Last fall, co-executive editor Anne Cattaneo discussed Lincoln Center Theater’s upcoming production of The King and I with its director, Bartlett Sher (LCT’s resident director), set designer, Michael Yeargan (South Pacific, Awake and Sing!, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and costume designer, Catherine Zuber (South Pacific, Awake and Sing!, The Coast of Utopia).
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A MODERN TWIST:
An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All set sketches © Michael Yeargan. All costume sketches © Catherine Zuber.
Anne Cattaneo: I’m curious about where this production began. Bartlett Sher: Because we had done a production of South Pacific, which went pretty well, André Bishop, our fearless leader here at Lincoln Center Theater, had been talking about doing The King and I. The initial phases, during which we talk about the very broad ideas, began while the three of us were doing Gounod’s Faust in Baden-Baden, in Germany. Over several weeks we spent a lot of time working daily on that show, and in the evening enjoying a lot of time together and discussing this production. AC: So you went to Baden-Baden knowing that you’d be working on The King and I. To prepare, had you all read the script? Or seen the movie? Catherine Zuber: I’ve seen the movies in the past, but I don’t like to see any reference material until I’m finished with the design; I find it gets in the way. I like to know that my responses are truly from myself and not influenced. Once the design is finished, I look at the films. Michael Yeargan: Well, I grew up with the movie, and as a kid I always wondered why this guy was running around in his pajamas all the time. So, as an adult, it has been fascinating for me to read about King Mongkut and Anna Leonowens, who is such an interesting character, and whom I knew so little about. It was wonderful to do that kind of research rather than just looking at sketches, pictures, and other visual materials.
AC: Everyone who creates a work of art based on a real life has to pick and choose what aspect of the core story he or she wants to use. BS: Yes, there are two aspects to this. One is the purely historical aspect of Thailand in the mid-nineteenth century, and Anna Leonowens’s life; the other is the interpretative aspect of what Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein did with the story in the early 1950s and how the story they wrote has come to be reinterpreted. So you stand inside a couple of corridors of interpretation. This becomes this kind of highly hermeneutic exercise, where you’re really trying to plumb through all these different layers of how the thing is perceived. From my point of view, setting parameters for the design really had to do with how to represent the key questions in the piece that were most resonant at the time it was written in the 1950s and what questions are most resonant now. So my entrance point came from the journalist Nicholas Kristof, who writes a lot about the problem of transitioning from traditional to contemporary modern culture in the Islamic world and developing countries. This transition to modernity is exactly what Rodgers and Hammerstein were addressing in the original piece, and it is what resonates most fully today. Kristof would say that the most dangerous thing in the developing world now is the education of women and giving a young woman a book. So in 1862, when Anna Leonowens, whatever she represents as a Westerner, gives Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to a young woman who is involuntarily given to the King as a present and is forced to join this household of many wives under the rule of the King, it is an experience of freedom that is really complex. That same problem resonated in 1950, and it resonates now and sheds light on the immediate significance of The King and I
today. Once we understood that, we could branch out and begin to build a design. One of the problems of the past designs is that they obscure this issue through decoration. MY: Exactly. BS: The opulence of past productions—and I’m not criticizing them—which are very ornate and very exotic in a way that contemporary critics would call Orientalism, is the very trap we have to avoid as we delve into the important question that Rodgers and Hammerstein were addressing, that Anna Leonowens brought up, and that historians look at inside this story. AC: How do you do that, Michael? MY: First, I looked at every picture I could find of the Royal Palace of Siam and was terrified, because all the other designs of The King and I are based on the palace’s actual architecture. It’s like an explosion in a tile factory. You’ve never seen so many tiles and colors, and all put together in the most amazing way. But when you imagine doing a play in front of it where do your eyes go? Also, in talking to Bart and in reading all this material, I felt like you couldn’t do the play in that rich world. You had to strip it down. You had to find a more iconic way to do it. So we found these pictures of Buddhist temples with teakwood and gold that was meticulously put on by monks, and this gave it a whole different quality. It’s still ornate, but you can look at it, you can find people in it. The key was this one picture of a temple, with this big canopy over it, that just became the basic thrust of the set. Because you’re also dealing with the space of the Beaumont, which is amazing—there’s this intimate platform downstage, and then this vast world upstage, and the challenge is to link those two worlds so that one can inform the other. AC: So you’re really looking at focusing on the actors, as opposed to focusing on the exotic atmosphere. MY: Exactly. 9