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Design Insights-Holiday Set Design

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2012-2013 SEASON, HOLIDAY

by Carter Thompson, Set Designer

In one of our first production meetings for Holiday, the director, Barta Heiner brought in an antique quilt that was somewhere around 100 years old. The fabric pieces which were made from wool and cotton fibers were remarkably well preserved, but all the pieces made from silk were brittle or shredded. Silk was sold to wholesalers by weight and in the 1800s silks were often treated with metallic salts (most commonly iron, lead, and tin) to increase their weight, thereby increasing their value. This treatment also improved the drape of the fabric. Over time, however, the metallic salts have eroded and destroyed the silk. Something which once gave the fabric value and beauty has destroyed it. An 1898 article from The New York Times even warns that, “These weighted silks are, however, of so combustible a nature that some have been known to take fire spontaneously…Spontaneous combustion is liable to break out—more especially in black silks.” This is where the concept for the set came from.

Holiday takes place in two rooms of the Edward Seton home. The home is from the Stanford White period (around the turn of the century) and is located on 5th Avenue overlooking Central Park. The action takes place between December 1928 January 1929. The wealthy Seton family—and the U.S. economy generally—has been weakened by excessive wealth. Grandfather Seton was a self-made man who went from nothing to become one of the most prominent financiers in New York. In the 1800s he amassed a great fortune which gave his family strength and power, but in 1929 that wealth is destroying his grandchildren as they race towards alcoholism and vanity.

The set is comprised of two rooms, a drawing room and a nursery room. The drawing room reflects some of the excesses of the family wealth, and it is a room which is splitting at the seams, like the antique quilt. The walls are treated with a segmented trellis wallpaper pattern which disappears into blackness. The corners of the walls do not meet as the room stretches upward. Their world is being pulled apart.

This room is guarded by an austere portrait of Grandfather Seton, the man whose wealth has led his family to the brink of moral collapse. The nursery room represents a return to virtue. The room was carefully prepared by their late mother and now serves as a sanctuary from the rest of the home. The style of the room is taken from the Art Nouveau period. It is soft and bright and gentle.

For the basic architecture of the home I drew inspiration from the Isaac D. Fletcher mansion, built in 1898, which is one of the few mansions still standing on 5th Avenue. The home was occupied by several millionaires in the first half of the 20th Century before becoming the Ukrainian Institute of America. Its longest occupants were Augustus and Anne van Horne Stuyvesant, an unmarried brother and sister who lived in reclusion, thus preserving the house in a beautifully unaltered state up to the present day.

What I have tried to capture in Holiday is a world of wealth, family, and changing relationships where some characters are really trying to find themselves in a world that is about to fall apart.

By admin

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="376"] Margaret Roper[/caption] Margaret More Roper: Scholar and Daughter by Adam White, dramaturg Thomas More was a family man; he was married twice and had four children with his first wife, Jane Colt. After being married for six years, Jane Colt More died, leaving More with four children: Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily and John. However, More quickly remarried to the widow Dame Alice Middleton, marrying her within a month of his wife’s death. While many of his friends resisted the rapid nature of the arrangement, More went through with it. Thomas and Alice More would raise the four children Thomas More had with Jane, as well as Alice’s daughter from her previous marriage and a foster daughter. Certainly, More valued his family and the welfare of his children. More also valued the power of education. He insisted that his daughters be educated through rigorous schooling, and this was unusual in 16th-century England, as society at large believed women unfit for scholarly pursuits. Despite cultural and institutional norms, Margaret More, the eldest of the More children (and More’s favorite, some would argue), would grow to become one of the most educated people in all of England, a woman of great scholarly knowledge. Margaret More Roper was tutored at home and became well-known for her studies, particularly for her adeptness in Greek and Latin. Her skill in writing and speaking Latin would impress the clergy of England. This specialty is reflected in a scene in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons where Margaret and King Henry VIII engage in a bit of Latin language sparring. She would also become the first woman who was not of royal birth to publish a translated book. In October 1524, Roper published an English translation of a book called ‘Precatio dominica’ written by Thomas More’s good friend Erasmus. This book was based on the Lord’s Prayer. Instead of translating the book directly from Latin to English, Roper would use her extensive knowledge of both languages to construct the themes and the meanings Erasmus had written in to the treatise with her own words. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="291"] Erasmus, Dutch humanist and good friend to Thomas More[/caption] It was Margaret who would visit the imprisoned Thomas More the most often. They were very close, writing letters to one another regularly the duration of their relationship. It was in a letter to Margaret that Thomas More confided, “I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I thinke none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.” We have good reason to believe that Margaret More Roper very well understood what would be her father’s fate. After Thomas More’s execution, Margaret More Roper and her husband William Roper would continue to carry on his legacy in their own ways. William Roper would write the first biography of Thomas More, a glowing and gracious document that would influence our understanding of More’s personality for hundreds of years to come. Margaret More Roper actually kept her father’s head after his beheading, pickling it to preserve it from decay. While many of us may find that historical tidbit a tad macabre, I would like to believe that Margaret More Roper had deep admiration for her father; perhaps it was out of this feeling she kept his head. Please stay tuned to the 4th Wall Dramaturgy Blog to catch clips of my interview with Mallory Gee, the actress who will portray Margaret More Roper in BYU’s A Man for All Seasons. Bibliography: Abernathy, Susan. "Margaret Roper, Daughter of Sir Thomas More." Early Modern England. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014. Duerden, Richard. "A Man for All Seasons." Telephone interview. 31 Jan. 2014. "Margaret Roper." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Sept. 2013. Web. 02 Oct. 2013. "Sir Thomas More Quotes and Quotations." Sir Thomas More Quotes and Quotations. Luminarium. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
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