Scenic designer Emmie Finckel reflects on their collaboration with Christopher Ashley and Will Davis, and the inspiration for their set
I have been such a huge fan of both Will and Chris's work for a long time, so I was already thrilled when they reached out to me to chat about some mysterious project they had coming up. When I spoke to them and they told me the premise — to gather a group of Queer and trans artists to tell the story of As You Like It through their bodies and sensibilities — I couldn't get on board fast enough.
As one of the first people to join the creative team, I have had the immense privilege of watching Will and Chris craft the community of artists around this project with such deep care and intention. Amidst all of the daily discourse about identity politics and representation in the arts, it can be easy to get distracted by numbers and statistics and forget the true goal: to create spaces where folks can bring their whole selves to work every day, and find community with others who share some part of their lived experience. At every moment that we've gathered together in a room around As You Like It, it has been so clear that Will and Chris have assembled a really special group of folks around this text, and I can't wait to see where we land.
Will, Chris and I started our process with a completely blank slate, and spent months looking at research from all corners of the world to try and locate our little Queer world. We knew from the very beginning that we were not interested in any kind of realistic location, and while we were interested in alluding to contemporary identity politics and the reality of what it means to be Queer/trans today, we didn't need to specifically locate the story in 2022 America for an audience to understand the relationship between the text and the characters' journeys and the current conversation around LGBTQ issues.
A few core ideas cemented pretty quickly. We knew early on that we wanted the forest to grow out of and layer on top of the court, rather than supplanting it — as if it was waiting there all along, and someone just needed to look for it. And we knew that there was something about the inherently theatrical act of looking at an object or a body onstage and using the power of theatrical imagination to know and believe that it is something its not, that felt inherently Queer to us, and spoke to the power that Queer and trans people have, to know and believe that they are something they are told they're not. If an actor stands on stage and believes that a potted plant is a forest, the audience can also believe that the potted plant is a forest.
And of course, our understanding of the world of the play only got richer once we started working with the other designers. Mel's attention to texture and the details of material as they relate body to environment, and Cha's ability to use light as architecture tied the visuals together so seamlessly, and it has been a delight to begin to fold in ien and T's aural world. From there, a lot of our design process became about assembling materials and shapes around these core ideas until we found a space firmly rooted in the rigid oppressiveness of the court, that could be punctured by just a few gestures to open up the imaginative possibilities of the forest.
