PREFACE by Arnold Aronson

REFLECTIONS ON A LIFE BY DESIGN

Monograph by Riccardo Hernández

One of first things that might strike a reader of this book upon looking at the table of contents is that it is not organized by chronology or genre but, primarily, by collaborations with directors and playwrights. Theatre design is, of course, a collaborative art, but at least in the American theatre, in which economic forces are a significant factor, developing and sustaining long-lasting collaborative partnerships with directors, playwrights, or theatre institutions can be difficult. For Riccardo Hernandez, however, these artistic collaborations are crucial, and he has carved out a career built upon such partnerships. Over the 35-year career he chronicles in this book he singles out 15 directors with whom he has developed artistically and intellectually intense relationships. Some of these have spanned decades—his association with playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, for instance, dates back to 1991 when, as a third-year MFA student, he designed The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Several of these directors and playwrights have had profound influences on his professional and personal development as an artist.

The directors with whom Hernandez has worked have tended toward cutting-edge explorations of classics and new works, while the playwrights most often are typified by their politically engaged focus and their experimentation with language and structure. This seems to have been a perfect fit with Hernandez’s aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual curiosity, and his willingness to explore new and unusual approaches to scenography. As one looks through the images he has chosen for this book, certain themes and patterns begin to emerge. These include a strong geometricity, a defined sense of enclosure, and often a feeling of danger or menace lurking beneath the surface. And although Hernandez is not a lighting designer (he has occasionally designed costumes), lighting is an integral aspect of many of his sets, crucial to his sculpting space and allowing the continuous transformation of space through time. To understand the roots of Hernandez’s scenographic approach it is perhaps best to begin, as he does in his autobiographical introductory chapter, with his life before emigrating to the United States.

Hernandez’s world view was shaped by his childhood in Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina—vastly different cultural and political environments from that of the United States during the same period. As director Arin Arbus notes in discussing her collaborations with Hernandez, “His lived experience of history informs how he interprets plays and how he shapes space.” He was a child in Buenos Aires when the military staged a coup d’état, beginning, as he notes, a period of terror and disappearances. The disruptions to family life were complicated by political realities of Cuba and Argentina, which added to a sense of uncertainty and fear. His family was finally able to move to Miami when he was 14, but at least initially, this only exacerbated the sense of instability. As Hernandez says in his introduction, “I spent an entire year at home in a place I did not know and could not speak the language, waiting to be admitted to high school. To say that I was bitter and angry was an understatement.” This radical cultural displacement, which made everything strange and disorienting, however, would ultimately contribute to his artistic development, making him both an observer and participant within his new surroundings. It is the cultural equivalent of Brecht’s alienation effect—making the familiar strange in order to have a more heightened and critical perception of one’s environment. This experience places him among a unique but significant scenographic lineage in the American theatre that includes Boris Aronson, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, Ming Cho Lee, and George Tsypin—designers whose work was distinctly different from the mainstream scenographic work in the American theatre of their times.

But his development as a designer was not merely a function of having an outsider’s perspective. As a child he soaked up a broad range of cultural influences from opera, theatre, literature, film. A small sampling of those he identifies includes ancient Aztec architecture, tango, writers and poets Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, André Breton, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Baudelaire, artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Jose Clemente Orozco, and filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Andrey Tarkovsky. I think it is safe to say that few young people growing up in the United States could claim such breadth of cultural and artistic education. Director Ron Daniels declares that Riccardo Hernandez “is probably the most well read and the most cultured man I know.” James Bundy, former dean of the Yale School of Drama, refers simply to the “mind-boggling breadth of his knowledge.”

Whether as a result of these influences and experiences or his own natural inclinations, Hernandez has the soul of a poet and understands theatre as a potentially spiritual place. One can see it in the way he recounts his experience of seeing Angelica Liddell’s performance of La Casa de la Fuerza at the Avignon Festival in 2010: “Not only did this night fill my soul with magnificence, it showed me theatre distilled and naked in all its sublime beauty and ugliness . . . I now gravitate to dreamscapes.” And it is clearly present in Hernandez’s response to Tarkovsky whom he described to me as a “visual poet” who has a need to search for meaning in the world, “a meaning that, at the end of the day, is a spiritual quest.” Tarkovsky, in fact, is one of the primary influences on Hernandez, though he finds it difficult to articulate precisely what he takes from the Russian director, noting simply that “it's something that I feel deeply.” He can describe entire scenes from the films, particularly Andrei Rublev and The Mirror, going into great detail about the imagery, which is often mystical and dreamlike. Describing the first scene of The Mirror—the doctor walking through the field as the wind is blowing—he declares it unequivocally as “one of the most beautiful things ever.” He refers often to Tarkovsky’s book, Sculpting in Time. Although theatre is also an art of time, its physical presence makes it different than film, yet one can perhaps think of Hernandez as a sculptor of space. In fact, several of his collaborators throughout this book refer to the way in which Hernandez creates and shapes space. Director Robert Woodruff articulates it most succinctly: “What dominates all Riccardo’s ideas, I think, are frames of space which respect the freedom of space and emptiness necessary for the release of the imagination of the viewer.”

So, how does his experience of history, as Arbus says, affect his shaping of space? Several of the designs Hernandez presents here create a powerful sense of enclosure. Most design, of course, needs to define space on the stage and does so by creating framing devices which can range from the literal walls of a box set, to skeletal frameworks, to amorphous boundaries created by light alone. Examples of all these strategies can be found throughout this book, but such designs don’t necessarily encase the actors in an inescapable, claustrophobic world.  In many of Hernandez’s design, however, the enclosure seems impermeable—a space from which the characters cannot escape. This in turn creates a sense of menace, of danger, and even existential dread. This is particularly noticeable in such productions as Jan Karski (Mon nom est une fiction) at Avignon, La Traviata with the Canadian Opera Company, One Flea Spare at the Public Theatre. One of the first of Hernandez’s designs to embrace the idea of enclosure was for Parade (1997). Director Hal Prince wanted what he described as a “Kafkaesque prison.” Hernandez’s solution was an ominous three-sided prison courtyard in which he placed a large dead tree trunk with branches reaching out as if to grab the performers, the entire design creating a claustrophobic prison world.

Even when the set clearly sits as an isolated entity within the larger space of the stage, it nonetheless feels inescapable. That the world in which the characters move is surrounded by a kind of void makes it even more menacing. For the Broadway production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune (2022), for instance, Hernandez created an environment—Frankie’s tenement apartment—with simply two door frames upstage and furniture and appliances arranged as if in a box set—one without walls. But a lighting grid hung ominously low over them, while behind them and at the sides loomed an enormous façade of a New York City apartment building. Hernandez described the set as “the containment of a little island for these two people, but the surround was the enormous New York City, with all these windows that are closed. You don't get a sense of life.” Somewhat analogous, though in a much more abstract way, was the set for La Mouette (The Seagull) at the Avignon festival ten years earlier (2012). Even though the stage and audience were enveloped in the courtyard of the imposing brick walls of the monumental Palais des Papes, Hernandez erected a giant iron slab, somewhat like a Richard Serra sculpture, in front of the wall that created an even greater sense of enclosure and danger—an enclosure within an enclosure as it were. Though as Hernandez explained to me, while you cannot create intimacy in such a space, the metallic wall, by isolating the performers, could create a sense of loneliness, “these lonely characters literally lost in this lake.”

Perhaps the most surprising and controversial of the “enclosed” sets was for the Broadway production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, directed by Diane Paulus. The set was a stark, curved back wall consisting of a semi-abstract patchwork of plywood panels through which a few elements of Catfish Row peeked through, surrounding a wooden platform stage. It evoked a boarded-up façade of a decaying urban neighborhood, but it was neither romanticized nor realistic. It was not impermeable—there were gaps as well as doorways—yet its bleakness suggested a world from which there was no escape.

This is not to suggest that all of Riccardo Hernandez’s creations are bleak, enigmatic, or menacing. He is also capable of lightness and even whimsey as in his Broadway designs for Suffs and Bells Are Ringing. Simple sets, almost emblematic, that use the horizontal and vertical capabilities of Broadway scene changes; the very opposite of total enclosure.

In Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky discusses the artistic image:

The artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substitute for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution . . . the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image. [p.38]

As you examine the wealth of images that Riccardo Hernandez offers in this book, you may agree that for him, too, the image is an illusion of the infinite.