Adam Flemming
Adam Flemming is a bit of a theater polymath. Although he has lately gained recognition as a projection designer, his long CV records training and an early career as a scenic designer. Talking on a recent late night in the lobby of the Boston Court, Flemming explains his circuitous journey.
“I came to projections in a really roundabout way. In high school, I fell into doing the morning news announcements,” which led to a magpie’s education in media with Flemming grabbing junior college film courses where he could and taking any job that got him access to an edit bay.
As a tech theater undergrad at the University of Northern Colorado, he fell in love with scenic design. “The last couple projects I ended up doing for them had video elements in them and because I had that loose background, I helped to put two and two together and sort of make sense. At the time, everyone was like, ‘A set designer doing videos, that’s kind of weird. Most of it is lighting.’ So I was coming at it from a different perspective.”
That different perspective shows — beautifully. In Rogue Machine’s recent production Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath, Flemming’s projections were woven into both the set and the action. The show was a one-woman tour de force through the final memories of Esther (Amy Davidson), a character based on Plath. Flemming’s visuals were used to show the characters from Esther’s life otherwise given only voice by Davidson. His projections, in collaboration with the show’s director Matthew McCray, also trod the line between expanding the set’s physical world and Esther’s metaphysical one.
Esther (Amy Davidson) recalls the moment she met her husband, as her kitchen expands into her past
One of Plath’s earliest projections breathtakingly demonstrated the fruits of Flemming and McCray’s pairing. As Esther, functionally trapped within the one-room set of her kitchen, recalled meeting her husband for the first time, the entire stage right wall, which until this point had been quietly present, painted a pale blue, blossomed into vibrant yellow. Wall moldings and a chandelier shimmered into being on the canary expanse as a ballroom, dotted with happy couples chatting, came into being. As Esther looked on from her place by the stove, her world grew at the same time that a light literally shone on its boundaries.
“I’ve worked in some productions where projection is literally the background, a scenic device, and some where it’s just a transitional device. I guess my own philosophy of it is to never overpower the story,” Flemming says, his voice a low but quick murmur. There is a pen tucked above his ear – he has stepped out of a tech rehearsal for How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, which opens April 30 at the Theatre @ Boston Court. The play is by Fin Kennedy, based on the book by Doug Richmond.
“I try to steer away from projects that ask me to do it as a background or a tapestry, or if I do get involved in those sort of things, to ask how can we tie it into the story in a way that justifies the use of video, as opposed to making it the cheap way to do scenery?”
In the first run-through for the second act of Disappear, a strip of a large wall had suddenly transmuted into a grimy plane with numbers and splotches of color tumbling down towards the slumped-shouldered Charlie (Brad Culver), the main character who was attempting to beat a path either away from or back toward his life. Even at this early stage, with the show still finding its feet, the projection’s gobbling up an entire wall felt different — dreary and expressionistic — from Plath’s miraculous memorial ballroom.
Brad Culver and Carolyn Ratteray in "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found," with Nick Mills, Valerie Spencer and Time Winters. Video projection by Adam Flemming
“It’s different for every production,” Flemming says. “In Plath, it was the world outside of that space, showing something that was in her mind, and being able to blow away the wall of the set and reveal an entire room that wasn’t there. [How to Disappear…] is very much about getting inside his head and experiencing that violence Charlie’s experiencing everywhere, especially transitionally. But also showing some of those other elements that are really ethereal – like he thinks he sees the fortune teller’s sign – and how we’re turning that on its head.”
As for the rain, seemingly a major piece of the visual story, only a week from opening Flemming is able to say, “That might change. We talked about that. The director Nancy Keystone wanted texture in the play, sort of shooting across, so those may become letters, words from the play, or it may get blurred out further. We both liked the visual effect of rain happening but it being something else. So I don’t quite know what that’s going to become yet.”
Flemming’s ability to be unsure, thanks to the options available to him to change his design so close to opening, highlights the ground between lighting and sets that projections straddle. “That is the weird question: are you a lighting designer or are you a set designer? I guess it is ultimately a light source and I have to play in that realm,” Flemming says, coming forward in his chair to clutch the arm, folding his hands around the upholstery while on his thought. “But at the same time it wants to work in some way with the scenery.”
He recounts a moment at the end of Disappear’s first act, where a door in that big wall – not yet filled with rain – hangs open. Charlie approaches that void and Flemming sees his own opportunity in the space between Christopher Kuhl’s lighting design and the door the director has blocked open.
Esther (Amy Davidson) faces the memories of her younger life. Video Projection by Adam Flemming
“Is that movement just isolated in the doorway? Is there something about that? Charlie sees the door which is just filled with static; he approaches it and it is just static. It’s something that’s beckoning him toward it. From a designer point of view, it’s all the same thing to me,” Flemming says of his tripartite consideration of the scenic, lighting and projected elements. “There really is no switching between mindsets.”
The more projection has come to be accepted as a stock tool of the theater, the more directors are conceiving of their stage pictures with the kind of cross-disciplinary confluence that Flemming is excited to exploit, moving projections off square screens and into the world of their shows.
“I love projecting on unusual surfaces. The more texture something has, the funkier it is; it’s interesting because the audience doesn’t expect a projection to pop up there.” An obvious joy lights up his eyes and Flemming’s murmur trips over itself as he continues, “A lot of times it’ll look really beautiful too, because the lighting designer can hit it from one side and I can hit it from another side and it’s got this sculpted look to it. It’s the best of both worlds because they and I can have that dialogue. It’s not like, ‘Turn your light off, I’m going to project now,’ or vice versa.
“I can’t remember the first time I saw media in a theater production but I definitely remember the first time doing it. It was Laramie Project, actually, as a video and set designer in undergrad,” Flemming says. “It was weird to see a script where it said, ‘Turn the camera on.’ I remember that first shock of everybody in the room going, ‘What do we do? We gotta find like…who has a video camera? What do we do there?’
“And that was less than a decade ago. Now productions like Plath are actually depending on media to tell the story as opposed to just being a layer.”
Esther (Amy Davidson) recalls her mother, hovering in judgment of Esther's domestic competence. Video Projection Adam Flemming
That use of media onstage, suspect within the bounds of Flemming’s own career and now coming into its own as a storytelling tool in its own right, is something he thinks about and discusses frequently. (As does, for just one example, Steven Leigh Morris, whose recent feature article in LA Weekly on the identity of Los Angeles theater meditated to no small extent on the occasional tensions between theater and its younger but flashier brother, film.) “One of my really close friends was the lighting designer on Plath, and he and I had many spirited arguments about what that new level of media has done to and done for the theater world.”
Of the most noticeable impacts projection has had on individual productions, Flemming says, “The biggest thing is it’s redefining what tech is. I’ve been in many things where I’ve been the cause of major delays because I just can’t respond to things” as easily as a moving light can change position or a deck crew member can shift a table. “It’s a totally new timeline. I think it’s a responsibility of myself, communicating with producers who haven’t dealt with media before, on how to arrange the tech and arrange planning to get to that point.”
But the biggest implications his art form makes run much deeper. Flemming thinks for a moment, considering how to say what he wants to say. “It’s kind of a scary time for theater because film and media…” He trails off, then begins again. “I feel like theater’s gotta step up and it doesn’t apply to all productions. That’s not a blanket statement but the tech savviness of our culture has come to this heightened point where it sort of…” Flemming shifts again. “Our culture needs that visual stimulation and media is the easiest way to do that. I think the trick is finding a philosophical way to make it gel with what the piece is. That’s the responsibility I feel like I have on every project.”
Flemming has enthusiastic words for his co-designers and director at Boston Court, then plucks the pen from its perch behind his ear. He wraps up the talk, waves good-bye, then slips back into the theater to take his place at the tech table and receive his notes, right between those for scenery and lights.
Experience Flemming’s projection’s live with these videos!
I Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath — Oxford Scene
I Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath — Confrontation Scene
**Plath Production Photography by John Flynn and How to Disappear Photography by Ed Krieger
All Video Projections by Adam Flemming
How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, presented by The Theatre @ Boston Court, opens April 30; plays Thur.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through May 29. Tickets: $27-$32. Boston Court Mainstage, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; 626.683.6883 or www.bostoncourt.org.
