November 2009: Meet Jeffrey Schmidt
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Take a really close look at the Talley’s Folly set. Does it look green to you? People don’t normally associate theater with being environmentally friendly, especially when it comes to building a set. Most sets are built quickly and intended for temporary use. While certain elements of sets are often saved to be reused for upcoming productions, quite a bit of material can end up in the trash after the show closes. Some materials used for sets are not environmentally friendly either, like styrofoam. As a set designer and master carpenter who is also environmentally conscious, Jeffrey Schmidt is especially aware of the waste produced by theater and with every project, he attempts to reuse as much material as possible. On one of his most recent directing/design endeavors, The Old Woman in the Wood for The Drama Club, he used only found or recycled objects for the set. Beginning a couple of months before production for that show, he asked everyone at Theatre Three if he could have their used dryer sheets. Theatre Three staff members who attended the show were impressed to see how Schmidt had turned the dryer sheets into a dove. When he took on the assignment of directing and designing Talley’s Folly, his initial intention was not to build a “green set”. Instead, he wanted to build a set out of materials that would bring out certain characteristics of the show. Schmidt calls the capability of using recycled and recycleable elements “the cherry on top of the sundae”. He wanted to work with reclaimed timber, knowing each piece of wood would have its own history, “The wood comes from different places: some of it was used for framing or flooring. We’re actually using some oak that is very old but it’s still hard as a rock. When working with this wood, you have to be very practical and careful. You never know when you might find a nail in the wood and some of the wood has been painted.” After Talley’s Folly closes, Schmidt intends to save the wood to use on other Theatre Three sets or use it to build some wood furniture. Everything else on the set is made of paper. The folly (boathouse) is made of paper. The boat in the folly is made of paper. The river is made of paper. And yes, the trees are made of paper. Schmidt uses a variety of paper. There’s newsprint, butcher paper, and the tree leaves are made of wax paper. Some of this paper is recycled. Schmidt decided to recycle the humorous posters from the set of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (a set he designed) and make them a part of this set. Very little paint is used. Instead Schmidt wants the various colors of paper to do the work of creating a color palette. He acknowledges some of the challenges of working with paper, “We treated the paper with flame retardant and the actors have to be careful about what they drop. However, I’ve discovered that paper is very forgiving. Honestly, I don’t want actors to see this paper set as a challenge. Limitations can be a good thing. When you can only use a limited type of material to create a set (in this case, paper), the discoveries you make are a lot of fun.” None of this paper will end up in the dumpster. It will all be recycled. While the ease of recyling paper is appealing to a director/designer who is interested in limiting waste, that isn’t the only reason Schmidt chose to use paper for Talley’s Folly. He keeps this ultimate reason to himself, hoping the audience will watch Matt Friedman and Sally Talley’s story and develop their own ideas about the use of such unusual building materials.
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