For the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits conversations with theatre designers David Korins, Ina Mayhew, David Rockwell, Es Devlin, and Dane Laffrey. From Broadway landmarks to innovative film and live performance design, these excerpts reveal how sets and spaces shape emotion, deepen story, and draw audiences into the moment.
David Rockwell:
Theater is one of the few art forms where things change in front of your eyes.
Dane Laffrey:
We had to really take the audience with them.
Es Devlin:
It’s very beautiful to be part of an audible gasp.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the eminent theatrical and production designers Debbie has interviewed over the years.
David Korins:
The cool thing about theater, we really get to mess with those proportions.
Debbie Millman:
I said, “What? You doing a film? You have to hire me.” I live in New York City, and one of the reasons I live here is the theater. I love the theater, and I go to as many shows as I can. I always have and I always will. Of course, I’m astonished by the dazzling playwriting and great performances. But as a designer, I’m also intrigued by the beautiful design and find it central to every theatrical experience. I feel the same way about films and concerts, and their production design. Over the years, I’ve had the great pleasure of interviewing a number of stellar theatrical designers. On this episode, I’m going to play some excerpts of some of my favorites.
In 2018, I interviewed David Korins, who has designed everything from restaurant interiors to performance stages for Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, and Bruno Mars. In 2018, I spoke with him about his set design for the Broadway show, Hamilton. You passionately wanted to be involved with Hamilton and pitch director Thomas Kale that you would be the James Madison to his Jefferson. And we can understand why now, but back then, before it was even off Broadway, when it was the 10 people in a room, what made you want to be involved so badly?
David Korins:
There’s probably a lot of ways to answer that question, but the short one is they’re my friends. And by they, I mean Lynn, Tommy, Andy, Alex.
Debbie Millman:
So, you knew them before?
David Korins:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
How did you meet?
David Korins:
So, Tommy and I actually met during the Edge Theater Company days. We met on the steps of the New York Theater Workshop on East 4th Street. He came and supported some Edge Theater Company shows. I came and supported his downtown theater company. We knew of each other. And so, as the show started to coagulate and come together, I thought like, “Okay, Tommy, seriously, when it comes time, call me.” And then I got a phone call from the public theater and they said, “We think we’re going to do Hamilton, and Tommy wants to interview you.”
Debbie Millman:
Interview.
David Korins:
Interview. I think we were in tech for a show that we were working on and I thought, “What is this going to be?” And I got the music and I got the script, and I listened to it obsessively. And I think at the time my oldest daughter was maybe four or six, I don’t know, the days, the years. And I played the opening number for her. I became obsessed with the show. I really liked it. And I played the opening number.
Debbie Millman:
I’m not going to give up my shot?
David Korins:
No, the opening number was the Alexander Hamilton number. And I remember her at six, let’s say, saying, “Put a pencil to my temple, connected it to my brain.” And I thought she was super into it. And I did a lot of work in preparation for that interview for Tommy, including lots of research, some sketches, and I thought about the show a lot. And I never really try and do that because I always feel like directors are halfway fishing for ideas, but I didn’t care. I went in there trying to get the job. And I did say to him, “I think that Lynn rose to pretty big stardom within the heights.
And I think that people think on some level, you’ve hooked your wagon to his star and let me be your Madison to your Jefferson. Let me be your right-hand man. I can do this.” Andy and I had just done a revival of Annie. I was like, “We’re young, scrappy and hungry. Who else are you going to hire? I will not throw away my shot.” Literally, I was quoting the shows. And I did try to at least plant a seed in his mind, like, “Boy, will you regret it if you don’t do this?”
Debbie Millman:
And did you bring along any of your, what is now legendary models with you? I know that you…
David Korins:
I brought no model, but I did propose the turntables in the first meeting. We’ve talked about that a lot, but…
Debbie Millman:
Tell me, just because I’m afraid that there might be some listeners that aren’t familiar with what a turntable on a stage actually is. It’s not an actual record player for those that might be wondering.
David Korins:
That’s right. Although Lynn was so excited when we proposed that we have two turntables on the floor, he’s like, “Two turntables and a microphone, that’s so exciting.” No, turntables are a big, huge machine that rotates the stage in a circle. And we have, in Hamilton, a turntable, and then on the outside of it, we have a donut, which has a big hole in it. So, it’s essentially a 3-foot section that can rotate left or right, and the turntable can rotate counterclockwise or clockwise. And we can adjust the speed, the tempo, the starting, the acceleration, the deceleration, and all that perfectly tied to the music. And I didn’t say to him, “I think it should have a turntable in it.”
But what I said to him was, “I cannot shake this cyclical motion of the show.” There’s something about this Aaron Burr Hamilton cyclical relationship, and Hamilton was swept off the island of Nevis by a hurricane, and he gets into this storm. And I thought there’s something about this cinematic sweeping story that takes place over 30 years. It could be really beautiful. And I think there’s this thing where there’s a lot of people watching, and there’s a lot of people listening, and there’s this room where it happens thing, where you are either in it and you’re complicit or you’re not.
And I thought that the turntable would be a really good way to tell that story. And Tommy was like, “Yeah, no, that’s not going to happen.”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you were outright. Yeah.
David Korins:
He was not that interested. But I guess he was interested enough to go down the road with me, and they said, “If you can give me 10 moments in the show where we could use a turntable, we’ll think about it.” And I sat down, and I drew for them 10 moments, and they said, “Yeah, actually that sounds really compelling and interesting. We’ll think about that. We should try it. Let’s storyboard further.” And then we did it.
Debbie Millman:
True or false on Hamilton, it’s been reported that you parse through 33 different colors of brick to find the right shade.
David Korins:
Yes. So, that’s an example as we talked about how we got to the end result of Hamilton where when you design, you make hugely obvious choices like the turntable, where people say, “Oh God, no performers are walking, but yet they’re still moving.” That’s an obvious David Korn steps on stage moment, but then there’s 33 variations of brick where no one gives any thought to that at all. But brick comes in so many different shades, as do people, to red, to terracotta, to brown, too beige, what’s it going to be?
And how are we going to carve out 25,000-plus words and 51 songs with very little physical scenery and be able to see these actors in front of this wall and have no backing wall with no wallpaper or no interior texture? So, it also led to a lot of discoveries with the costume design because the parchment clothing that most of the ensemble wears for throughout the show was in direct response to the brick and what it was going to be and how we were going to be able to see people and carve them out with their shapes and etch them out in front of the wall.
Debbie Millman:
In addition to the physical elements of the set, you also take a strong psychological approach to your designs and how they convey theme and other subconscious elements to the audience. And for the 2010 production of the Pee-wee Herman Show, you crafted each step to be 10 inches tall so that when Paul Rubin’s Pee-wee was going up and down, he would be able to “clump up and down like he was a small child.”
David Korins:
Yeah, I actually think we went with higher than 10 inches. I think we went with 12 on the peewee steps because the normal rise to run is eight inches is the rise. And it’s a thing I’ve been thinking a lot about architectural standards. I think a lot about how table heights are the right height and seats of the right height and light switches and toilet bowls and all those things, curbs so that we don’t fall down and go boom. I think about it a lot. And then I think the cool thing about theater, we really get to mess with those proportions all the time. So, in opera, you might make a 6-inch-high step so that they can glide down without breaking voice. Yeah, that was an easy one with Pee-wee.
Debbie Millman:
On Hamilton during intermission, eight feet of wall is added to the set to convey the impression of the nation being built. I did not notice that when I was at the show, but I would’ve wanted to.
David Korins:
But no one notices it, by the way.
Debbie Millman:
So, why add these layers even when most audience members won’t consciously realize they’re there?
David Korins:
We add the eight feet because the country has progressed. The big theatrical gesture of the show is that we see the scaffolding being built that the builders would use to build the foundation of the country and the foundation being this unmade brick wall. And Tommy and I just talked about this such a huge moment in the show. We’re building towards independence. There’s this war. We finally win the war. It’s this cathartic, massive revelation, and then we go home and we have to start to govern. And what does it mean to sow this nation together? And we thought there’s a whole lot of progress that has happened. We’re a big industrious country really getting its stride and we needed to show that somehow.
So, if we’re doing this brick wall that’s in the middle of being built, we should add layers to it because it would not ring true. So, we changed the whole profile and no one sees it because they’re busy buying merch, or going to the restroom or talking to their friend or taking selfies. And when they come back, it has changed. And we also change out a lot of the props. They go from building and utilitarian and war-like objects like guns and muskets and things. And we changed them to maps and books and China and no one sees it.
I mean, no one sees it so much so that when we were in tech rehearsal and we had spent, I don’t know, three weeks on the set, Tommy and I said, “We should bring the actors downstage and have them look and let them see the walls fly in.” And we did. And they were all like, “Huh, I had no idea. I just spent the last 300 hours here and I had no idea,” but maybe they felt it.
Debbie Millman:
That was David Korins in 2018.
Ina Mayhew is a production designer who has worked extensively with the directors, Spike Lee and Tyler Perry. I spoke with her about her career in 2020. You were also doing quite a bit of freelance work at the time, a number of different projects. I believe you started working with Spike Lee. You started working on the TV program, Showtime at the Apollo, but I believe you were doing hair and makeup. Is that correct?
Ina Mayhew:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
So, you really are jack of all trades.
Ina Mayhew:
Well, in my time in Rockland County, a dear friend of mine whose name is Teddy Jenkins, he did fashion, hair and makeup. Anyway, I would help him a little bit. He was an African American makeup artist, so there were very few of them at the time. So, somehow, he got into the world of Spike Lee, and he brought me with him. And the funny thing is, is that I was hair and makeup on that music video.
Debbie Millman:
I know.
Ina Mayhew:
He didn’t know who I was. I think I probably tried to talk to him. He wasn’t exactly approachable, so I just hung out and watched.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve since worked on several projects with him, including some commercials and his films, Girl 6, Get on the Bus and Clockers. What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from Spike Lee?
Ina Mayhew:
He completely said, “I trust you. You’re the designer. Do it.” There wasn’t a lot of back and forth or collaboration at all. He really felt that that was my job, and I knew what I was doing, and he trusted it.
Debbie Millman:
Another defining moment occurred when you bumped into your former classmate, Charles Lane in Macy’s of all places, given that you also worked there. He was about to start shooting his first feature, a black and white, nearly silent film named Sidewalk Stories about a young African American man raising a small child after her father is murdered. How you convinced him to hire you is I think one of the greatest pieces of research I’ve ever found. So, can you explain that? Can you share that with our audience? I think that this will be very inspiring to anybody that is needing some motivation to make something happen in their lives.
Ina Mayhew:
I think persistence was an understatement. When I ran into him, and we were talking, and I said, “What? You’re doing a film? You have to hire me. I have to be on it.” And he was like, “Okay. Well, let me see. Okay, what’s your phone number?” And I think I must have called him. I probably did call him every day until I said, “No, I want to be on this film. I have to be on this film. You have to hire me.” And then I would tell him, I said, “This is what I’ve done,and you have to bring me on. You have to. I’m going to come on your movie. I don’t care what you have to say. I’m going to be on that film.” And I think he finally, I wore him down, and although there was a designer on it already, he brought me on.
I definitely talked him into hiring me. I was not going to take no for an answer. Absolutely not.
Debbie Millman:
You worked with Charles quite a bit after that.
Ina Mayhew:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
The film went on to win the audience award at the Cannes Film Festival, won a lot of awards. You then were a visual consultant on his next film called True Identity, which was a big-budget film. And then you designed an American Playhouse TV film titled The Upper Room. And I think that’s really when you began your career, your big career as a production designer.
Ina Mayhew:
Yes. Well, you know what’s great about knowing Charles and being his friend, I felt comfortable and confident. Sometimes you’re not sure, at least I had his ear when I wasn’t sure about something, or I was like, “What do you think of this? Or how about this location?” Or even on sidewalk stories. So, there was a nice comfort level. So, it allowed me to figure things out a little bit, not be afraid to make a mistake. There’s a little bit of fear. Is he going to like this? Is he not going to like this? So, I liked that I had that support. It was a really great way to start.
Because I didn’t go to film school, because I was a theater designer, it was always a bit of convincing and really having to show what I’ve done and what I can do through other types of design. So, I was always prepared for a fairly elaborate presentation.
Debbie Millman:
Did you feel like you had to overcompensate for something?
Ina Mayhew:
I think a little bit. I think because I didn’t go in the formal direction of film school, that I went in a theater way and I didn’t have probably what they thought these producers thought would be the experience you would have to be a production designer. I didn’t work up the ranks like a lot of people do.
They started as an art department PA, and they become an art director. I just went in and just started designing. I didn’t go up the ranks at all except for when I was a visualist consultant and then rock director on Sidewalk Stories. So, yeah, I do feel that I paid my dues by being an assistant for so many years that I didn’t need to go up the ranks.
I was on Clockers an art director for the same reason I was a visual consultant on Charles because Spike Lee wanted me there. He wanted a representative in the art department that was person of color and all of that in his eyes and ears. So, I feel that I had just really wonderful support and confidence from these directors, and I learned everything I could and watching all the other things that you have to manage as a designer.
Debbie Millman:
How do you assert your vision and your authority with a director, given that so many directors are control freaks?
Ina Mayhew:
Well, I guess I do my homework very, very thoroughly. So, once I read a screenplay, let’s say, and I have an idea, I back it up and I will fully research it so that I have an actual answer for all the questions or like, why do you want to do this or where do you want to go or what my concept overall is like for Girl 6 with him in particular, where they lived and what part of town they lived in and all of that. Why did they live in the village, or why does she live in the village? Well, because she’s an actor, and I think that that was affordable. So, you go through, and then I want it to look like this, and this is the color palette.
So, I was very prepared and made sure that I could convince them of going in this direction.
Debbie Millman:
Ina Mayhew in 2020.
David Rockwell is an architect and a designer. He’s designed hotels and restaurants and created sets for major Broadway productions, including Into the Woods, Hairspray, and the brand new production of Chess. When I spoke with him in 2022, I wanted to know how he expanded his practice from architecture into set design. So, I want to talk about the similarities and differences between designing a restaurant, a hotel, and a Broadway show. And I want to start just by talking a little bit about some of the theater work that you’ve done. When you created the sets, I believe that your first show was the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
David Rockwell:
It was.
Debbie Millman:
In 2000. Now there are different dates online that I found. One said 1989, but most of the others said 2000, so I’m going to go with 2000. And when you did that show, I understand that you had been meeting with directors for years prior, but just sketching solutions. What were you doing with the sketches and why did it take you so long to decide that you wanted to do a show if you had been doing the sketches all along?
David Rockwell:
Well, I had a successful architecture studio, and I was spending more time at theater with friends of mine in the theater looking at scenery. And I’d studied that as well. I’d studied scenic design post graduating ongoing basis. So, I spoke to two people, Hal Prince, who, the phenomenal Hal Prince, who was encouraging and said, “Just start to sketch out what your ideas might be.” And I knew it wasn’t going to be a quick journey because I was going from a skillset where I had proven myself over time into a different skillset. I would meet with any director I could, and there were a lot of them who were interested in meeting, sketching and talking.
And what started to emerge out of that was my recognition that the real opportunity that was most interesting to me in theater was transitions. I mean, theater is one of the few art forms where things change in front of your eyes. And so, the set design and the lighting designer together are the cinematographer, the experience crafting where your eye goes. And I loved transitions all the way going back to the Rube Goldberg constructions and things that had interested me. So, it felt like very vital territory. And I would go to the theater twice a week, really my whole life in New York. So, it took a while to, there were a couple of false starts.
I was offered a show that I started working on and that show didn’t happen. And when I met with Jordan Roth, who I knew from restaurant and hotel work, and he introduced me to Chris Ashley, who’s really an extraordinary director. He directed Come From Away, which is just closing. And they mentioned the Rocky Horror Show. Having lived in Mexico during those pop culture years, I wasn’t familiar with it. So, I went home, and I rented the movie.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a great movie.
David Rockwell:
And I went back to Chris, and I said, “I’m not sure what the key is to making this work on stage.” And he said, “It’s about self-creation. It’s the audience really creating this in their mind.” And it seemed like the perfect first show, and we had a couple of false starts at different theaters. And then we went to see the Circle and the Square, which is the most non-traditional Broadway theater there is. It has no fly loft. It has very little wing space. So, it required invention just to get from one place to another. And it was just the most wonderful experience ever. It was a really loving, wonderful, great experience.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that architecture and theater are both defined by the people that inhabit and animate them. Without an audience enlivening its streets, its museums, its restaurants, its city is only an empty frame. And I think this has been reflected in the way the pandemic has affected public space. Everything for quite a long time was feeling very lonely. When did you get involved in making the kits for the New York City restaurants to be able to extend their spaces into the outdoors, so that they wouldn’t lose their businesses?
David Rockwell:
Actually, I was at Nobu downtown, March 12th, which was a day before restaurants shut down, I believe. And it was a day that they were trying to go to 50% capacity in restaurants and see if that would work. And then of course, everything shut down. And I was in the process of editing drama for Fiden, and I would look out at the city and realize we were living in a period where we got to see what a city would like if it was all hardware. There was none of the life of the city, and it was brutal. It was such awakening of how cities are inert without people. And it sounds obvious in retrospect, but my office immediately went to remote and Zoom.
And as we were brainstorming, I started to reach out to people I had worked with around the country in different industries to brainstorm about what might be some initial thought starters that would be helpful. Of course, restaurants had many challenges. There was no customers who were willing to be outside, and you couldn’t be outside. And to have that start to change, there’d have to be a safe way to get the restaurants to want to be back in business. So, four seats on the sidewalk wasn’t going to justify enough business to get them back open. So, I started to speak to a number of friends all around the country. Melba Wilson was one of them who’s a longtime friend.
And we started to think about what are little ways that could start to move things in a better direction.
And outdoor dining was being talked about, and it was being talked about in a way that it might work in Europe, but it won’t work in New York. And there’s so much red tape and inertia. So, someone in city planning suggested the way to be helpful would be to try and develop a strategy and a prototype.
So, we came up with a 40-page deck together with Melba Wilson and Andrew Ridge, who was the head of the hospitality alliance, speaking again to restaurateurs around the country about a very simple system that would continue to allow the streets to function, but would be an immediate way to get at a big enough scale restaurants back in business outside in a safe way. That document made it to the city, and then we decided to make all of that open source. So, everything we had drawn was made open source.
And then I realized what we really needed to do was help underserved restaurants, because it was immediately evident that there was going to be those who could afford it and those who couldn’t.
We looked at manufacturing techniques of ways that could be made less expensively. And we actually engaged with a lot of labor from the theater world that had no work at the time. Think about those pools of labor. And we set up a non-for-profit 501(c)(3) and worked with the hospitality lines in the city. Our outdoor installations were all non-for-profit for originally six restaurants, at least one in each borough, and then community installations, the first one in Chinatown, where 12 restaurants shared it, and it led to doing that all over the country.
Debbie Millman:
David Rockwell in 2022.
Es Devlin is a theater designer from the UK who has become one of the world’s leading concert set designers. I spoke with her in 2024. One of my favorite pieces that you’ve created is the work that you did for the 1998 production of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. Harold Pinter said that you didn’t pay any attention, any regard to the stage direction, and you designed the fuck out of it, which I think is the best compliment you could get from somebody like Harold Pinter. You used projector images of children between the scenes and conveyor belts. And you said you were inspired by Rachel Whiteread’s monumental 1993 sculpture, House.
Talk about how you approached that play and the courage that it took to do something that really flew in the face of everything that had come before it in regards to not just betrayal, but just stage design.
Es Devlin:
The thing is, it was all founded on utter instinct and ignorance, honestly. I think it was a convergence of me literally skipping. I skipped when I came out of the meeting with Trevor Allen and realized I was going to do this project. For me, it was such a dream, having just graduated and done this prize project, that, really pretty much a couple of projects later, was, for me, the epitome of what I wanted to do at that time was to work at the Great National Theater of Great Britain. So, I was excited beyond belief.
And I had a sense, and this is very odd when I look back at it now, it’s very strange, but weirdly, the thing that I thought was most appropriate when I read the play was to perform it at somebody’s sculpture, literally. And it’s interesting that that was my thought. I just thought, where does this play need to happen? And it was very much in the press at the time because Rachel Whiteread a phenomenal artist. It was a moment in the ’90s, where Britain was emerging from 20 years of conservative Thatcherite politics. And there was an emergence of artists. They were called the YBAs, the young British artists. And we felt a real sense of hope, I must say. We felt really that the tape modern was being planned.
It was to open in 2000. There was a real sense that our country was finally changing, real sense of positivity. And we all got behind this sculpture that she made. It was so beautiful. It was a monument in the East End. She filled a house with concrete, and then she took the house away. This was a condemned house that was about to be knocked down anyway. She took the house away, and it was this exquisite sculpture of the volume of time and space inside a building. And it was everything that what we’ve been talking about on this podcast about houses having life and voice. And it was plangent. It was sad as well as potent. And to me, the piece that Harold had written, Betrayal, was a series of rooms speaking.
It was rooms to me. I think it’s quite a particular take on it, but to me, it was rooms remembering, rooms remembering time and humans passing through rooms. And I said to Trevor, “Why don’t we do the play at this installation?” And of course, we couldn’t because it was outdoors and it was about to be knocked down anyway, or maybe it already had been knocked down. So, I wrote to Rachel and it was an odd thing to do, seeing as I was just beginning my practice, one would’ve thought I might’ve wanted to make my own mark, but I actually didn’t. I just wanted this thing to happen. I said to Rachel, “Can we make a wall that remembers all of the locations in this play, in the style of what you do?”
And she said, “Oh, absolutely, you have my blessing. Put it in the program.” So, we made a wall of plaster, and I went and researched around London and found, and I didn’t go to it, but I looked at pictures, found exact photo-reel references of where we thought the play probably happened, and then I made impressions of them onto this concrete wall. And then we also had the wall remember by projecting onto it. We filmed, we made a film, actually. And remember this was in the ’90s, it was very unusual to put projection in a theater. There weren’t departments for that. You had to get an advertising agency to come and… It was very expensive to pay for someone to come and make a film to put on your theater piece.
Projectors were big and noisy. It was all complicated. And we filmed Trevor Nunn’s children and the actor’s children. So, we made a whole family movie out of it. And then we had the furniture passing through and actually the floor of the piece, because in my mind, again, because my instinct was to just associate and because the national theater is made out of shuttered concrete, the national theater bears the imprint of the making of the national theater. It’s got that shuttered ply impression on the concrete. So, to me, it was already halfway there. So, I was conflating the architecture of the building with a piece of concrete that could remember places.
And to me, it just seemed like obvious that this is how it had to be done, but obviously it was probably the last thing that Paul Play needed, but it survived, I think.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I love the fact that after the play, Harold Pinter introduced you to someone on opening night and said, “Have you met Es Devlin?” She wrote the play. It’s the best possible compliment I think you could give, you could get.
Es Devlin:
I think it was definitely a backhanded one, more of a slap. But anyway, I’ll take it.
Debbie Millman:
In The New Yorker, writer Andrew O’Hagan wrote that each of your designs is an attack on the notion that a set is merely scenery. And when you first started in this industry Es, set design was not supposed to be its own character, give the story away or turn everything into metaphors that could take the audience out of the play. You don’t do that, but your sets are very much of the play and in the play. How are you able to avoid taking the audience out of the play?
Es Devlin:
I think really that question goes to the essence of the mystery, I guess, or the technique or the practice of what we’re trying to do. And yeah, the way I was taught was definitely don’t shout too loud, do less. But equally, I was also taught that the answers will be in a process. So, if you read the text, if you research, and if you start with nothing and see what you really need, and I guess adding a layer, not just responding to the text and what it needs, but also being cognizant of what the space needs. I walk into a room and treat each space as a patient.
My family laugh at me because when I come home, I immediately go around the room and move just a few things that really annoy me or the lights have to be a certain way. So, I think spaces look for correction or help medicine. So, I think you can respond to the space as well as the play and how the play meets the space or the music or the artwork, whatever it is you’re putting into a space. And I think you respond to a moment. It’s not just the moment when the piece was written or the song’s written or the artwork was written. It’s the moment that you are communicating with a group of people.
And I think the more and more actually, I realize how precious… I fell into theater, but now after 30 years, I realize having done many other things, how unique, rare, and precious it is for a group of people to gather together. And as my friend Lindsay Turner, the director says, still the ego for the greater good. And she puts it like this very brilliantly. She said, “We all agree.” The actors agree that they’ll pretend the audience aren’t there. The audience will agree to pretend that they’re not there. Everyone agrees to do it at 7:30. We’re all still the ego for the greater good.
And when you are sitting watching a play or any performance really, the opportunity for things to go wrong at every single second is so multi-vasted. The opportunities for humiliation for all concerned. And the fact that we all keep the balloon in the air, we all keep blowing the balloon up together. is a very beautiful human thing. I really more and more value that presence. Even to be honest, even if I go to a theater, it’s not very good. Sometimes I just, I went to see a play straight after lockdown. I was just so excited to be in a theater. The play wasn’t very good, but the audience was so beautiful. I said, “I’m loving this audience, but doesn’t really matter about the play. They were so quiet.
They were so connected to one another. They were all…” Sometimes an audience is doing something which is just tolerating. Sometimes, you can hear the sound and the beauty of an audience tolerating a second-rate bit of work from a first-class artist. They know the artist is brilliant. They put faith in them. They believe in them. They’ve all turned out for them. They know that this night just isn’t quite working, but there’s a beautiful sound of audiences being patient, and it’s so rare.
Debbie Millman:
As you’ve since gone on to design more than 50 theatrical productions that does not include hundreds of other projects in opera, dance, film, and as I mentioned in the intro, ceremonies like the Olympics and the Super Bowl, you’ve collaborated with Jay-Z and Beyonce, YouTube, Billie Eilish, Adele, Miley Cyrus, Shakira, The Weeknd, Lenny Kravitz, Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga. What is it like going from a small black box theater to creating sets for audiences of what can sometimes be 100,000 people?
Es Devlin:
Well, the logistics of a touring concert are brutal because the main thing that has to happen is people have to be able to put it in a truck in a really tight amount of time and get it out of a truck in a really tight amount of time and get it up and get it safe. And it has to do a job of broadcasting the music and often an image of the performer. So, there’s quite a lot of constraint to that aspect of my practice. That said, when you are among a crowd of up to 100,000 people or going off, I mean, we just did the Bad Bunny concert open in Salt Lake City recently and is now touring America. That audience, I must say, I hadn’t experienced that particular audience before.
Every audience is a different species in itself, and this audience was so joyous, so joyous. It was luminous to be there. And yet, the concentration that you get when everybody’s focused on a text in a small theater. The hunt we have on at the moment, actually in New York at St. Anne’s Warehouse, I think that only seats about 250 or 300 people, or something, very small. And the concentration that you can’t… No one’s breathing barely. And then, actually, there are some plot points in that that are somewhat shocking. I mean, not in a terrible way, but they surprise you. And the audience, you can hear them go altogether. It’s very beautiful to be part of an audible gasp.
Debbie Millman:
Es Devlin in 2024.
In 2025, Dane Laffrey won the Tony Award for best scenic design for the musical Maybe Happy Ending. I spoke with him just a few weeks before he won that Tony. Let’s talk about the play, Dane.
Dane Laffrey:
Let’s do it.
Debbie Millman:
The show is about two retired helper robots called Helper Bots. They’re named Oliver and Claire, but the set is not really sci-fi oriented. In fact, it feels what I’m going to be calling a bit post-mid-century modern nostalgic with a very of the moment visual gestalt. Don’t know if that’s in any way what you intended, but that’s the sense that I got. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach designing this very unusual, very innovative set?
Dane Laffrey:
There’s a few things, and you’ve hit on a bunch of the important parts. It’s a story that we need a way into because it’s something we don’t immediately know, right? It is an imagined near future. I think the circumstances involving sentient AI beings navigating the world is increasingly close to us and something that feels increasingly believable. But nonetheless, there was a gap to bridge. So, I think we knew that in presenting this world, we wanted to lean away from the need to mythologize a sci-fi universe and instead really focus closely on the characters and their lives, and as such, present them inside spaces.
And their two apartments are a really important part of the story, mostly in that they’re not supposed to leave them. They’ve basically been placed there until such a time as they can’t turn on anymore. Those places felt like something we could hold onto that didn’t feel like they had the burnished quality of a sci-fi architecture, that instead they felt a little having fallen into disrepair, that it had a roughness about it that I think is really relatable. Conjuring that aspect of the world is an important thing. The other thing that for those who see it and will know that it moves a lot and at a tremendous pace, and that’s baked into the writing.
And I think when I read it, I was like, “Oh my, to really do this justice. And because it is so much about two beings deciding to boldly leave the space that they’re not supposed to leave and go on an adventure.” And it felt like we had to really take the audience with them, that this is about an experience opening up and expanding and really taking these beings beyond what they thought was possible. And so, we wanted to try and give the audience a similar experience. So, we needed to build a machine that would do that, that would really be able to convey this idea and convey these wonderful helper bots on an amazing journey and take the audience with them.
I believe really strongly that in theater design, where you are frequently needing to present multiple places in one evening, that all of those places have the same visual value that they are… There’s not, well, these are the main sets, and then these are these other little sets that are a bit of a throwaway. And there’s a tradition in musical theater of the well-made scenes that are written to be done in one, in front of a curtain so that the set can be changed behind it. Then you go back to the big set. I reject that idea in contemporary theater making. I think that if you’re going to do 75 locations, those 75 locations have to have a set of equal value.
So, we needed a set of tools that would allow us to do that, which is a huge ask. It’s an enormous problem. So, another important aspect of it that is also, again, just written in is the idea that we go inside these people’s minds. We are let into their memory bank to see really critical pieces of information is how we learn about them. It’s information that they share with each other, and that is something that we knew we had to do. There are entire characters that only exist in this format.
So, a video element, an element that was going to be digital on some level, felt like it was going to be a part of this world, and that we would need to address that and find a way to completely integrate it into the rest of the design so that it felt indistinguishable from the physical elements. And that’s something we worked really, really hard to do. So, those were the ingredients sitting in the pot before we even put the pot on the stove that we knew we had to address, come to terms with.
Debbie Millman:
Maybe Happy Ending has perhaps the most technological visual beauty I’ve seen in a Broadway show, but it’s a real counterpoint to the deep humanity embedded in this story about robots. And the design in many ways seems to erase the boundaries between technology and humanity. There are dream sequences, time sequences, erasure sequences, atmospheric sequences that are just breathtaking. Where did these ideas come from, and how were you able to bring them to life?
Dane Laffrey:
Well, first, thank you. That’s an incredibly lovely assessment of this work. Again, I think basically everything you described is asked for in the story. And I love the way that you’re talking about the tension between the coolness of the technological world, the literal and figurative neon edge on it all mixed with the most surprisingly human story, which I think it’s the magic of the show is that you come in thinking you’re going to see a story about robots and you were really holding the mirror up instead. And I think that’s a wonderful…
Debbie Millman:
Story about love.
Dane Laffrey:
Exactly. Exactly. And so, that tension I love and it feels really important. And I think it’s important that these helper bots feel it. They lack agency in the world and it’s something that they learn to have and they make decisions for themselves, which is not something that they’re “programmed to do.” And so, them navigating a world that really moves around them, that is an idea that I think is woven through the design in an important way. Again, being inside their memories was something that we had to do. And it was so wonderful because it allowed us to create a visual vocabulary in the video.
And with this immensely talented George Reeve, who is the video designer on the show and my co-Tony nominee, is that we use those memories as those flashbacks to show the audience how the help robots see the world and the way that they process things and the way that they myopically focus on the human being in front of them, and that the background is not a thing that they process. And so, when we use video, if you look closely at it’s treated in exactly the same way. It’s not a photorealistic backdrop. It’s not in the place of scenery. It is a deliberately digital thing that is precisely the same way that they process the world. And now we’re giving the audience that opportunity.
Debbie Millman:
Dane Laffrey. I spoke with him in early 2025.
Maybe Happy Ending is still on Broadway as of December 2025. So, you still have a chance to see this beautiful, brilliant musical and Dane Laffrey’s Tony Award-winning set. You can hear the full interviews and hundreds of other interviews with some of the world’s most creative people on our website, designmattersmedia.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another episode, recalled from the many years I’ve been doing Design Matters. Yes, this is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening.
And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.