Julia Weber
Staff Writer
Chautauqua Theater Company continues its world premier of C.A. Johnson’s The Witnesses with a performance at 4 p.m. today in Bratton Theater.
The Witnesses tells the story of a group of individuals participating in a peer support group in the midst of an apocalyptic plague wreaking havoc on the world around them. The play was commissioned by CTC Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll two years ago and was brought to the Institution as a New Play Workshop last year under the name Tell Me You’re Dying.
Scenic Design Fellow and The Witnesses Scenic Design Assistant Sebastián Zavalza said that in conversations with Scenic Designer You-Shin Chen, the main challenge the play posed was creating different locations that were still coherent and grounding as a whole. Scenes in the play include various apartments, a car, a meeting room and more, and the scenic design had to adapt to portray each of those spaces in a cohesive way.
“All of that had to somewhat differentiate itself from one another but at the same time make sense onstage,” Zavalza said. “You don’t want to put a lot of random locations onstage and call it a day. That doesn’t look cohesive and looks odd to the eye.”
When assisting Chen in bringing the scenic design to its final state, Zavalza said unifying elements like color and texture helped to bring the scene together in a coherent way. Employing these common features while still experimenting with attributes like hue, saturation and texture make the scene unified but not repetitive.
The Witnesses employs elements of familiarity to the viewer — after all, we all know what it is like to live through a pandemic — but also depicts a world devolving into an apocalypse. By collaborating with the sound department, the scenic design team designed a set that struck a balance between familiarity and unease through sensory effects.
“There’s moments of tension where you understand people are trying to have their most normal life, but there’s something out there,” Zavalza said. “They have no power. It’s more psychological; you cannot see it, but it’s out there.”
Zavalza said he invites audience members to “be attentive to the different small details” as they experience the play and take note of how smaller creative decisions influence the overall atmosphere of The Witnesses.
While the decisions that contribute to the scenic design and set dressing might seem small, Zavalza said each one “lets you know more about the characters themselves and where they’re located in spacing and their personalities as well.”
“Everything has a reasoning of positioning and helps you visually flow along better,” he said.
As this summer’s scenic design fellow, Zavalza said one of the challenges in developing a set in Chautauqua as opposed to in a concentrated city is there can be less opportunity to make quick changes. For him, the “main takeaway” is ensuring quality control by designing sets and troubleshooting in advance so problems can be addressed ahead of time.
For Zavalza, learning to work with people and foster connections “both from a professional and a personal standpoint” has been an invaluable skill he has developed throughout the season. He said the company in CTC was one that was tremendously supportive and healthy, and he said he will take these relationships he has formed with him as he continues his career.
“You’re just connecting because you love the art,” Zavalza said. “You’re kind of the advocate of your own persona and your professional self as well, so learning how to foster those and maintain those in the future is the biggest takeaway for me.”
