Julia Weber
Staff writer
On Tuesday, July 22, Chautauquans may have noticed a white van making its way across the grounds, individuals hopping out intermittently to pile empty, discarded cardboard boxes into the van as they traversed the grounds.
What was that about, you might ask? It wasn’t mail theft; it was all in preparation for Chautauqua Theater Company’s latest New Play Workshop, of course.
At 6 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater, the second NPW of the 2025 season, All the Little Boxes, written by Vichet Chum and directed by Mei Ann Teo, will be presented as a staged reading. A talkback session will follow.
The play follows main character Chan, a newly-hired home organizer packing and unpacking the baggage — both literally and metaphorically — of his clients and himself.
For scenic design fellow Sebastián Zavalza, the key to a successful set design was in the ability to tie the literal to the metaphorical through the scene’s architecture.
“We create this world out of those boxes themselves,” he said. “(The characters) are psychologically bound to these subjects — they cannot let go of them, or they haven’t even unpacked them yet because they don’t even have the emotional capacity to do so. … They’re both living in it and literally, physically, that could be the architecture of this space.”
Zavalza said the process of acquiring the 196 boxes — each meticulously turned inside out to hide packaging labels and markings — that make up the set was just one step of many in the scenic design process.
One of the first considerations in the process was how to balance establishing the scene through design with the play still being in its earliest stages. Because it is a new play being workshopped and not a fully produced piece of theater, All the Little Boxes will undergo revisions and changes every day as conversations are had and creative decisions are made.
Because of this, it isn’t always feasible to create an elaborate or detailed set, as that needs to adapt to the needs of the playwright, director, dramaturg and actors. Zavalza needed to adapt and change according to revisions made in the workshopping process, so going simple rather than complex afforded much-needed flexibility.
“How can we best support that, keep it in scope, and do a gesture that moves the story along and connects the metaphors in the play with the actual scenes that are happening on stage?” Zavalza asked.
As a scenic designer, one has to take on many roles: painter, builder, prop maker, 3D modeler, sculptor and architectural drafter, to name a few. Zavalza works with many others to bring the scene from its earliest drafted mockups to its final product onstage.
“It really does take a village, and that’s the magic of theater,” he said. “You never notice, and it’s so well done that your subconscious will never tell. … You just go along with the story because it’s our job to take the ordinary and put it onstage and seem as natural as possible.”
One of Zavalza’s major challenges during the process of designing was figuring out how to incorporate the already-staged set of CTC’s upcoming mainstage production The Witnesses into the one for All the Little Boxes.
“As we’re working on top of it, we’re like, ‘How can we make it our own and incorporate these boxes to the architecture?’ It all made sense then, to create architecture and these walls and structures to go with actual brick walls that we have onstage,” he said.
At the end of the day, the most important goal for Zavalza is to create a piece of immersive art for viewers that helps bring the play to life in the fullest way possible.
“You want to entertain people,” he said. “You want them to be visually there, present with you, while at the same time, you want to tell a story.”
