Bringing Ghosts to Life

I found Ghost Quartet four years ago and immediately fell in love with Dave Malloy’s musical genius. It was everything I looked for in a work I sought to direct. A haunting and confusing mess of eclectic pieces merged together to create an entrancing story, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. After the success of directing Ride The Cyclone, I was approached and given the opportunity to direct again the following year. I immediately pitched Ghost Quartet.

Bringing this show to life was one of the most challenging things I have ever done, from blocking to lighting; each aspect of the show created an inordinate amount of unpredictable challenges.

Since Ghost Quartet is a show that translates best within a Black Box theater rather than a conventional stage, the performance venue options were highly limited. What gave me some degree of comfort was the fact that the original production took place in a hotel and the audience sat mostly on the floor. If the original production was so open-ended and spatially free, I could definitely convert any room I had into a space fit for the show.

I was offered to use a dance room that the producing studio had, the confines of which being that I only had one week for the building of the set, lighting design, tech rehearsals, and the entirety of the 6 shows. The space itself was long and narrow and was surrounded by mirrors and windows that let in natural light. This posed an issue with blackouts as well as positioning the audience. It didn’t make sense to make the stage narrow and long with the audience on one side nor did it make sense to confine the set to one side of the room and limit audience visibility in the absence of risers. The solution was to put the stage in the center of the room and have the audience surround the set on either side. While visually, this enhanced the show and allowed the audience to come back to witness the show from multiple perspectives, the blocking was definitely a difficult task.

There was no angle from which every seat in the house would see a scene play out from the front. As a result, scenes were commonly blocked on diagonal angles and in ways where different actors played towards opposite sides of the audience. As a director blocking the show, I tried to air on the side of less movement and blocking, instead focusing on subtle and slow movement reliant on patterns and spacing. In such a limiting space with a set that never changes, it was difficult to provide visual variety, but as Abby Lutes said, “repetition creates motifs, and motifs create meaning”. With this in mind, I attempted to parallel scenes dependent on their purpose within the story itself as well as the time period within which the scenes took place.

My favorite blocking tool is the reservation of stillness.

Within the show itself, there are only three moments within which absolute stillness exists. It is in each of these moments that the stage exists at its darkest.

The first instance is within I Don’t Know. The lyrics during this moment state “let me read you a story, let me read you a romance, I will read, you will listen, and this terrible night will pass”. I don’t know what it is about this line that sticks out to me so much, but it flawlessly breaks the fourth wall in the way Dave Malloy does with any one of his iconic musical introductions (Prologue: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812). It successfully sets up that the entirety of what will follow will be the four ghosts retelling the story of their various lifetimes that occurred as a result of the romance and revenge between Rose Red and the Astronomer. The ghosts facing outwards on each corner of the set provide this moment between actor and audience within which the fourth wall is broken. The lighting within this moment fades to black as a way of introducing the darkness that surrounds each of the characters in the show.

The reverse of this exists in the final and most important instance of stillness; Prayer. Unlike the moment in I Don’t Know, where the ghosts face outwards, in Prayer the ghosts face inwards towards one another, allowing for a moment of stillness and reflection as they attempt to forgive themselves for “living in the dark”. It is during this song that Side Three ends and the light is restored to the space.

What fascinated me about the original production is the simplistic lighting that was utilized through the means of physical lamps and common overhead lights. In an attempt to recreate this minimalistic lighting, I realized that it is not at all simple, especially when the room within which it is created is equipped with almost no real lighting systems. Another challenge with lighting was the reliance on lighting being the factor that distinguishes the four time periods from one another. Our lighting was manually run through three lighting systems by our incredibly talented stage manager and lighting technician Kamron Popal.

When I initially pitched this project to him, he was more than willing to help after learning to be a spotlight operator for our production of Ride The Cyclone. I don’t think either of us realized how complex lighting in this particular performance space would be. The room came equipped with simple LED overhead lights, which were able to be manipulated through a very old lighting board. It was the physical lamps that made a complex manual lighting system even harder. The solution to controlling the physical lamps was utilizing Smart Bulbs which meant that we had elevated lighting from operating one manual system to simultaneously operating 11 lamps through an app that also required manual adjustment. Of course, the fun couldn’t end there. One of the time periods within which the show occurs is 14th-century Persia. The way this was communicated was through the utilization of beautiful mosaic lamps that were scattered across the set and even spiraled from the ceiling. Of course, these lamps required bulbs that did not exist in smart bulb sizes, so they all had to be wired to connect to a single physical dimmer. The chandelier that was utilized to represent The Usher household was also wired to its own dimmer, and now Kamron was left to manually operate 4 lighting systems simultaneously. If lighting design wasn’t hard enough, I had lost my voice during the week of the show and was on vocal rest during the entirety of the lighting design process. It made for a very fun and stressful game of charades.

The creation of the set and costume design was one of my favorite aspects of the show. Since we had a very limited budget, I opted to thrift as much of the costumes, props, lighting, and furniture as possible. Each lamp (with the exception of the Persian lights) was thrifted from Savers and Goodwill. I was either extremely lucky on the days I went, or Goodwill and Savers have some of the best collections of cheap antique lamps one could find. One of the best decisions made with the set was the utilization of carpets to establish the confines of the set and separate it from the audience. The second the carpets went in, the entire space was elevated and finally began to feel like a cohesive space rather than an eclectic assortment of objects.

The prime jewel of our set turned out to be the upright piano. When discussing the set with my musical director Yehee Shin, we agreed that the aesthetic we were aiming for would be undermined by a simple keyboard. If need be, we would settle for an electric upright, but both of us dreamed of having a real upright piano on the set. After days of searching through free pianos on various websites, I found an upright that a homeowner needed to get rid of as their family home was in escrow. What made it even more perfect was that it was a Primrose piano, which within the context of the show, added a secretly poetic detail only the cast was aware of. I didn’t know how I would go about transporting this piano but immediately agreed to take it. After weeks of debating transportation, we got the cast together on the day of pickup and put the piano into Yehee’s dad’s truck and carefully drove it to the studio.

After transport and years of not being played, it was terribly out of tune, each key being almost a half-step flat. We couldn’t find a piano tuner on such short notice so the only option was to tune the piano ourselves. We were neither prepared nor qualified for the journey of tuning a piano. For the next three days, we stayed at the studio until 2 am and returned early before rehearsals to tune more. The first night of tuning almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong when a rubber stopper used for muting strings fell deep into the piano. Yehee and I spent almost an hour performing what felt like open heart surgery with random wires and metal forks. The piano was luckily saved, but we made sure all rubber stoppers were secure prior to continuing tuning. After a three-day process of grueling and monotonous work, the piano was finally usable; just in time for our first tech rehearsal.

One of my favorite things to do when playing the piano is to take the front off and watch the mallets hit the strings. Through my years of piano lessons with piano teacher Elizabeth Lucus, I was encouraged to experiment with playing inside the piano and using the strings themselves. The resulting sound of playing on the strings is so beautifully haunting that I knew it needed to be used during the show. I opted to open the entire front of the piano and have our pianist, Sam Vance, improvise with the piano strings. This helped enhance the creepier moments of the song cycle such as in The Camera Shop, and Usher Part 3. The climax of the show is Kara’s monologue in Usher Part 3. It was during this moment that lighting and sound meshed together to create the perfect accompaniment for the subway accident. We used a modified can light to cast a bright stream onto Kara, that faded in and out, resembling the headlights of the subway car approaching her. In the original score, the only instruments used during the monologue were the spring drum and free humming. In order to intensify this moment, I added synth, cello, the singing bowl, and of course, the piano strings to bring forth an ominous and uncomfortable sound that couldn’t otherwise be recreated. After one of our shows, my lead actress Abby Lutes recounted to me that at that moment, she would exist in the scene and marvel at the fact that all the sounds surrounding her were being made by the people on the stage. It was truly one of the most beautiful moments of the show, a perfect example of the utilization of unconventional aural ingredients.

I’ll wrap up this long-winded recounting of one of the most incredible projects I have had the privilege of taking on by thanking my cast and crew. I had the luxury of working with one of the most incredible casts I could have asked for. Abby Lutes, Aiden Morgan, Kara Chaffin, and Matthew Folkin are some of the most talented people I have ever come across and it has been an absolute honor directing them. Thank you to the most resilient and talented musicians I could ask for. Krishi Shah took on the challenge of percussion and added so much to the show with his dedication and willingness to learn new things. Sam Vance was one of the most incredible additions to the live band I could have asked for. Despite his initial hesitation to play piano for a musical, he took a risk and ended up making the music uniquely his own with his unmatched improvisation skills. This show would not at all have been possible without the crew and everyone who helped make the details of the show so seamlessly come together. Thank you to my Musical Director Yehee Shin for always enthusiastically taking on the increasingly complex projects I throw your way. Thank you to Kamron Popal for pushing through one of the most difficult weeks of lighting design imaginable and for taking on such an overwhelmingly complex task. Thank you to Joshua Song and Hayden Lee for joining our crew last minute and helping with sound and ticketing. And last but not least, thank you to Austin Chaffin, Julian Clark, Eric Ducos, and Harry Pachchala for helping with set construction and helping put the last-minute details together.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this production an attainable task and invested their time and energy into making my vision of Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet come to life.