Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with set designer Lawrence Moten about his work on Covenant.
Leah Reddy: What is your theatre origin story?
Lawrence Moten: My theatre origin story goes all the way back to middle school. I was an actor in my tiny little middle school plays growing up. I enjoyed it. I went to a weird private Christian school in Seattle. When my parents split and my mom and I moved to San Antonio, Texas, which is where my whole family is from, she was really smart, and she said, “There are two things I want you doing to help with the transition,” which was “I want you in theatre and I want you running cross country.” It was kind of the two afterschool activities that I did. I took Theatre 1 freshman year of high school, and the teacher of that class happened to also be the technical director at the high school.
And he was like, “Hey, you should take my Technical Theatre course next year. And I did. And at 15, I was like, “Yep, this is what I'm going to do.” And I looked him in the face, and I was like, “Get me ready for college. What do I need to do? How do I need to get there?” I was off to the races. I happened to meet Ithaca College, where I went to undergrad, at one of those state high school thespian conventions. I did an interview and was accepted. They called me like, “Hey, we, the theatre department, have accepted you. You just have to be accepted by the college.” I applied, got in, loved my four years at Ithaca, and moved to New York City. Here I am, 12 years later.
LR: Were there any specific teachers, other than the one you mentioned, or experiences, that shaped who you are as an artist?
LM: There were three. Scott Schumann was the technical director at my high school; his partner, Carla Schumann was the head of the theatre department; and their former student-turned-teacher Melissa Utley. When I think back on my theatre career, I always highlight and uplift high school theatre educators, because I think instilling that joy and that love of the art form at such a young age gave me such a fruitful and lovely life.
LR: What drew you to Covenant? What resonates with you about this piece?
LM: There are several things. I love a horror play. I love a horror play that uplifts Black bodies. I think about my history and the plays that I read and analyzed in undergrad, and A Raisin in the Sun was the only Black play I think we ever did. When I think about my career and the things that have become important to me, it's seeing people of color or marginalized [groups] or global majority communities in the spotlight in ways that don't mean that their pain is the only thing.
So watching a family struggle with real things [in Covenant]—like a mother who's so entrenched in religion that she can see nothing else, or a young man who's chasing a dream, but because his dream falls outside of the standard ideas of society, he becomes an outlier, and then, there's this mythos around him—and the beautiful relationships that York has built into the piece and the ways in which environment can add to that, it's just such a haunting tale of family and love and loss. Add into that the myth of the occult, for lack of a better term, and I was hooked. It's a really exciting piece.
LR: How are you interpreting the idea of horror as a genre on the stage? Is that in your thinking at all?
LM: A little bit. I think, for set design, you are trying to create a world in which the audience is ready to accept the journey they're going on. I often ask this of playwrights or directors when I'm first talking about the shows, “What do you want the audience to feel when they walk in the space? What do you want them to know is going to happen? What do you want to prepare them for?” Sound gets to do a lot of that, and scenery gets to do a lot of that. “What's our pre-show walk-in? What do we hear? And what do we see?” And those are the two things that I think really get us ready for the journey of the next 90 minutes, two and a half hours, whatever the length of the show is.
Creating a space in which you can feel uneasy, creating a space in which you feel like the supernatural is present, was where I wanted to go. We are working with a brilliant illusionist. There are all these [effects] that are going to be happening, and so, part of my job, as a set designer, is to work with the illusionist to make sure that those things can happen. That's a level of expertise that is not mine and I'm not going to try and have it. My job is to work with [director] Tiffany [Nicole Greene] and the rest of the creative team to create an atmosphere that our audience would then believe these things could take place in.
LR: Is there anything else about collaborating with magic and illusions that you want our audiences to know?
LM: In the wild intimacy of this space, it takes a lot of work. When your closest audience member is 30 feet away, you get more breath and space and grace to create those magic tricks. And when your audience is 18 inches away, as some of our audience members may be in these moments, it's harder to do. That's just the nature of the game. And so, it's exciting and it's terrifying, and I'm hopeful it all comes together and looks beautiful.
LR: That leads into my next question. Can you talk about designing for a space as intimate as the Black Box Theatre?
LM: Tiffany had a really interesting idea from Jump, which was to say that she wanted a space that was [shaped like] a T. She said, “I'm interested in both horizontal movement and vertical movement and the audience having to follow us in scenes not all happening in one location,” which is a big task for such a small space. I think it was that challenge that created the space that the audience is going to walk into. When thinking about this play and when thinking about how small and intimate the space was and how intertwined religion, and specifically religion in 1930s Georgia was, to the piece, I found an online directory of all the small rural churches in Georgia, and I just started looking through them all. Then I bought the book: Historic Rural Churches of Georgia. It's literally all the interiors and exteriors. I just started to fully envelop myself in these spaces to see how it would feel to be in a church of that nature. Some of them are well preserved, some of them aren't. It's a really amazing resource. That was the thing that made me realize, “Oh, if she wants a T space, then let's think of what it is to walk into a church and be in a space that feels like your soul is opened up to the supernatural. And then, let's tinge it, so that it could feel a little dangerous.” So it's actually a far more rundown and a little more beaten-up church than a pristine space. It doesn't want to feel like a pristine space where you might be able to instantly make a connection with God or who the higher power is.
LR: Pivoting away from Covenant: you've done a lot of work developing new work with playwrights. On your website you mention “developing new works from a design perspective.” Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that and what that process looks like?
LM: I spent four years as the resident scenic designer at the National Playwrights Conference, which was a great training ground for myself, but also a wildly interesting incubator for new work. The thing that is brilliant there is that playwrights are coming in with a director or dramaturg or performers, but the first thing they do before any of that starts is they sit down with a group of designers. And we say, “Let's talk about the play.” The director is not allowed to speak in that design process, because so often, the director is the game of telephone between the playwright and the designer. The thing about developing new plays from a design perspective is I desire direct contact with the playwright, because the playwright has a wealth of information that they don't realize they have. I don't get to ask [questions] of Chekhov or Shakespeare or any of the canonical playwrights, because they're long gone. But with a living playwright, there is something about the design process that becomes deeper and fuller, and I can find their brain space. Whether a playwright thinks about it or not, they have an idea of what the space looks like in their mind. And then, they forget it, or they don't want to admit it. They're like, “Well, I don't know. I didn't see anything.” I say, “Yes, you did. Talk to me about it.”
One of the greatest compliments a playwright ever gave me was on the last horror play that I did. The playwright came up to me, and she said, “I don't know how you did it, but you recreated my grandfather's kitchen.” And I was like, “I'm sorry, what?” And she says, “No, this staircase and then the cupboard underneath, I never told you any of this, but it is an exact recreation of the kitchen that terrified me as a child. And it was part of how I wrote this play.” Somehow, I tapped into that brain space, because I was able to have those conversations with the playwright.
LR: What advice do you have for people who want to pursue a career in set design?
LM: If you are interested, pursue it. A life in the arts is one of the most gratifying and hardest lives you'll ever live. I wake up every day excited to do what I do, but it's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world. You have to be ready to put in the work. You are your own best advocate. If there's something you want to work towards, work towards it. See what you are missing in your tool palette and the things that you have as your skillset and teach yourself. No one is going to hand that to you.
This is an industry, and specifically a career in which you have to make your own opportunities. That's advice number one. Advice number two: be kind. I would rather, as a designer and as someone who hires assistants, bring someone into my studio who doesn't have all of the skills and pay them to teach them, because they are a good person, they're a kind person, and I can spend 40 hours or more a week in the same room with them than a [jerk] who has all the skills in the world.
At the end of the day, theatre is community. It is an invitation into community, and it is an invitation into finding people who you like to create with. Don't make them mad. Don't make them hate you. Then they just won't work with you anymore. Be kind. Be a joyous and gracious person in the room. Those would be my two biggest pieces of advice.
LR: Is there anything else I haven't asked you that you want to talk about?
LM: In the world of theatre, for young people, for anyone who's interested in it, I say a life in the arts is what you make of it. So many of us are raised to think that you have to be on Broadway. But at the end of the day, if you're making art, working with your peers and collaborators who you love, and you're paying your bills doing that, that, in and of itself, is success. We have to talk about the versions of success in the arts that people want. At the end of the day, it's like, “Are you happy doing what you're doing? Do you wake up happy doing what you do every day?” Great. Nothing else matters. Do that. If you're happy and you're able to pay your bills, that's the goal. Nothing else matters. Find the versions of joy in what you want to do and chase that. I chased a different thing for far too long, and when I finally started to work towards the versions of joy in my career that I wanted, everything followed. And I've been happy for five years doing what I do, and it has only gotten better every day.
Published on October 19, 2023.