I'm sitting in the house at the Dorset Theatre Festival as my crew finishes applying molding and other detail touches to the set for Clybourne Park, our last show of the season. This production was coproduced with Barrington Stage in Massachusetts, and as part of the cost-sharing discussion, we decided it would be smart to split the physical labor--have some of the set built by our shop here, and some built in the shop at Barrington.

There were a lot of reasons to split the construction; time, of course, being the biggest: it was pretty clear that neither shop would be able to successfully complete the build of the whole set in the time available. In order to keep the scope of the set intact, the construction would have to be split between the two groups. Additionally, we're a small shop, and while we do some things really well, detailed architectural work (moldings, custom windows and door casings, that kind of thing) are a little outside our wheelhouse. We simply don't have the tooling and skills to do that kind of work as well as I'd prefer. From photos of previous productions at Barrington stage, it was clear that their shop did; consequently, I strongly suggested that this work be completed in their shop. It just seemed to make more sense for materials to be built in the shop and by the people who'd complete it to the highest level of quality.

The set--a box set--is comprised of solid-color walls on the sides, a ceiling (yay for more ceilings!), a staircase upstage, and a coffered-panel wall upstage of the stairs. The upstage units--cofffered wall and stairs--were to be the same wood treatment as the architectural elements, and Jes, our charge, felt (and I agreed) that having one shop try and paint/stain some wood elements and another try and do the same with the rest, about 100 miles away, seemed...not so wise. It would be next to impossible to coordinate and be sure elements stayed in the same world. So...we agreed to have the wooden elements--trim, doors, casing, windows, stairs, and coffered wall built and finished by the Barrington shop, while we would complete the floor, flat-colored walls, and ceiling.

The elements we completed had their own amount of detail: the ceiling included soffets to allow for lighting positions over stage; the ends of the deck, walls, and ceiling were to look as if they were "cut through," revealing plaster, lath, studs, joists, and the like; the ceiling downstage was to support small walls to indicate upstairs/"attic" rooms. It was complicated detail work, but the kind of thing we can do well (and, frankly, I think we did.)

Most of you are probably feeling the same anxiety about building in two separate shops that I did: how do you make sure everything fits together as it should? Will the logic of load-in assembly match what you normally do? What if it doesn't all work? What if what shows up off the truck isn't of acceptable quality?

We wrestled with all of these questions, and decided with our Producing Director that we wouldn't be "responsible" for what came from Barrington, but that we would work as closely as we could with their TD and scenic charge to ensure things would go smoothly for load in and tech. And, for the most part, they did.

However, I personally learned that abdicating responsibility wasn't the best option to satisfy my sense of pride in my work. The material we received from Barrington was solid construction, and it mated with our pieces reasonably well. However, there were a lot of elements of these units that weren't built how I would have built them, and some of the working parts (there are doors, and some of the coffered panels must come off during an intermission shift) don't operate as nicely as I would prefer. Also, there was a fairly large communication error in terms of paint treatment, and all the wood-toned elements came out significantly darker than the team expected. Giving up responsibility for these elements was meant to absolve me from having to a) feel badly about them, and b) fix them. But, of course, that's not what happened--I did feel badly, and I did feel the need to fix them as best I could in the time I have.

In retrospect, abdicating responsibility was a cowards way of avoiding the question of authority. I teach my students that you can't be held responsible for something that you don't have authority to change, affect, or adjust. By saying I didn't want to be held responsible for the materials Barrington provided, I was really saying I felt uncomfortable being in a position of authority over the Barrington folks (and that I definitely didn't want to be under their authority). But that was cowardly. I should have insisted that their be one TD, one person in authority. We should have--as two companies, as part of the negotiation--determined that one or the other shop was "in charge"--generating drawings, being responsible for quality control and fit and finish, for communication with the designer and the director.

Things we learn when we do new things, right?