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Diary of a Scoundrel- Ostrovsky Designer's Notes: Diary of a Scoundrel is the hilarious story of a young man in Russia who is scheming to get himself back into money and a position in society. He almost succeeds in this when the diary in which he has been recording his exploits is discovered by one of the people he is trying to dupe. In the final scene, he defends himself masterfully and leaves us wondering who is the bigger scoundrel, himself or the society he was trying so hard to get into. The play has three settings that repeat to make five scene changes, two of which are internal to the acts. This combined with the fact the stage space we were using had no wings or backstage space except that created by the walls of the set meant that the changes between locations had to be very economical in both time needed to achieve them and space required to store pieces when not in use. Based on these considerations, we decided that the three locations would have to be delineated by a generic set of walls. We would then use furniture and décor changes to suggest change in space. Because of this concern I first started with determining a ground plan that would accommodate all of the action. After this I started thinking about what these walls would look like. The director had mentioned that the folk tale aspect of the script was important to him and this connection made me think of folk art, which I researched. I decided that the set would be most supportive of the comedic as well as the folk tale aspects if it was painted to resemble a folk painting of a room rather than a realistic treatment of walls, doors, etc. I was able to combine this idea with the bright colors favored in traditional Russian architecture to create a softer edge and make the unreality of the changes that didn’t change, believable. The bachelor’s apartment , was furnished very simply, with no ornamentation and very plain furniture to suggest his relative poverty. The red that is revealed whenever the front door is opened, gave a nice contrast to the blue room walls to help frame the entrances as we are introduced to the various characters.
Next, we moved to the home of the Mamaev’s. This was a room just off the ballroom. I used the device of the chairs pushed up against the walls on either side of the arch, and the placement of the furniture, to give a more formal flavor and changed the tonality of the room by adding two paintings of wall tapestries in a very bright yellow. This helped to suggest a home with more money, as well as obscuring the stage right door, which was not needed in this scene. The table is the same as in the first scene with the simple addition of a tablecloth and samovar.
In the last scene, Madame Tourosina’s house, the yellow pieces are removed. The large one on stage right being moved across to the stage left wall, revealing it’s other side, painted as a richer, red and gold tapestry, and restoring the door. The wall upstage of the archway opened to reveal a garden symbolized by a painting of a cherry tree, taken from my research. A carpet and a few more pieces of furniture as well as the picture frames hanging on the wall add to the sense of wealthy clutter of the room.
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