Brian Slattery Photo
Wearing a hard hat because the crew was still assembling the set, Sound Resident Lindsay Wagner demonstrated some of the sound design for the Long Wharf’s staging this weekend of The Boy at the Edge of Everything, by Finegan Kruckemeyer. She looked toward the stage, where one crew member was up on a ladder that reached to the high ceiling of Long Wharf’s Stage II, adjusting a light. Another crew member was below him, checking his work.
“Sound!” Wagner called.
The crew stopped what they were doing, and Wagner hit a button on her laptop. The sounds of a bus stop filled, and in one sense, transformed the theater.
“Let him hear the rumble,” said Audio/Video Supervisor Hunter Spoede, sitting behind her.
“Sound!” Wagner called again. She hit another button, and a low, warm rumble weighted down the air. It was the ambient sound Wagner had created and designed for the action of the play that takes place in outer space. Sure, there’s no ambient sound in space. But the sound Wagner was playing conveyed the sense of what she and Emily Breeze, the play’s director and an artistic resident as well, wanted space to feel like for the audience: empty, vast, quiet. A void they could hear.
The Long Wharf’s staging of The Boy at the Edge of Everything — which opens Friday night and runs through May 29 — is remarkable in two ways. First, the play, about an overscheduled earthbound boy who improbably rockets into space to encounter a lonely lad who lives at the farthest point in the universe, is a piece of professional theater staged for a young audience. Second, it’s the culmination of this year’s Next Stage Program at the Long Wharf Theatre. The program, which runs August to May, gives college graduates who are interested in a career in the theater an apartment, a stipend, and the chance to work with Long Wharf’s cast and crew throughout the season — and at the end, to stage a production themselves.
“It’s really difficult for anyone under the age of 27 to get this kind of experience on their resume,” said Breeze. “If grad school becomes the only option for people to develop their skills, then there are fewer voices in the theater.”
Wagner came to the Long Wharf from the University of Denver’s theater program. She applied to Next Stage over other theater residency programs — there are a lot of them — “because it had a specific sound program” and because, having traveled in Europe and to the West Coast, “I had never been on the East Coast.” She arrived with sound design experience. Over the course of Long Wharf’s season, she has also learned a lot about being an engineer, that is, assembling and using the sound systems that deliver the sound she designs, from the microphones attached the actors to the speakers that fill the room with sound.
Spoede and Wagner.
She got to run shows as well, Spoede pointed out. After working with David Budries, the sound designer on Picasso at the Lapin Agile, she ran sound for the play’s entire run.
What has she learned?
“I don’t like JF-50s,” she said with a laugh, referring to a specific kind of speaker. More generally, though, she has learned to use sound in more subtle and dynamic ways to immerse the audience. Like that low rumble in The Boy at the Edge of Everything.
“On Earth, you’re overwhelmed with sounds,” she said — from squealing bus brakes to people shouting at each other to whistles at soccer games. “In space, there’s nothing.” Which, paradoxically but effectively, there is a sound for.
When Boy closes and her residency ends, Wagner plans to pursue a masters in sound design in Europe. “I’m hoping to work at the National Theater in Prague,” citing the sound design team there as “an inspiration to me.”
At that, Spoede gave her a mock-insulted shrug. What am I, chopped liver?
“Actually, it’s just you,” Wagner said to him.
For Breeze, one of the most important lessons she has learned is the importance of teamwork like that between Wagner and Spoede. “The faces you see when you interact with the theater are not the faces that make the theater possible,” Breeze said. “Actors are obviously crucial, but the theater itself doesn’t fall apart if the actors don’t work out. It only falls apart when the support system does” — the many, many crew members and other staff at the Long Wharf that keep things running from show to show and season to season, from developing each production to striking the sets.
Working with Long Wharf has taught her that lesson through the positive example of how good theater can be when that system is in place, and things are running right. In The Boy at the Edge of Everything, Breeze said, “there’s this beautiful moment where one of the characters has this monologue about the history of the Earth, and he’s almost conducting the sounds.” Wagner has “an amazing ear, and she’s very delicately and subtly done something amazing.”
The Boy at the Edge of Everything runs at the Long Wharf Theater tonight at 7:30 p.m., May 23 at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., May 24 at 2 p.m., and from May 26 through 29 at 9:30 and 11:30 a.m.
