Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Playing it by ear when the action begins Date: Sun, 8 Nov 92 15:50:37 EST Message-ID: \SE D;ARTS;BEHIND THE SCENES: SOUND DESIGNER \HD Playing it by ear when the action begins \BY Hap Erstein \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES Helen Hayes Award winner David Crandall doesn't mind talking about sound design, but he doesn't want the audience to pay too much attention to what he does. "You're trying to notify the audience that, say, there's a car approaching, but you don't want to take their attention away from the play, like 'Oooh, what a weird and wonderful sounding automobile,' " he says. "The audience should just go, 'Car. OK, now what's the actor doing?' " If the taped sound effects, live sound balance and acoustical engineering that are Mr. Crandall's stock in trade are working, he can transport an audience to the Oklahoma dust bowl of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," currently at Washington Shakespeare Company. Or the arid South African plain of Athol Fugard's "Boesman and Lena," now at American Showcase Theatre. Or any of the other 100 locales he has created in sound since moving to the area in 1985. Each production begins the same way, with a conference with the show's director. "One thing I need to know right off the bat," the soft-spoken, unassuming Mr. Crandall says, "is the style of the production - realistic, unrealistic. And usually I can't get it to jell in my head until I've heard the actors talking. I'm not quite sure why that is. I've never been aware of saying, 'Oh, that person's voice sounds like this, so I'll do that.' It just gets me going intuitively." The small resident theaters in town - and Mr. Crandall has worked at most of them - would be foolish to argue with his method. He gets results. This year Mr. Crandall, 40, garnered three of the five Helen Hayes Award nominations for theater excellence in sound design. He won the award for "Hamlet" at WSC, where he is a company member and resident sound designer. Nearly all of his sound effects are prerecorded on tape, but "Hamlet" was distinguished for, among other things, the ominous live sound of dripping water. Mr. Crandall turned a production concept from director Jason Adams into an aural reality. "He said, 'I want the set to be oozing and dripping and I want to hear it,' " Mr. Crandall recalls. "The castle in 'Hamlet' is next to the ocean. It's in the rainy part of the country. So it needs good drainage. It probably was dripping all the time. The central argument of the sound was that this was a really watery world." * * * Live music presents an even trickier problem, requiring careful sound balance between the musicians and the actors. "The Grapes of Wrath" was originally supposed to have live music throughout the performance. But when finding affordable musicians for a month's run proved difficult, Mr. Crandall had to adapt his plans and pre-tape the score. He is credited with composing the original music, but he says much of it is improvisation from the musicians under his guidance. "I would go, 'Here are the parameters, wing it,' " Mr. Crandall says. One of his favorite moments is when the band simulates the Joad family's travels westward. "Basically, what I said when I went to record was, 'Banjo, you're the motor, you're the truck. Fiddle, you're the people sitting in the truck, wondering what the hell's going to happen next. Guitar, you're the landscape. You're the sky, you're the ground,' " Mr. Crandall says. "I didn't believe I was saying this to them, and they went, 'OK, sure, great,' and away they went." The remnant of the original concept is the pair of musicians who stroll through the action, playing instruments from mouth harp to musical saw and delivering a line or two of dialogue. Although he is not credited, a couple of nights a week, one of those musicians is Mr. Crandall. The other main sounds of his "Grapes of Wrath" are an Oklahoma wind storm, the climactic flooding rains and a recurring ambient chirp of crickets. He was able to realize his design for about $250, which is higher than average, "because we had to pay the guys on the tape. Usually for sound design, I'll spend like 50 or 60 bucks. " He doesn't have to bill for studio time, since he set up a makeshift recording and mixing space in the den of his Arlington apartment. * * * Typically, Mr. Crandall's sound design is completely pre-taped and culled from public-domain effects discs, as "Boesman and Lena" was. The show begins with a montage of sounds - a helicopter, a bulldozer, a donkey and a baby - that establishes story elements in the audience's mind. Mr. Crandall admits sheepishly that the bulldozer is really a construction shovel, but he figured that "anything diesel" would work. Gone, perhaps fortunately, are those romantic old days of sound design when effects would be created by recording a completely different object that simulates the sound of another. Mr. Crandall remembers needing the sound of boxcars on the first show he ever designed - Arthur Miller's concentration-camp drama, "Playing for Time," at the Studio Theatre. "My dad had an old wheelbarrow that he'd put wooden wheels on," he says. "So there's this old wheelbarrow, with contact mikes all over it - you tape a mike onto the surface of whatever you want to listen to. Then I rolled it back and forth over a concrete floor 20 minutes at a time." * * * An important part of the sound designer's job is assessing the acoustics of the playing space and modifying it for the best aural experience. When Washington Shakespeare got the notion to present "Julius Caesar" in the unfinished penthouse of an Arlington skyscraper last year, Mr. Crandall had to harness it for sound. "One of my trademarks has always been to aim the speakers away from the audience," he says. "In 'Caesar,' we put the speakers on the back side of some columns, shooting out, so that the sound bounced off of all that glass and concrete and then created kind of a surround." A more difficult assignment, oddly enough, was the first time Mr. Crandall designed sound at Woolly Mammoth's theater. "The reason is you've got this corner that sticks out into the room and that bounces the sound all around. You'll have a sound coming from offstage right and, because of the bouncing around, people will actually think it's coming from the left." Soundwise, he prefers the confines of the Church Street Theatre. "I've heard some real good sound done there. It's got brick, which makes a big difference," Mr. Crandall says. "Brick is real friendly acoustically. It's got a certain amount of bounce, a certain amount of liveliness, yet it's got that rough surface. It kind of softens up the high frequencies a little bit but doesn't really take them away." * * * Mr. Crandall moved to Washington from Kentucky to play music, gravitated to theater and became a sound designer when Studio Theatre had an unexpected need for one on "Playing for Time." "It hadn't really occurred to me to make sound a career move," he says. At that point, sound was just beginning to be recognized as an important design element. Its use, at least locally, was boosted in 1990, when it got its own Helen Hayes Award category. Still, Mr. Crandall complains, sound design is considered a stepchild of the theater crafts. There are no university programs in it that he knows of, perhaps because the boom in sound equipment, which puts such technology within the grasp of most theaters and schools, is relatively recent. Mr. Crandall is himself about to return to the University of Kentucky to complete a master's thesis in human communications. He describes it as "a theory of information processing in real life situations." His plans beyond that are unclear. "Then I've got to use this academic work to get myself enough of a living so I can afford to do one show at a time," he says. (This summer he worked on six shows in as many weeks, tackling several productions simultaneously.) Then again, he adds, maybe he can whip through this thesis and be back in town in time to design WSC's production of "The Tempest" in the spring. Academia is fine, but it is clear that Mr. Crandall is hooked. On the sound of applause. ****BOX DAVID CRANDALL Sound designer, Washington Shakespeare Company's "The Grapes of Wrath" and American Showcase Theatre's "Boesman and Lena" Born: Mobile, Ala. Marital status: Single Age: 40 School: Berea College, University of Kentucky, Studio Theatre Conservatory Home: Arlington Day job: Part-time technical writer for CACI, Inc., "to keep body and soul together and get insurance benefits." Night job: Tenor saxophonist for the Capitol Quicksteps Quadrille Orchestra, Little Red and the Renegades, Evening Star Awards: 1992 Helen Hayes Award for Sound Design for Washington Shakespeare Company's "Hamlet"; Helen Hayes Award nominations for "The Stick Wife" (Horizons Theatre), "Ardiente Paciencia" (GALA Hispanic Theatre), "Julius Caesar" (Washington Shakespeare Company) Philosophy of sound design: "Success in design - or anything, for that matter - is measured by the extent to which necessity and mystery become the same." 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