5.3: Case Study- Marcus Doshi and Wilson Chin Design Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over

On August 4, 2021, the lights on Broadway flickered back to life after an unprecedented eighteen-month shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first new production to open was Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu—a symbolic and urgent choice. Nwandu’s play reimagines Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through the intersecting lenses of the biblical Exodus story, the legacy of American slavery, and contemporary Black life in the United States. Two young Black men, Moses and Kitch, linger on a street corner, dreaming of escape while navigating the constant threat of state violence embodied by the racist Ossifer and the unsettling, otherworldly presence of Mister.

Pass Over did not emerge fully formed on Broadway. Instead, it evolved across multiple productions and cultural moments, beginning with its 2017 premiere in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s intimate Upstairs Theatre in Chicago. That initial production, directed by Danya Taymor and designed by a close-knit team including lighting designer Marcus Doshi, set designer Wilson Chin, sound designer Justin Ellington, and costume designer Sarafina Bush, established the play’s stark visual language and allegorical terrain. The production was later remounted on Steppenwolf’s mainstage and filmed by Spike Lee for Amazon Films, before transferring to Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 Off-Broadway in 2018, and ultimately to Broadway in 2021. At each stage, the script, staging, and design were reconsidered in response to shifting spaces, audiences, and a rapidly changing national conversation about race, policing, and racial justice.

This case study focuses on the long-term collaboration between Doshi and Chin, tracing how lighting and scenic design worked together to visualize urgency, danger, and presence across these evolving iterations. Through these two in-depth conversations, both designers reflect on the iterative nature of theatrical design, the challenges and opportunities of working with a living playwright, and the ways instinct, expertise, and collaboration shape aesthetic choices. Their reflections illuminate design as an adaptive, responsive practice embedded in social context, rehearsal process, and the shared labor of meaning making on stage.

“Make, Look, Evaluate, Adapt”

A Conversation with Marcus Doshi

Marcus Doshi:  My name is Marcus Doshi. I’m currently a professor of theatre at Northwestern University, and I’m also a lighting designer for theatre and opera. I was born in Connecticut, but ended up in Indiana for elementary and middle and high school. I went to a small college called Wabash College in Central Indiana. I went there because they had a hell of a pre-med program and I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, but I discovered theatre there. The virtue of that school is that it was a small liberal arts school. We had the opportunity to study and practice all parts of theatre. I discovered I was not a very good actor and had a propensity for design. By the time I graduated from Wabash, I’d worked any backstage position and any design position you could do on a show, save costumes. I spent a semester in New York City interning at the Vineyard Theatre Company in Union Square, and then I went to the Yale School of Drama for graduate school. I finished there in 2000. I moved to New York because that’s what you did at the time and I worked all over the world for twelve years before I moved to Chicago to start the position at Northwestern. I still carry on a very active design practice all over the world.

 

Gibson Alessandro Cima: What led to your interest in lighting design, specifically?

 

Doshi: I started fiddling around with set design. I’m a union set designer and I design sets occasionally. I realized it was hard for me to conceive of a space without thinking about how it was lit. I think that was informed by some early studies of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig and the new stagecraft revolution. As I put those ideas into practice, I realized that the great thing about lighting in theatre is that it’s an active design process. It’s plastic. The form allows you to be dynamic and engaged with the performers up until the moment that the show crystallizes. It was a way for me to be much more dynamically engaged with the production as it unfolds. I talk about the “make, look, evaluate, and adapt” loop. You look. You make an idea. You look at it as naively as possible. You evaluate whether or not it’s doing what you want it to do, and then you adapt it, and you cycle through this as you go. That’s only possible with a plastic form. I’ve always been a very visual person.

 

 Cima: Can you start to walk me through your process of designing Pass Over? How did you get involved with the project and what was the design process?

 

Doshi: It started out as a project at Steppenwolf Theatre. I came on board and the team really gelled very quickly. Wilson [Chin], I knew from graduate school. We put the piece together and it was being rewritten all through rehearsals. It had a pretty successful run. Then Amazon Films wanted to film it and hired Spike Lee to direct the filming of the production. We had this one wacko crazy weekend where we remounted it at Steppenwolf, but this time on their main stage. The first production had been done in their now-closed upstairs theatre. We redid it very quickly for Amazon Films. The disadvantage of the film is you don’t get to see the entire mise en scene of the plagues. It’s all done in closeups, which is, in my view, a drag because we made the picture in a certain way. But that’s how it works for film. Then it got picked up. We transferred it to LCT 3, Lincoln Center 3, which is considered an off-Broadway theatre in New York. We remounted it. There were some script changes that happened but was essentially the same production. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was pre-pandemic. Then, finally, we did it on Broadway, and it was the first new production back on Broadway after the pandemic. That version had some more script changes, specifically having to do with the ending. That was a much more optimistic ending than previous versions.

 

Cima: How did you approach the design process?

 

Doshi: There’s something that happens when you become an expert in any field, the decision-making process becomes less cognitive and more instinctual. You have more experiences to draw on. You can make decisions much quicker. I remember Wilson [Chin] had the idea of the set pretty early on. He’s a really good designer. When I looked at it, I thought, "Oh, yeah, this all makes sense, right?" We had the discussions you always have as a team, asking what exactly is the story? With Antoinette [Nwandu]’s play, there’s many different layers of dramaturgy happening. It’s ancient Egypt. It’s a plantation. It’s contemporary inner city. We tried to figure out the version of four-dimensional chess that’s happening between the characters the whole time. If you understand what that story is, everything else takes care of itself in a weird way, especially when you’re operating on an instinctual level. Once we got an idea of how the story was told, what it meant when Ossifer showed up, what it meant when Mister showed up, what the time-of-day span meant, then we tried to wrap our heads around the various endings.

We came up with an arc for the piece. Then it’s my job to ask, what does this mean with regards to lighting? I am a minimalist. I love to flirt with very subtle changes in plays. There’s an artist called Gregory Crewdson. He’s a photographer whose work is a huge influence on mine. I was really getting into him at the time. If you look up his photographs, you’ll see that many of them are staged, and some of them have interesting and peculiar color relationships. I was thinking about streetlights. The streetlight was a central image of the play. I always think of the semiotics [sign system] of a practical [non-theatrical] on stage. What is it supposed to be? What is it representing? It’s the icon of streetlight, but it’s also supposed to be where all the light in the scene comes from. There’s many kinds of streetlights. These days, there’s LED streetlights, which you see a lot of, and they’re ugly as sin. But there’s the old mercury vapor and sodium vapor lights. The mercury vapor ones are the cool white ones, and the sodium ones are the yellow ones. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the world of Moses and Kitsch and Ossifer were lit with cool mercury vapor? Then when Mister comes in, it warms up in an imperceptible way and becomes more of that yellow ick color. I wove that idea into the design. It was all very subtle in terms of minutes-long cues changing the color.

It felt important to me that there was aggressivity and abstraction to the light. Instead of just having the light come from the streetlight, there were dominant sidelights. That’s where the meat and potatoes of the lighting design came from. Part of that choice of side lighting was because of how aggressive it is. Part of it is that those angles are really good at popping bodies away from a background. If you think about a typical dance lighting plot where the light is coming in from the side. That’s exactly what it was. It allowed me to create a real darkness with the background. But also it can be traumatic and evoke, scariness, right? Because of the way the figures presented with a big shadow down the front of the body. It’s like what the boogeyman might look like. I wanted the street corner where they lived to be dangerous but I also wanted to push these two guys off the stage and right into the audience’s laps in terms of intensity.

The whole play, except for the sunrise and the ending in the Broadway version, basically takes place at night. But I’ve always been one of those people who thinks brighter is better. It doesn’t matter. It’s all abstract. You don’t have to make it dark. It doesn’t have to literally be dark to figuratively be dark.

 

Cima: Much of the play is about race. I noticed that when Mister is on stage, he’s even whiter than white. He’s washed out. Almost like a ghost.

 

Doshi: That’s the virtue of the warm color temperature. I am one of those designers who picks the right feeling of light for what the story is. Then within that feeling, I do subtle tweaking to see what version of that will be the best for skin tones. For example, the cool white light that dominated the corner with Moses and Kitch, there’s a lot of different ways to make that light. Not to get too technical, but there’s different gels we can use. There’s one called Lee 201, and there’s one called Lee 501. Lee 501 is just slightly warmer than Lee 201. That’s the one I chose for the show because I didn’t want it to green out Moses and Kitch, but I needed it to still work for Ossifer. When Mister was there, it was actually just clear white light.

 

Cima: There was a functional streetlight?

 

Doshi: We took a functional streetlight, we ripped it apart, and we put color-changing LED tape in it so I could fine tune the color for the cool white and the warm white. LED tape has red, green, blue, a warm white, and a cool white. The warm white is the same color temperature as an incandescent light bulb. The cool white is the same color temperature as daylight. But the cool white also looks like the mercury vapor streetlamp. When I wanted it to be warm, I was able to put a little bit of green in it. Then during the plagues, it was red.

 

Cima: You said the ending changed for the Broadway run and became more optimistic. Can you talk about those changes?

 

Doshi: In the Broadway version, I don’t want to speak for my colleagues, and I certainly don’t want to speak for Antoinette [Nwandu], because my understanding of what she did might be different than her motivation for it. But we were all looking for some optimism in the world. It was post-pandemic. It was post-George Floyd. The world was reeling and we didn’t want to go out on a bummer, or I didn’t want to go to a bummer, anyway. The idea was that at the end of the play, after the plagues, at the moment of self-actualization for the guys, that suddenly the world was revealed to them. The idea is that it was like precolonial Manhattan, the island of Manahatta. During the plagues there was a scrim [sheer curtain] upstage, which was just this black backdrop. It’s just these guys in this black surround. Then, during the plagues, there were lightning flashes where you just barely caught glimpses of foliage up there. At the end, we revealed a giant landscape of foliage and sky and a sun. Then they were able to exit off through the background.

 

Cima: So, Mister doesn’t reappear to—

 

Doshi: He reappears, but it’s not the same reappearance. It was a beautiful, very different ending. Whether or not it was as powerful as previous endings is an open question. It’s curious because that makes two different plays. That was a big technical challenge to pull that off in just the right way. For those of you who’ve read my book, there’s a really interesting conversation that we all had as a team and it was fiery to come up with what we wanted that last image to actually be.

 

Cima: Can you talk about having a living playwright in the room and what that does to your process?

 

Doshi: It depends on the playwright. Some living playwrights in the room will just huddle down and take notes and then talk to the director later. Some playwrights in the room have strong opinions about everything. Antoinette [Nwandu] certainly has strong opinions about everything. I’m a big fan of the hierarchy of theatre rehearsal practice. I always like it when playwrights talk to the director and then the director interprets that and talks to all the designers. But there were times when we were figuring stuff out and everybody would huddle because we’re all friends. That’s the virtue of a social, collaborative process. We would go out to dinner and ask, “Hey, what if we did this? Or wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” I remember when we were doing one of the Steppenwolf iterations, I had the whole team over and made collard greens and pinto beans for everybody.

 

Cima: Theatre is a collaborative art form.

 

Doshi: We can’t do it alone. It’s a very social art form. When the playwright’s there, it’s nice too because sometimes you think, “Hey, these words and this idea aren’t meshing.” As a lighting designer, I’m always fond of saying that the lighting designer and the director are the only two people who are responsible for 100% of stage time. Even if it’s a blackout, it’s on us. Sometimes when I work with playwrights that I’ve worked with often, I have dramaturgical conversations that aren’t necessarily about design but help me solve something that I’m trying to solve design-wise. It happens in opera too, where I say, “Hey, we don’t have enough time for this transition. Can you write another 10 bars of music?” Nobody knows how the sausage is made in the theatre. They don’t come out humming the lighting design. If they do, we’ve all made a mistake.

 

Cima: There’s that old lighting design joke about how you’re never mentioned in the reviews.

 

Doshi: If you are, it’s because they hate you.

 

Cima: You talked about how you now work intuitively. I wanted to come back to that. How did you learn to build that intuitive structure? For young designers, how do they learn to trust their intuition?

 

Doshi: There’s a lot of research done these days on theories of expertise. The most common and popularly quoted one is that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice before you become an expert. I don’t know if that number is exactly true. I’d have to go back and do a lot of math to see how many hours I’ve been in tech, but it’s pretty close. I always tell my students the great thing about doing theatre in a university is that you can fail. You’re practicing how to make theatre. I often joke that we go to play practice, we don’t go to rehearsal. I love the idea of how rehearsal is a place of experimentation. I used to hate the word play when it related to work. Now I love the word play because it is the idea of letting the imagination loose. When you’re a young designer, you are constantly trying to figure out what you are doing. What light am I turning on? What is it supposed to look like? How do I make this scary? Or how do I do this transition? Because you’ve never done it before. In my early career, I can think about the terror of being in tech and not exactly knowing what I was gonna do next.

But if you do it enough, you start to build a vocabulary of what works and what doesn’t work in terms of storytelling on the stage. If you’re in a thrust theatre [with audience on three sides], people are going to be staged on the diagonal. So it’s probably a good idea to have a light coming out of the vom [the space in between groups of audience members where actors enter] and one going into the vom. It sounds like Legos. But in a way, it is. If you put those [lights] there, you’re probably going to need them. You start to build these ideas of what might be necessary in the storytelling. Those are nuts and bolts things. After you do enough shows in the thrust, you don’t even think about it anymore. You’re know, “I need this [vom light], and this [vom light]. Because it’s a thrust. It doesn’t matter what the play is.” That’s an architectural response to the space.

How you use the lights and how you integrate those ideas into the overall ebb and flow of the lighting design becomes your style. You can probably look at several of my plays or operas and understand style choices I make as a designer. There’s fifteen different ways to light people, but one of them is the one I might choose. Once you understand what your style is, once you understand that the necessary components of how to light a play, how to make a light plot, how to put lights in the air, where to put them to effectively translate ideas, what ones you’re going to want in the air, no matter what show it is—for example, it doesn’t matter what show it is, I’m always putting a cross light system [a method of lighting performers from opposing side angles, rather than from straight-on] because I know what cross light will do. I know exactly how I can use it. It’s like “ol’ reliable” in that regard. That doesn’t make it formulaic. I know that for me to make the show look like I want it to, it’s probably going to need cross light. Then if there’s a finite amount of time I can spend working on a show in advance. I know, of course, there’s a finite amount of time I can spend working on a show in the theatre because it says I have to start being creative at noon and stop at five and start up at seven, end at midnight. That’s my job. The more you practice, the less time you have to spend thinking about what the light plot is. In fact, these days, I mostly make my assistants make the light plots. I give them a list of ideas and say, “You have a good idea of how I think a good cross light system should work. Go make a plot and show it to me.” I want to spend my time using that plot in the theatre, crafting light for the show. I now can intuit responses to what’s going on stage without having to think too much about them.

I tell my students I’m a classic mid-century modernist in the studio where every idea is there for a reason, and then I am a totally feral postmodernist in the theatre. Whatever my gut is telling me is a good idea. Of course, I have an idea like this scene happens at night or day, and I can get a little bit more wild depending on what the piece is. In the end, I’m making decisions that seem to make sense to me for some reason. Usually, “I’ve done a show like this before. I’ve wanted to evoke an idea like this before and this worked. I’m going to turn it on and see what happens.” Then I “make look, evaluate, and adapt.” Once we get through the whole show, I go back and look at the whole thing, and I think, “I see the idea I’m going for here.” I’m going to spend the rest of the time carving it out and making sure it articulates itself the way it wants to, whilst also growing with the way the production is growing on stage through the rehearsal process. If there’s a long preview process, the lighting design for the first preview might be radically different than the lighting design for opening night. I’ll just keep working until they tell me I can’t anymore.

 

Cima: They do say, “Okay. You’re done.”

 

Doshi: Yes. It’s a little bit different with opera because we don’t have previews, and generally you don’t have rehearsal after the final orchestra dress. I want the show to be buttoned up by the end of the penultimate orchestra dress. Then, I can watch the orchestra dress for mistakes. The next time you see it is opening night. I loathe making changes between the last rehearsal and opening night. Sometimes you have to. The opera process is radically different from the theatre process, at least for lighting designers.

 

Cima: You have written a book about aesthetics.

 

Doshi: I have.

 

Cima: I wondered if you could talk about the importance of visual storytelling and how aesthetics play into your work.

 

Doshi: The thing I was trying to get at with that book is that in order to be a good lighting designer, you have to be a good theatre maker. In order to be a good theatre maker, you need to know how to collaborate. In order to be a good theatre maker, you need to be an artist. In order to be an artist, you have to have an idea of what makes art and to give yourself permission to say there’s such things as good art and there’s such things as bad art, which is always a heretical idea to introduce to young people. If you don’t think there’s a difference between good art and bad art, why do we do previews? You do a preview so you can make your bad art good art, or your good art better art. What was important to me in the context of the book was to set forth my own idea of what I think an artist is and what I think an artwork is. I think the artist is the maker and there’s an art object, but the artwork itself happens in the dialogue between whatever the art object is and spectator, which is why I devote a lot of time to theories of spectatorship. The wonderful thing about the theatre, and why I’m drawn to the theatre more than any other art form, is the dialogue between the artwork and the spectator is live and active and dynamic. Whereas I can look at a sculpture all day long, but that’s a one-way story.

I wanted to foreground the idea of thinking in terms of being an artist, thinking in terms of also being a spectator, because an artist also has to be a spectator to their own work for it to work well. I wanted to say, “Here’s my point of view on design, using some case studies,” but then I realized I needed to provide a clear understanding of what I think modernism is and what I think postmodernism is so that I could explain to the readers how all that high theory actually matters when you’re trying to figure out, “Am I going to make this red or blue, or am I going to turn that light on or that light on?” Previous to my book, there was very little literature out there that connected the heady, artistic, dramaturgical idea to [the practical need to] put a 360 Degree Source Four over there. There was nothing. I wanted to talk about how you can make those choices in the book. This idea of spectatorship becomes more foregrounded as I continue my career. I’ll be having a discussion with a collaborator and we’ll start talking about whether or not a moment’s landing. I’ll ask, “Are we primary, secondary, or tertiary witnesses to what’s going on?” Then somebody asks, “What do you mean?” I respond, “Are we witnessing the event, or are we witnessing somebody else witnessing the event, or are we hearing about somebody else witnessing the event? How do we want that to land with the audience?” If we can identify how we want the spectator to take this thing in, then all the answers to our questions will be made.

Discussion Questions:

1. How did Marcus Doshi’s early theatre experiences at Wabash College shape his approach to design?
2. In what ways does the “make, look, evaluate, adapt” loop reflect a growth-oriented design process?
3. How did collaboration with Wilson Chin and the creative team influence the lighting design for Pass Over?
4. How does Doshi balance technical precision with instinct in his design choices?
5. What role does spectatorship play in Doshi’s overall design philosophy?

Designing Worlds, Inviting Play

A Conversation with Wilson Chin

 

Wilson Chin: My name is Wilson Chin. I am a set designer. I’m from California. I went to college there, UC Berkeley. I studied architecture, but I always loved theatre. I loved it as an audience member. It wasn’t something I thought I could do professionally. It wasn’t until after college that I went to Williamstown Theatre Festival for two summers as an intern just for fun, I discovered you can do theatre professionally. I met other professionals and realized this was something I loved doing and I wanted to keep on doing. I went to grad school. I went to Yale School of Drama. I moved to New York because it’s the epicenter of American theatre. I’ve been there now for over 20 years.

 

Gibson Alessandro Cima: What made you want to go to the Williamstown Festival to begin with?

 

Chin: It had an incredible reputation. It produced ten plays in ten weeks. Literally every week they would open a new play. In one summer, being able to do back-to-back shows, fitting basically a whole year’s worth of theatre in three months, that was really appealing to me.

 

Cima: Were you doing design work then?

 

Chin: It was an internship. I was mainly painting, which I had no experience in. So I learned so much from my colleagues, from designers. Most of what I know now I learned in those two summers at Williamstown.

 

Cima: What drew you to set design specifically?

 

Chin: I think it’s about creating a world in which a story can take place. In high school, I discovered [Steven] Sondheim and his musicals. His musicals had incredible original designs. Boris Aronson designed them. His designs for Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, later with Into the Woods, these are like iconic set designs that inspired me. I don’t think I design like that myself; but I think the idea of creating an envelope for a story to be told in, that is what drew me into it.

 

Cima: What was the takeaway from your graduate study?

 

Chin: At Yale, the main professor was Ming Cho Lee, who was an iconic designer. I wanted to go to Yale to study under him. He had trained a lot of designers who were also my favorite designers. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the people he had taught. He was a real advocate for making sure that there were generations to come of designers who had a very thoughtful process.

 

Cima: Tell me about those years in New York as you were starting to build your career.

 

Chin: I first moved to New York and I spent many years assisting other designers, which is a great thing because it’s a real job. You get paid well if you have the skills, and because I studied architecture, I had very good model-making skills. I had good hand drafting skills. I was useful for productions. I assisted some of my favorite designers. I wrote my favorite designers and asked, “Can I work in your studio?” I ended up working for about three years with a designer named Santo Loquasto, who is one of my favorite designers. I learned so much from him. All the while I was designing my own shows on the side. Over three years, I had to make the decision to step away from assisting and become my own designer, which is what I’ve been doing since then.

 

Cima: What did you particularly like about his designs?

 

Chin: His designs had a rawness to them and a materiality to them. You look at his sets and they don’t look artificial or fake. You feel the texture. His scenery has life to it, has character to it. You look at one of his sets and you understand. It becomes like another character in the play.

 

Cima: Is there a design that I would be familiar with?

 

Chin: Santo did sets and costumes. As a costume designer, he designed the original production of Ragtime. He did the sets and costumes for Fosse, the Musical, Moving Out. Recently, on Broadway right now, he did the set for Gypsy. He did a lot of dance. He did opera, plays, musicals. I loved his versatility. That’s what I aspire to do as well.

 

Cima: Were there aspects of his work that you incorporated into your own?

 

Chin: Every time I design a show, I think about materials. I think about how the characters inhabit the space and the interaction between the two. I think about how the space is getting used, providing opportunities for usage. You want the set to be full of possibilities. That’s what I feel like his work was like. That’s what I aspire my work to be like as well.

 

Cima: How do you go about creating possibilities for the actors and the director?

 

Chin: As a set designer, you have to create spaces that are flexible enough that you feel like anything can happen. You don’t want to get locked in. You want the play to be able to breathe. It’s not just about open space. It’s about making sure that the pieces that you provide have multi-use, can move around in different ways. It’s a feeling of a playground. Set design is also about creating layers of depth: foreground and background so the actors have something to interact with when they’re downstage or mid-stage, or upstage, so it almost has a cinematic quality. When you watch a movie, it’s not just always actors in the foreground and things in the background. It’s an interplay between the world and the actors.

 

Cima: How did you get involved with Pass Over, and what was your design process?

 

Chin: Pass Over came to me when it was about to have a production at Steppenwolf. There’s not a lot of stage directions, and the stage directions that are in the script are very amorphous and dreamlike. When you approach the play, you can go in many directions. The play is allegorical. It’s not about specific people, but the characters represent other things. It’s representational. It’s metaphorical. I wanted to create a world that can contain all of that. You have to imagine. Put yourself into it. Put your own feelings about who these characters are, and what their situation is [into the design], because it’s all ambiguous. It’s also tied in with Waiting for Godot, the classic [Samuel] Beckett play. I thought a lot, what are the parallels? How to mirror that? Instead of a tree, I put in a big streetlamp. I knew it wanted to be desolate. It’s just a slab of concrete that’s like a sidewalk, like a street corner. The original script said the play works on three different levels: the biblical exodus story, a southern plantation slave-time story, a story in the here and the now. Containing all three of those worlds was a fun challenge. The original production was a slab of concrete that was surrounded by desert sand. We also, at one point, had cotton plants back there, like they were in a plantation.

We’ve done the play now in four different iterations, and each time we get closer and closer to the essence of the play. The original production had all of this stuff in it. With each subsequent production, we stripped away a little bit. We did it at Steppenwolf and then we redid it at Steppenwolf with Spike Lee filming it. Then, we took it to New York off-Broadway at Lincoln Center. Then, we took it to Broadway. By the time we got to Broadway, there was no more sand, no more cotton plants. It was just a desolate slab of concrete. At the end, when they pass over to the Promised Land, we did a big transformation where a Garden of Eden, a utopia emerges around them. I feel if we were to do the play again now, we would find a different way. I think the playwright and the director were never interested in repeating themselves. It was always a constantly evolving dialogue with the story. Because it was so allegorical, the story could shift and morph and transform over time in space.

 

Cima: I’ve seen the film but that has a very different ending. I hear that the ending was much more hopeful on Broadway.

 

Chin: Yeah. Because the play existed in a certain time each time we performed it. And so there were some moments in our past where we were more hopeful than other times, and the play production reflected that at each time.

 

Cima: Were you part of those discussions?

 

Chin: It was always an ongoing dialogue. The playwright and the director are such open people. It was a very communal discussion between actors, designers. It was a long-term collaboration that went on for a few years. It was great.

 

Cima: You talked about the streetlight instead of the bare tree.

 

Chin: The original stage directions didn’t mention a streetlamp. I think they do now. The stage direction at the beginning, it just said a street corner. I didn’t really give a street corner because a street corner implies a corner of a building, and I didn’t put any buildings in because I just wanted it to be desolate. It was evoking a street corner without actually being one.

 

Cima: Then, of course, Marcus [Doshi] took that up, asking, “What is the quality of light this streetlamp is going to give off, this phosphor light?" Can you talk a little bit more about the artistic collaborations that you went through with the other designers with Marcus [Doshi] and Justin [Ellington] and Sarafina [Bush]?

 

Chin: With lighting design, we knew how desolate it was, we knew when you walk into the space, you didn’t want it to feel like you were seeing traditional theatre. We didn’t have any masking on the sides. It was just the exposed walls of the theatre. So you walk in and you feel like you’re in an empty theatre with just the slab in the middle. [Marcus Doshi’s] lights are totally exposed. It’s a lot of side light, because that’s the best way to isolate and to sculpt people. It was almost like dance lighting, which is not a lot of front light, a lot of sidelight, a lot of backlight. You feel like they’re almost floating in space. In every iteration we’ve had, we’ve maintained the “ no masking” feel to it. You feel like you’re walking into a raw space. With costumes, because the world is a dark void, the actors need to pop. We discovered quickly that wearing black clothes, they disappear into the background. Giving them pops of color makes them stand out in the world.

Sound and lights work together hand-in-hand because there’s so many moments of pops and shifts. It’s almost like a horror movie. There’s a certain amount of tension that needs to be maintained throughout. That’s all about lights and sound working hand-in-hand to create an environment that shows these two guys are constantly in terror for their lives, but they’re getting through it. Because what they’re afraid of, you don’t really ever see. So, it’s just about the sound and the lights creating that shift.

 

Cima: When the white guy [Mister] comes on stage, there’s a surreal kind of feeling of being on a picnic in the 1950s, this green landscape at the same time as being on this street corner. And I wondered, how you built those moments of rupture, where, suddenly they’re being affected by the policeman [Ossifer] coming or the white guy.

 

Chin: Sound and lights do a lot of that. What I had to figure out is how this guy enters the world. It’s a floating slab—you can’t really tell how they get on or off it. It feels like they should be trapped on it, because like in Waiting for Godot, there’s nowhere to go. This guy appears magically. With each iteration, we figured out different ways for him to pop up. Literally there were times when he was just underneath the platform and would pop up a little bit. Then there were times when we built a black ramp you couldn’t see because the whole surround was black, and he would just walk on. With lights, it was like magic, almost like a magic trick, diversion of the eye. You do something in one corner, and then the other guy sets himself up so the audience doesn’t notice. Then with a shift of light, you notice. There actually was a magic special effect specialist who worked on these transitions with us. The picnic is magical as well. In Chicago, and I think in the movie version, he had an enormous basket, and all the food was in it. When we moved to New York, we gave him a much smaller basket. We had a little trap door underneath the deck that the food popped up in. There needs to be like an otherworldly quality to this guy. We don’t know who he is, but he’s not right. He’s not of this world, almost. It’s about how he enters and exits the space and that basket.

 

Cima: I love that idea of the old magic tricks that still work, misdirection and all of those old safe escapes.

 

Chin: Waiting for Godot is a vaudevillian act. That was what Waiting for Godot was based on. We kept some of that tradition of oldie timey, vaudeville magic in with us. Bill Irwin, who’s a clown and also a Beckett specialist—was a consultant on our production of Pass Over when we moved to Broadway.

 

Cima: How has participating in that process shaped your work moving forward?

 

Chin: The director is a woman named Danya Taymor, whose process is like none other I’ve seen. She’s very process-oriented and works deeply with actors to create this real mood in the room. They begin every rehearsal with half an hour of stretching and exercises. There’s a lot of trust in the room. So much of theatre is about getting the job done. It feels like a construction site. She creates a meditative, almost like spiritual room. the work becomes super intense, super hyper-focused. You can go so far if there’s a real trust and a real giving yourself into the work. She directed The Outsiders on Broadway, which was her first musical. I saw it and I was so proud of her because I saw it and I saw all of the things she brings to a production in that production. There was an intensity, there was a quietness at times I’ve never seen any other director do except for Danya [Taymor]. That relationship is something that I took out of Pass Over.

 

Cima: Is that meditative approach something you’re trying to integrate into your practice now?

 

Chin: My process is very calm. In my studio, it’s not a lot of hubbub. It’s not a lot of yelling. I think I’m fairly quiet in a way. I think. I’m not like running around going crazy. I try to slow things down.

 

Cima: Can you walk me through a typical process?

 

Chin: You get the script. You read the script. For me, reading that script for the first time is a very big deal because, like an audience member, you only get one time to take in the story. Reading the script is my first time to take in the story. First impressions are important. What I’m thinking as I’m reading the play is important because that’s also the journey an audience member takes. Clocking how I’m feeling as I’m reading the play is important. I read the play and I usually put the play aside and just live with that story for a little bit. While I’m living with it, I think about what the world of it could be, the mood of it. I feel as a designer, I don’t go directly into the specific needs of the play. I think first about what is the overall vibe of this world. What is the mood? Then, once that starts taking shape, I start thinking about detail. I do research, particularly if the play is set in a period or a place that’s not familiar to me, but even if it is familiar. It’s all about getting closer to the core of what I think this world is. Research, dreaming, talking about the play with the director, it all brings you closer and at a certain point it snaps together where you understand what it needs to be. Once that happens, everything else is just about making it happen. So much of design is getting to that moment of “Eureka!” Then it’s just filling in the blanks.

 

Cima: Is there a reason why you work primarily in the theatre rather than film or television?

 

Chin: I love the communal aspect of theatre. We’re all in the same room together, actors, audience, the theatre space, every night they come together and relive the story over and over again, the repetition of it. What you’re watching is something that is hyper-rehearsed, locked in. Of course, it’s going to be a little different every night, but the cues are the same. The transitions are the same. I love the coordination of all the elements together: text, acting, design, staging. It’s crazy that theatre works. It takes dozens of people to make a single moment happen. And it happens every night. Hopefully nothing ever goes wrong. Being in the same room with this thing that happens the same every night is inspiring.

Discussion Questions:

1. How did Wilson Chin’s background in architecture shape his approach to set design?
2. What does Chin mean by making a set “full of possibilities” for directors and actors, and how might this affect performance?
3. How did the design of Pass Over evolve over its multiple productions, and what does this suggest about the role of iteration in design?
4. In what ways can set design contribute to metaphor and allegory in a play?
5. How does Chin’s collaborative process with other designers reflect the interconnected nature of theatrical production?