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Covers in pop music — especially ironic ones — are a dime a dozen, but in theater décor? That’s not an everyday occurrence, as far as I’m aware.
So when I read the program for the Goodman Theatre’s current production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, starring Brian Dennehy as Larry Slade and Nathan Lane as Theodore Hickman, the following credits caught my eye: set design by Kevin Depinet, inspired by designs by John Conklin.
In 1990, the Goodman produced Iceman with Dennehy in the “Hickey” role. Conklin created the décor with Robert Falls, director of both versions.
I had questions. What follows is my conversation by phone with Depinet on May 16.
Each act’s set is a variation on a theme, I thought: They all fit together as a…well, as a “set,” themselves, but there’s a great progression from Act I to Act IV. And this is coupled with elegant references to art history. The opening scene is reminiscent of Rembrandt, with the strong chiaroscuro, and we also get whiffs of The Last Supper and other well-known works of art. How much of all of this came from the previous designs by John Conklin, and to what extent did you introduce your ideas to this production? That’s, of course, about ten questions in one, but what I want to discuss with you today, in a nutshell.
[Laughs] Well, let’s start with the idea of the four different sets. In terms of how Bob [Falls] and I worked, because there was a previous set and because he wanted to use the guise of the original production, one of [John Conklin’s] design’s major ideas was these four points of view [onto the bar]. That production being at the old Goodman, which was a different space entirely… You could literally have four sets and wheel them in as you needed them, you know? One might be offstage right, [another] offstage left, and then upstage, and you could just wheel the whole sets in [as the show progressed]. In the new Goodman, you can’t do that, so one of my biggest challenges was figuring out how to make it work, within itself. There isn’t that [offstage] space to put everything. So the original production [had] basically these four separate ideas that were trucked on, and this was more a morphing, sort of onion-skin, layered thing that unfolded, with the [bar]room getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
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