How It’s Made [1] A feather duster on the props table: “We trace each prop with a Sharpee and label it so actors and prop masters will know if something is missing.” [2] Phillip Robin ’13, Tyler Swaim ’13, and Gross measure and lay-out the arch. [3] Two sheets of plywood comprise the “brick wall” created with paint by students
from Gross’s stagecraft class. The convincing look is all about technique: “I could take anyone on this campus and show them how to do this in an hour.” [4] Timesaver: “This paintbrush caddy, which we cart around the stage, is where we return brushes so we don’t lose them.”
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C U R R E N T PA S T —photos by Kim Johnson
SOON AFTER THE FIRST LINES of the first act of the Wabash Theater Department’s production of Molière’s
The Miser, an actor grabs a doorknob. It falls off in his hand. The audience isn’t sure how to react: Was it an accident, or was it scripted for comic effect? By the time banisters drop to the floor and mantelpieces fall off the wall, the audience is howling with laughter. This set is not only a place, but a comic actor in this rollicking French farce. James Gross has designed and built a mansion that literally falls apart along with the miser’s schemes as the show progresses. The Miser is Gross’s 45th show as scenic designer and technical director for Wabash. As an assistant professor of theater at the College, he teaches scenic design and technical theater and is also resident designer for Indianapolis’s Phoenix Theater. His process always begins with a careful reading of the script, no matter the play or stage. “I think of moments in the play that are key,” Gross told the Indianapolis Star in a 2010 interview. “If I can visualize a very specific moment, most likely I’ll talk to the director about that moment. Based on my feeling about that moment, the rest of it will fall into place.” Or, in the case of The Miser, fall apart.
Photographer Kim Johnson followed Gross and his Wabash students as they put together the interior of this mansion that the play’s program described as being set in “the current past.” “I was impressed at the calm guidance James offered and his insistence that the young men do the work,” Johnson recalls. “It would no doubt go faster if he just barked orders and they obeyed, but instead they talked through design, shared ideas, and worked as collaborators to get the job done.” See more photos and read more about the play at WM Online.