Photo,  Courtesy Kaye Voyce  

The World According to Kaye Voyce

The Accomplished Set/Costume Designer on Waiting for Godot at the Geffen, and on the Larger World of Creativity

By Isadora Swann

 

 

This article is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship

Walking into the theater to see Waiting for Godot, at the Geffen Playhouse, I was instantly captivated, intrigued, and set on edge by the startlingly other-worldly and yet entirely recognizable set design. A black backdrop that seems to fade into oblivion, a bare metallic tree, and a realistic-looking rock sit alone on a noticeably otherwise empty stage.

Costume and set designer Kaye Voyce is an Obie Award Winner and Tish School of the Arts graduate whose multifaceted designs span the worlds of theatre, dance, and opera.

I met with her over Zoom to discuss her choices in Godot, life and practices as a designer, and her thoughts on the industry.

Stage Raw: What drew you to the theater and what keeps you in the theater?

Kaye Voyce I started going to the theatre in New York City in 1989 when I moved here. And there were a lot of small, scrappy, independent companies doing very experimental work. It was actually a really good time to be a young person in the city. I just thought that all theatre was this kind of amazing, communal, exciting, current, spontaneous thing. I didn’t realize that for a lot of people, it was a very kind of rarified experience. A kind of anarchy, and not knowing what you are walking into, and people really playing with the form, I thought it was normal. It was during the AIDS crisis, and I think a lot of the work I was drawn to was very political because of that, and people were making it with some of the urgency that way. That is what drew me into it as an audience member, and eventually as someone who wanted to work in the field. I stay in it because I keep wanting it to be those things. There is a sense of communal practice, collaboration, and trying to make something bigger than yourself.

SR: When approaching a new project, what is the first question you ask?

KV: Usually, the first question is, “Is there a text?”; sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. And once you get beyond logistics . . . “talk to me about why you are drawn to this text” or “talk to me about the mood of this text”. I think asking about the mood or energy takes you out of the literal and more about the experience or the thing you are trying to make.

SR: In Waiting for Godot, what was the answer to that? What was the mood?

 

KV: In my first conversations with the director, Judy (Lovett), she talked about how the world should feel very unstable. The world should feel very small, and very large, so that you never quite know what is going to happen. The tricky thing about the play, and there are many, but one of them is that in some ways it feels like it requires very specific things, and in some ways it is unbelievably open. So the process of talking with Judy and our other collaborators, Simon (Bennison) who is our lighting designer, and Mel (Mercier) our sound designer, was trying to figure out what elements are important to the mood and the changeable nature of it.

SR: I noticed Waiting for Godot frequently referenced costume pieces within the stage directions.

KV: Well, it’s interesting, I feel like for a long time as a designer I kind of undervalued stage directions. As an undergraduate one of our assignments was to read a play and not look at the stage directions, only look at what the actors actually say. For that reason, I started to think of the stage directions as something limiting. Years later, when I was actually working on a Sam Shepard play, and there are some incredibly specific stage directions, I had a realization; I started taking stage directions more as a prompt to imagine. In working on Godot, since Judy had worked on the play a lot before . . . it was interesting to find out from her what she thought was important in terms of staging. As a part of the preparation, we read Beckett’s notebooks from the Schiller Theatre in Berlin, and he has all these diagrams about the staging and I realized.. there is actually a sort of structural geometry that exists in the text, and the timing, and the rhythm.

SR: How do you read a script through the lens of a customer/set designer?

KV: First time, I read it just like anyone else . . . reading it for pleasure, I read it a few times. And then I usually have a cross between a list and a chart… in one column I have the names of the characters, and then, scenes or page numbers of events. So in Waiting for Godot like, “oh in this scene it seems important that they need hats.” Then there is usually a step of finding visual research, that can be everything from just really instinctual, unexplainable research that ends up in the pile, to things that feel very specific, like a historical period.

SR: Where do you go for inspiration?

KV: Oh, gosh, everywhere, I get inspiration every day on the street. I get inspiration in museums, galleries, and books, then that remind me of the things I have seen. There is nothing more that I love than going through used bookstores. I also have been saving magazine clippings of things for years and years, and I have them in loosely organized binders. I mean you know, things like Pinterest can be useful to me too. I find what’s hard about finding a lot of inspiration online, is that you need to know what you are looking for. Whereas browsing in a bookstore, you might come across an author you have never seen before. The opportunity of chance is so much lower, and I like things a little chancier.

SR:  Can you tell me a little bit about your costume choices for the character Lucky?

KV: The work on the costumes was really interesting. Judy and I worked in 3D collage almost; putting things on the actors, on the bodies. I would do things in a rough way and then she would be like, “Oh! I really like that shirt, or that coat, but what if we made things tighter or made things looser?”. I think for Lucky there was an initial impulse that came out of actually watching Adam [Stein], the actor, in rehearsal. He has an incredibly expressive body and … one day he came into rehearsal wearing shorts, and there was something about his arms being bare and his legs being bare, sort of instinctually right about his character and this actor. I think along the way \we were trying to figure out how much of the costumes in general exist in a kind of expected, Beckettian world. And how much felt unexpected, without feeling contradictory.

SR: How much were you in rehearsal?

KV: A lot, especially in the first week and a half or two weeks, for many reasons. A lot of times you can get better information by just observing how other people are working. I hadn’t worked with any of the actors before so I think as a designer the more you can be in rehearsal the more potential trust you can gain as a part of being in the process and you have seen the conversations. And I think as a costume designer too, you start to watch just that human being in movement, and what they wear normally, and how things sit on your body, and that gives you an extra leg up when you are buying clothes for people. That way you are able to answer questions, scenic and prop wise too, you just learn things more quickly.

SR: How much do you involve individual actors in your process?

KV: Different kinds of actors have different levels of involvement, or wanting to be involved in different ways in costume and the physical world. I like talking about those things with any actor that is interested. There is an inherent collaboration no matter what, and I think it is a question of how deep and how articulated is that conversation.

SR: How do you choose to work on a play? And why did you choose to work on Waiting for Godot?

 

KV: I choose things that feel either difficult and I don’t know how to do them, and that makes it exciting, or things with people I love. And I just want to work with those people, and sometimes I take shows for money. And sometimes those things overlap, and sometimes they don’t. It’s both a job and a calling. I took this one because to be asked to do set and costumes for something like this was very interesting and totally daunting for me. I really wanted to get to know the play, and also, in 2016 I was working on Beckett’s Endgame, and I found working on Beckett at that point in American history very helpful, just a good place to put my energy, and it seemed appropriate to be doing it in 2024…. Everything comes from something, it is all happening right now in the theatre, even plays that are historical, it is still happening right now in the theater. It is all in the now.

SR: Do you feel like your identity and or life experience impacts your work as a designer?

I feel like being a designer can be a very humbling thing, because you have to acknowledge that you only know what you truly know and how you experience it. You have to be questioning that all the time, and yet you have to be not paralyzed by that. At the end of the day, everything you do in the theater is telling someone else’s story. Unless I was doing a one-woman show starring, designed by, written by, myself, it is all going to be someone else’s story. I love that because I think people are fascinating, other worlds are fascinating, and to be entrusted with all of that is fantastic and humbling, and I think it also makes me look at the things I think I know in a different way.

SR: Would you ever work on the same show twice, or have you ever?

KV: What is great about doing a play more than once, you realize that in different points in your life, things mean different things, you know, plays will have wildly different meaning to you, you will realize in a great play you can highlight very different things. Using the exact same things you can highlight different material. And it depends too on the cast, if there is somebody in the cast who really carries something in a different way, totally changes the experience of it.

SR:  What advice would you give your younger self?

KV: I would say, I would have told my younger self to get out of their lane more often. If you think you are a costume designer, you should totally try to design lights for a show, you should try to direct something, you should try to write something, you should try to perform in something. Actually the idea of things being these lanes, I think is ultimately not helpful for the whole process.

SR: Can you tell me more about that?

KV: For me, it comes from a very personal space. I studied both set and costume design, and I did both my first few years out of school. But I became much more known as a costume designer. For many reasons, I think I had just gotten more work that way, and I think at that point in time, the industry definitely had some male bias around gender roles in theatre. And I was just so happy to be getting work that I didn’t push it. I should have tried to do more things more early on, and push those boundaries and those limits early on. I am trying to do that now.

Waiting for Godot runs through December 21 the Geffen Playhouse.