Creative producer and dramaturg Megan E. Carter, former director of SDC Foundation, has worked with RACHEL DICKSTEIN and her company, Ripe Time, in multiple capacities. She recently talked with Rachel about how she approaches design and technology in her work.

Describe your relationship with design and technology in two words.

In love.

What do you consider your role as director/ choreographer to be?

I think of myself as hosting one big conversation. I want to provoke a communal curiosity. I invite a talented bunch of artists to spend time dreaming together, wondering, “What if…?” I take those investigations and layer them into story compositions that explore possibilities visually, sonically, kinetically.

With your company, Ripe Time, you adapt literary works for the stage. What themes and ideas are you drawn to?

I’m a die-hard feminist, so women’s stories have always been my focus. I am especially drawn to writers who trace the lives of independent-minded women, navigating thorny societal constructs. I want to tell stories about mavericks who try to change the world, even in small ways. And I partner with like-minded playwrights to spread the gospel.

How do you define “technology” in theatre?

The key to crafting beautiful images on stage.

As a director/choreographer, what do you want technology to do?

I stay away from the mechanics of how things get done and leave that up to the designers and technicians. That being said, I rely on technology to create deeply immersive worlds for my pieces. Design takes us into dreamscapes, interior worlds, which is where I’m most excited theatrically.

At what point in your process do you start working with designers?

Before I even know I’m definitely working on something. The conversation helps me understand my route in so I know it’s a piece I need to do.

How do you download ideas to designers?

I invite them into the workshop process. At that phase, things are pretty embryonic, so we look at research together, develop strands of ideas with the actors and the writer, and see where to take them.

How do you upload ideas from designers?

Designers contribute invaluable ideas to the physical vocabulary of the piece as it’s being choreographed, and their impulses on physical space really galvanize my staging.

Do you approach design elements one at a time, or do you like to bring all the ideas together at once?

I tend to think associatively. I have an impulse, and it might be bound up in multiple design elements, or it’s not immediately clear whether it’s light or sound or projections. If I put the impulse out to my team, then the designers can offer multiple points of view. I also don’t insist a designer only speaks to her area – I want people to cross boundaries. For example, the wonderful Jiyoun Chang, who designed lights for Sleep, offered me just as many invaluable ideas on set and dramaturgy as she did on lighting. Her instincts about space and storytelling are so on target. I want to invite cross-disciplinary conversations.

How does choreography relate to scenery?

The movement of the set should be completely integral to the telling of the story. In the workshop process, designers, actors, and I can experiment with the idea immediately in space and imagine how the actors’ physical score can be wrapped up with the design element. Usually, it becomes clear if the idea has muscle, if the dialogue between the body and the object or architecture takes on something dynamic. I love building moving sets and objects into the physical score– it creates a total transformation of the world.

Your first foray into working with video design was Fire Throws, an adaptation of Antigone, with Ripe Time in 2009. Why?

I imagined Antigone playing out as a memory, as if we were inside her mind right before her death, in the cave in which Creon imprisons her. I wondered if the events of the original story could play out like memories un-scrolling in projected images on the walls of the cave. Designers Maya Ciarrocchi, Susan Zeeman Rogers, and I created layers of black scrim for projections, so the sense of envelopment came from projections on multiple vertical surfaces and the floor. The stage became a container within which light and projection animated Antigone’s thoughts.

Your work always has a handmade feeling to it – you can almost see the brushstrokes of the artists involved. ls that an intentional aesthetic choice or a product of process?

I respond to the text for each show and trust that intuition. Projection designer Hannah Wasileski and I collaborated on a production of Sarah Ruhl’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters that was quite tactile– it was a design based on memory and nostalgia, told through the visual palette of scrapbooks and turn-of-the-century cyanotypes. We loved the handmade, naïve assemblages of scrapbooks in evoking the intimacy of longing. The design was projected on an interior, so it acknowledged the reality of the house but also allowed Chekhov’s words to be surrounded by a landscape of memory and desire. I fell in love with that way of seeing Chekhov.

In Septimus and Clarissa, the world you created was highly transformative – ­everything moved. How did you create that on a minimal budget?

I don’t think about budget when I envision a world-I dream about what sights, sounds, shapes, and textures belong there. Certainly, having a company has helped me think economically, but working without a massive budget allows me to distill ideas to their essence. And you don’t·need a lot of money to create visual poetry on stage. In Septimus and Clarissa, Susan Zeeman Rogers and I both wanted the set to move, to let us slip fluidly between one part of London and another, or one state of mind to another. She kept talking about the staircase where Clarissa stands before entering her party. The staircase idea stuck, and we wanted a turntable but couldn’t afford that. We found that having actors move the staircase created that same magical shift in a more dynamic, ensemble-driven way. During war sequences, the unit served as a landscape of trench warfare, in which actors run, climb, and fall in athletic ways. Moving that huge piece around the stage became central to the visual storytelling – the staircase became a battlefield, a townhouse, a garret – a single object that had Clarissa’s world above and Septimus’ below. That metaphor was central to the piece-these two characters, who never meet, were linked inextricably, and the design gave us that.

The World Is Round is adapted from a children’s book by Gertrude Stein and features the imagined adventures of a little girl. What did you ask your designers to try to capture, and how did your vision manifest in the design?

The World Is Round is a simple story of a girl on a quest. Confused by the world and her own sense of self, Stein’s young protagonist, Rose, sees a mountain and decides to climb it. The desire to climb, the challenge of the journey, the eerie loneliness atop the mountain once she arrives all relate to growing up, being ambitious, and surmounting obstacles. In theory, we needed a mountain. But set designer Mimi Lien’s first impulse when we read the script was to create a visual palindrome: a square, white, raked floor mirrored overhead by a white ceiling that opens like the cover of a book. A circle is cut out of the upper level, allowing ladders, aerial silks and hoops, and objects to drop through it. The space transforms architecturally in each configuration of the ceiling-and-floor relationship. A narrow room transforms into a broad open field and then into a vast open vista. At first, Mimi and I were sure the show didn’t need projections. The piece had a simplicity and naïvete in its aesthetic. We assumed projections would add a techno sheen that would feel too polished. But Hannah Wasileski offered up this beautiful hand-drawn style that encapsulated the childlike world of Rose and the singsong nature of Stein’s text. The rhythm of light and projection matched the movement inside Heather Christian’s soulful score – the imagery and color palette of the lights and video responded to the mood and tone of these shifts with playfulness and dynamism.

And how did Rose climb the “mountain”?

It’s a very nonliteral world. On my first read of the source text, I felt like the mountain didn’t need to be real – it was a metaphor for an impossible challenge, for ambition, for the effort women and girls make to survive. So Mimi Lien, Nicki Miller (aerial choreographer), and I gave Kristen Sieh (who played Rose) verticality with aerial ropes and custom-built rope ladders instead of a physical incline. The effort of the climb was very real, and the aerials gave us height and danger. To capture the final moment of Rose reaching the top of the mountain, we had her actually disappear through the circle in the
“ceiling.” The whole ceiling then magically lowers to the ground, leaving Rose on a hoop 15 feet above the floor, suspended and alone. The transformation of the space is like Stein’s writing: shocking, simple, radical, and very nonliteral.

In your recent production of Sleep at BAM, you dramatized a story by Haruki Murakami adapted by Naomi Iizuka that took place in the mind of a housewife. How did you invite the audience into her mind?

What grounded my visual imagination was Naomi’s language and actor Jiehae Park’s masterful embrace of direct address, which anchored the audience in that interior space. Jiehae used Naomi’s words to welcome the audience into her experience like a trusted confidant, with enthusiasm, relish, and a bit of danger.

The textual anchor freed us to create a sonically immersive and visually transformative environment. I wanted the audience to be welcomed into the ocean of her thoughts and then give them enough breath in their lungs to live underwater and explore.

Describe a perfect moment of design synergy in one of your shows.

The opening moments of Septimus and Clarissa. Our giant staircase is swirling through the space with Clarissa atop it, and I think, yes, we are in a tempest of someone’s mind. It’s beautiful and violent and has the velocity of the speeding thoughts of someone on the edge of madness. Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of the source text, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and our staging and design captured the sensory so exquisitely – it had to, because the source text is linguistically a master work at capturing sensation. I’ve always felt that alongside Woolf’s words, my work with design takes on new heights–the language and the environment become beautifully inseparable.

What are some of the projects you are working on outside of Ripe Time?

I’m working on two new operas and my first film right now, an adaptation I am writing of a Jhumpa Lahiri story set in Italy. I’m headed there this summer to finish writing it and develop it with students. Film is a whole new world for me, but it feels like a natural fit for how I create visually.

What is the next story you want to tell?

A modern Odyssey, with a young woman revolutionary at the core. I’m working with playwright Dipika Guha on the story of a young woman lost on her journey home returning from a war. I imagine she’s kind of like Emma Gonzalez. She is a revolutionary. An idealist. She believes she can be president one day. And she wins a war. Her Troy is that she’s toppled a certain fascist dictator and brought equality and tolerance. It’s using the Odyssey to tell a story about idealism and feminism; about women achieving triumph and power, only to be trailed by erasure and judgment. #MeToo is inspiring and chilling –women can now speak about their trauma, but speaking about it doesn’t resolve the hurt and pain of that trauma. There is such hope in today’s embrace of women’s radicalism, but to me, it’s complicated in the same way that Odysseus’ “journey home” is complicated. Women carry wounds from the battles we have fought, and I want to make a modern myth to celebrate this profound resilience.

If money were no obstacle, what is your dream project?

To keep working with stories of women’s lives, told with a deep sense of visual adventure. And since we’re talking about technology, I’ve long wanted to create soundscapes where text and music and sound were delivered intimately to each audience member, like a Janet Cardiff installation. I would love to play with scale and motion using augmented or virtual reality on stage. Imagine the Odyssey through this lens. This kind of imaging could give this epic myth such visual complexity and wonder. I want to push the boundaries of how design on stage can suggest the limitlessness of dreams with no boundaries.

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