Download a PDF - Stage Directions Magazine

started watching the tennis without the
sound to hear what I heard in my head
when they hit; then I set about to create
that sound. I took elements of tennis hits
that I could find and other percussive
elements to build the sound from scratch
just to get something that had that sense
of the ball traveling a 100 kilometers per
hour.
There’s a sort of a development in the
piece, too, that wasn’t an original concept
of the sound design, but developed
out of the need in the rehearsal room
where the early games are quite slow and
polite. Over the period of play, it became
like a history of women’s tennis. The
first games are slower and more polite.
As it goes on, they talk about modern
tennis and how it has changed, and the
games get a bit faster and the hits get a
bit harder, then they start grunting and
the tempo continues to increase. They
start swearing. By the end, the last two
games that you hear are much more
energetic than the ones that you heard at
the beginning of the show. So there was
some sense of that shift in tennis.
Then there are the other little details.
The foot sound is an important part of
recording, but early on we decided not to
incorporate the sound of them running
to the ball because it just got too distracting.
It was one of those things where you
can’t use it, drop it and then bring it back
again. So the only foot sounds we ended
up using were with some of the serves as
it built up to make the serves bigger. My
family has a tennis background, so I sort
of grew up with all of that.
The performances are very closely
linked to your sound design. How
closely did you work with the actors?
Director Michael Blakemore is important
because he’s really interested in
sound design. The three shows I’ve done
with him have had no music. It’s all been
structured around sound design. He also
likes to bring the sound into rehearsal
very early, both for the performers’ sake
and also because he says it’s the only
thing he can tech before getting to the
theatre. So I went into rehearsal with
pieces that I started putting together.
We could change around the games and
change the nature of them. When the
performers began to realize that I could
do it on the spot, they started realizing
that it was a flexible thing and began
asking and making suggestions. The way
I work is I basically have a mini studio
in the rehearsal room with
Logic, so I can put the thing
together and take it apart and
put it back together again
and change the timing. We
couldn’t expect dialogue to fit
within firm, timed pieces, so a
lot of the elements, like the
bouncing of the ball in the
game itself, were all designed
to go as long as they needed
to go and are all separate elements
within the playback.
Some of them were then
linked later on. Just about everything you
hear are separate elements that could be
fired separately.
A big part of getting that to work was
that in the theatre, the design was about
localizing the game. Especially with musicals,
the idea is to give an evenly dispersed
sound throughout the theatre
so everyone hears the same thing, but
we wanted the game to be quite localized
down in front of the performers, as
well as in the speakers on either side.
We hung the balcony speakers quite low
so that from the balcony you heard the
sound from below. It was consistent with
the performers’ eyeline. We put speakers
in the platform underneath the performers
so that the net was located in the
center. Then, all of the announcements
came from the cluster, and the crowd
was spread around through the surround
in the front of house as well.
You used Meyer speakers on this production.
Which ones did you employ,
and how did you place them?
It was a combination of UPAs and UPJs
and some UPMs for fills. We used UPAs
on the side for the grunts and the hits.
The UPJs were in the center for the hits
on the net. We ended up using that to
Marian Seldes and Angela Lansbury in Deuce
Joan Marcus
localize the radio mics, which was fantastic.
It’s so rare that you can put a speaker
underneath the performers so that the
sound is reinforced and totally localized.
There were also UPJs up for the TV commentators
because we wanted to localize
their sound, too. We didn’t want them
being in the whole system because they
would have ended up being the “voice of
God,” which would have been a bit out
of proportion with everything else. So
they were localized through a UPJ that
was underneath them, with delayed reinforcement
through the system.
So how far back in the theatre does the
sound reach?
There were rear delays underneath
the balcony and above the front of the
balcony itself. I have this rule of thumb
that if an unamplified actor is standing on
stage, and what you hear is them in the
space, then the bottom line is the speaker
needs to do that as well. Here we’re lucky
in that we didn’t want the sense that
everyone was on the line of the court, so
obviously if you’re down in front, it felt
like you were closer to the game, that
there was a natural acoustic roll-off from
the stage. It keeps your perspective to the
continued on page 42
Joan Marcus
www.stage-directions.com • September 2007 21