeway in how they build things. When you're trying to cram six human bodies and three shows into a van and a half, it's a very different set of parameters from a design standpoint. And like, ‘Oh, there should also be costumes. And like, maybe they might want to bring food with them.’ It was definitely something that I had not experienced. And then even at the graduate level we did a couple of theoretical projects that were sort of ‘how might you fit stuff in a mobile unit,’ but never anything truly experiential. When I got to the Players, the first summer was a challenge because I had an anticipated things like, ‘Oh, the interior of a van is not a perfect rectangle.’ So the height only exists at the center of the van. As you move out to the edges, it gets smaller and things don't fit. So my first year with the Players was just a lot of trial and error and really great support from the technical carpentry staff at Barter who had been doing this for years and had a much better understanding at that point than I did of how things might go together. I've taught at several colleges. And one of the things I usually incorporate into my first year scene design class is about a four week project where the students designed a show for a small space (like a black box or something like that) and then two weeks into the project, I say, ‘Hey, guess what, friends, the producer decided this show's going to go on tour. So how are you going to adapt everything to fit into a van?’

S: I love that because I've seen your work in doing something like that, where you have a show in a black box theater or a small stage and then also by the way, it's going on tour. I love that you're incorporating that into your teaching. When you were starting out in doing this and creating these sets that were going on tour (and sometimes also being performed in Barter’s smaller theater) what was the design process and the timeline for that s far as your, your inspiration and balancing your design work with other projects that the theater had you doing?

H: Barter was incredible for me. I jokingly refer to it as my post-doc work. So most students who do a doctoral, then go do a postdoc study somewhere where they're doing some kind of research project or they're working for another university, or that's the academic parlance for it. And for me, going to Barter and being so creatively trusted by the directors and artistic teams that were in place there was liberating and terrifying. So when you're in graduate school, you are supposed to be being creative as a designer or even an undergraduate, but there are all kinds of other things that are being thrown at you, right? Like you don't get to pick the shows,  you don't usually get to pick the space or who you're working with, and there might be budgetary constraints or timeline constraints. And I experienced that at Barter, but it was also different because a lot of that was something I was putting together myself. So we would, as the resident, we would attempt to look at the entire year, not just one touring season. So we would say, you know, you remember this at Barter, we refer to things as seasonal reps, right? So you have the spring rep, the fall rep the summer up: you look at those as units within and of themselves, but you're also looking ahead to what's coming next. And so timeline-wise, I would be able to say, ‘Okay, this part is going to be smaller so I can spend more time on this other part. And therefore I can make that other part more complicated because I know what's impending.’ And so that had a level of freedom, structurally, just to be able to find the time to do different things. Granted, that also meant that I had to think as I was designing, ‘Wait, that's a very cool galaxy backdrop, but that's gonna take me three and a half weeks to paint and I only have four days.’ So there definitely were times where I would make adjustments knowing that I was also doing a good chunk of the painting and specifically with some of the props work. During my time at Barter also, there were a variety of different…staffing changes. So sometimes I would be building, painting, and propping. Sometimes I had a carpenter dedicated to the Players so I had another human who would be doing most of the building and I would just do the finished painting. By the last year I was there someone from the prop department was helping us do props as opposed to just me in the basement making props. So it was never just me, but it was always different combinations of where I was getting help and not getting help. Artistically, I couldn't have asked for a better place to go, because…it’s funny that you mentioned the Sleeping Beauty with the strings going up and down. So that was a project directed by John Hardy, who is an incredible giving artist and human. And that was literally a sketch that I had laying on my desk, and he came in for a meeting and went, ‘Oh, what's that?’ I was like, ‘Oh, it's like this preliminary, I don't know. I was playing with an idea.’ And he was like, ‘Cool, let's do that,’ and I was like, ‘Wait, really? Okay. But now I have to figure out how to do that and make it work for Sleeping Beauty, which is, you know, a show about weaving and there is string in it. And so it was a very bold, broad metaphor of the strands of her life and that sort of thing.’ But it was also for, for TYA, it was a very symbolic set. It wasn't the fairytale castle that we're accustomed to seeing. It was three step units and a lot of string. And you wouldn't necessarily expect that either in that type of theatre for children or out of someone coming from a more traditionalist background. And it was just something that we played with and were like, ‘Oh yeah, like this, this can work.’ Like you said, it did really cool things with the lighting and you could both see through it and not see through it. And the actors had to be able to move around it in a way. One of the things that John said to me is like, ‘I want this to be difficult for the actors to exist in.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do that.’ 

[Laugher]

S: Of course he would say that! Having worked with him on that show… I was so fun to play with. Just seeing Carabosse, the character, being able to play, and it's their gossamer dream. And me who…I was just like a weesnaw with a sword walking through and being like, ‘Well, these stairs are rocks now, that's trees.’ It's so much fun for my grownup imagination to make that. This is the world, this is what it is. And it just makes sense. 

H: Kids don't need anything else. I mean, I think we get bogged down in this idea that because everything we're seeing on our screens is now in 4k four thousand zoom made by Netflix that everything has to be 120% complete in order to be believable. And I don't think that's true. And more specifically, I think it's less true with children. And I think when you give a group of children just enough of a hint of what the world is, they each finish the world's details in a way that is so unique to that child—that they're getting their own experience out of the performance. 

S: So then you had the challenge of creating those individual pieces for these three shows that were taken on that road: Anne of Green Gables, Velveteen Rabbit, and Julius Caesar. What kind of work did you do either with the directors or your own personal research to find: what are the most important pieces that make sense in this world that are going to represent everything for these characters in this story? 

H: Practically speaking, at that time the Barter Players were using a pipe and drape. We had purchased an aluminum frame, so it was a box, basically, that the drop/painted backdrop would hang on. And it was either eight by eight or ten by ten. It’s not very large. It's just enough for maybe two actors to hide behind and change their costumes. So the through line for when when you're doing something like that, where the three shows are not necessarily in repertory but living together, you know that you're going to have that backdrop as your base. So when designing those three shows, the first thing I did either in digital rendering (which I was doing with those shows) or in a physical model is take that little square shape that is the backdrop and go, ‘Okay, well that goes here.’ And then you have to build out the world from that, because that's the core when you're doing this particular type of design and this particular type of touring, right? You know, in the middle of a gymnasium or gymatorium, there is no backstage, there's nowhere to run. So you have to have some kind of physical design element to hide people behind when they're not on stage. And so with these designs, I always started with that. With this particular repertory, both Anne of Green Gables and Velveteen Rabbit also had lives in the second stage at The Barter, ao they did have fuller iterations of themselves. And so the question for tour became how to maintain faithfully the design choices we had made for the fuller productions on a much smaller scale. So in some things, Velveteen Rabbit, for example, in the stage space had a series of wall panels to indicate where the house was when we were inside the little boy’s room or inside the living room or things like that. And in the touring version, the backdrop (the quilt) had panels built into it that mimicked the blue of the walls. So if you saw both shows, you would see those connections. If you only saw one show you, in theory, never felt like you were missing anything. When you're building out from a backdrop then, the question becomes how much stuff do you need in front of that backdrop to create the world? And that really comes from discussions directors talking about what are the relationships between the actors, between the characters that they're trying to create? So, for example, Velveteen Rabbit again, the biggest thing that we knew we had to have is this bed, because for the child in that show their bed is their safe space. They turn it into their ship and their mountain, and all of those. So we knew we had to have that sort of central element. The challenge, of course, then being, for tour, it had to come into pieces and be able to be also sturdy for everyone to jump on and those kinds of practical challenges. For Julius Caesar, one of the iconic images is Julius Caesar on the steps getting stabbed. So you have to think about how in the center of a gymnatorium are you creating some kind of height for actors to interact with. And stair units are very hard to travel with, like an actual five-step or something like that. They're an awkward shape; they don't stack or nest neatly with anything other than other stair units. So we very rarely sent any kind of traditional step thing out on tour. And instead we ended up with…so for Julie Caesar it became a series of columns. And so there was a two-step column round unit that the actors could actually kind of roll into place and not have to lift and things like that. But that was just about trying to create height. These three shows (this rep in particular) was actually pretty minimalistic and didn't have a lot of crossover pieces. So sometimes when you do a rep you have (you are fortunate enough that) maybe two of the shows can use the same chair. And because the audiences are changing as the tour goes out, the audiences aren't noticing that that’s Grandma's chair in one show and the Pirate King's chair in another show. Sometimes you are fortunate to be able to do that. This particular rep, I don't think the shows share… I was trying to think about it this morning. I don't think the three shows shared anything, which is great stylistically, not so great when you're trying to pack a van. 

S: Was there a moment when it came time to do the pack (the “van Tetris”)—did you know beforehand it's all going to fit or was it a surprise? 

H: I know this is a podcast so your viewers, your audience can't see that I'm shaking my head. Absolutely not. Um, okay. So you can, as a designer and a technical team, you're going to lay out the best plan that you can. And you're going to make sure that all of the bigger elements definitely fit within the parameters of your van, right? So if your van is four foot eight, you're not going to design anything that has an eight foot tall piece that can't come apart. So there are things that you're going to do ahead of time to protect yourself and prevent those kinds of catastrophes. But when you do the van pack…so what we would do at Barter is you pull the van in and you literally lay out on the floor everything that had to go into the van. And then as a team, we try to make it fit. And that would be the first time as a designer or technician team that we would actually see all of the stuff together. And I'm not going to lie: every first Tetris day I would walk in and see that pile of stuff on the floor, not in the van and go, ‘Oh, we're going to need a second van.’ A lot of things would be consistent from your year in tour. So like there's a wardrobe box, there’s certain things that no matter what are going to fit, there's the sound system, there's things like that that are the same size that generally fit in the same place. And I would take that into account when designing each of the shows. And you know that some things are going to nest together and you're just going to throw a suitcase in the middle and it'll be fine. But no, I was never sure that it was actually going to work, and until Tetris day, you're never really sure.

S: As a designer and someone with such a passion for science, is there any way that you incorporated some eco-friendly things, recycled material, sort of things in your design for this tour?

H: In Player land (or in any TYA) if you have resources, usually the resources tend to be a room full of stuff that no one knew existed. So yes, there are oftentimes when I would be trying to repurpose materials. To a certain extent, theater is (it’s getting better but it’s) generally terrible when it comes to environmental things, both in the paints and adhesives and chemicals we use. and also in the just temporariness of everything. You build a set, you do a show, and then the set generally goes away, which is not a great environmental impact story. And it's something that we're working on as an industry and individual companies are working on. A lot of times with the Players we would be reusing repainting shapes, right? Rehearsal cubes become a crate on a ship, but then they also become a bale of hay and painted a different thing every year, and five years later, it has twenty layers of paint on it but it still functions. So reusing things was always going to be a part of what we were doing. So I would come up with a design and think about what I might want, and then I would go into the storage unit and say, ‘All right, well, I designed a twenty-four inch cube, but look there's a twenty inch cube sitting here that will totally work.’ For this rep in particular, I took on the task of building a quilt as the backdrop for The Velveteen Rabbit. One of the conceptual approaches for Velveteen from the directing team was the idea that we were setting it in Appalachia instead of…Velveteen Rabbit is actually a British story, and so we (it’s not really a translation but) transcribed it in into the Appalachian world. And so the idea of the quilt backdrop is connected to this idea that when you're a kid, when you're sad and you're sick, Grandma comes over and wraps you up in a blanket that she made and it makes everything better. And so we wanted the world to have that feeling of, ‘Oh, like the kid’s in bed, and he's really sad and he's got his bunny and like this backdrop is this quilt thing,’ which all sounds well and good until you've never built a quilt before. And you go into the Player storage area and go, ‘Oh, here's a bunch of boxes of random scraps of fabric. Here's some that are blue and here's some that are green that'll work.’ And so (like many things I designed for the Players) it was great in theory. And then I had to make it happen. And it was less great mainly because it just meant long hours, but the design got tweaked a little bit because I was using the found fabric materials. So it was just bits, you know, like in the design, I was like, ‘Oh, it's going to be this shade of blue,’ and then in the scrap box I found a different shade of blue so it morphed a little bit based on what was available. It ended up being a really cool project. It was not a traditional quilt. It didn't actually have batting or anything in it, so the backside just was a mess of seams and scraps of things flying off of it. But I think it turned out really interesting and it was just one of those things that if you can't paint it, how else does a backdrop come into existence? 

S: Do you have any fun stories from your time working on these shows down in the Appalachian mountains? 

H: I think one of the greatest experiences I had would be the first time we would let kids come in to see the show. You'll be doing all this work and you'll be in tech and you're so in your adult theater-person zone, and you're stressing about, ‘Should the lights be at 10% or 15%?’ and ‘Did I pick the right shade of red for that object?’ and you get so lost in the technicalities and practicalities of that. And then you go to the first performance and there are tiny humans watching and they don't at all because they are so excited to be there. The best part would be sitting in the audience in the midst of all of these kids and hearing their reactions because kids don't edit, kids don't have a filter yet. They are just the most pure reaction to what they are seeing. And sometimes it would be worry for a character like, ‘Oh no, don't, don't go that way!’ That sort of thing. Inevitably, there would be some storyline that involved romance and you get some kid going, ‘Oh no, don’t kiss her! Ew!’ right? Like the art kind of thing. And it just helped you remember why you were doing this whole thing in the first place, because the kids would just come in with pure joy and it made everything okay. 

S: How did your experience working on this propel you forward?

H: Working at Barter changed my entire outlook on TYA and what that means. I think sometimes that (I will speak for myself as well), I think sometimes there's a dismissiveness that we have like, ‘Oh, that's not real theater. It's just for kids,’ or, you know, ‘Kids aren't going to get it,’ or, ‘Oh, we don't have to work that hard. You know, like the kids won't notice,’ and one: that’s B.S. and two: it's completely outdated—there have been so many studies in the past twenty/thirty years (mostly in Europe because American TYA is behind admittedly, it will say that itself), so I went into this, not really having done TYA, and what I realized is that you don't have to dumb anything down for children. In some ways you can do more complex and intriguing designs because they don't know anything else. And so they just see it and go, ‘Oh yeah, cool, that's what that's going to be.’ There are companies that will say it is just silly entertainment for a forty-five minute assembly for children. There are a lot of companies emerging that firmly believe that we can get kids interested in the arts earlier than we ever had before; that interactive theater performances, like what Imagination Stage in Maryland does with six-month-old children on stage interacting have been proven to be incredibly beneficial to the development of children. I don't think TYA is something that we should dismiss at all, and I think that it needs to become part of our core theater training in the way that we bring up theater artists so that we’re creating a recurring set of people who are ready to do this work and help get that next generation ready to experience art in whatever that means for them. In my time after Barter, I joined several commissions on SETC, which is the Southeastern Theatre Conference and was an active member for a couple of years while I lived in the area in discussion panels of what does it mean to be TYA?/What is that?/What are our obligations?/What can we do to be better? And there are programs (friends of ours run some of these programs) where you take your arts training and you go into schools and you work not on a performance level but with core curriculum, and you use art skills to develop core curriculum. And that sort of idea of how to connect all of this together—it was never something I had thought about before. I also am a firm believer in undergraduate students graduating with their undergraduate degree, going out into the world and working for a bit before they go to graduate school. I think having spent the time I did with the Barter Players (oddly enough after my graduate work), I think it's a great and nurturing ground for young theatre artists to experience their own sense of creativity and impact on the world around them. 

S: Holly, thank you for speaking with me today. 

H: You’re welcome, Stephen, this was lovely.

S: How can our listeners find you and see more of your work? 

H: So, I believe you are going to be linking to my website and there is a contact form in there. So honestly, if anyone has questions, it's really…the contact form on my website is the easiest way to get to me. Honestly, if anyone were to have questions about anything practical or stylistic or how weird can you get with a design before a kid just says, ‘No,’ I would love to have those discussions with anyone.

S: You can find more of Holly’s work and her contact information at hollymbreuer.com.

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. Artwork for Pipe and Drape was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today.

Find Holly Breuer:
WEBSITE: https://www.hollymbreuer.com

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