Tribes sound designer Ryan Rumery returns to Studio having previously designed Frozen for Studio 2ndStage. Rumery has worked at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Classic Stage Company, and many regional theatres. Rumery also works as a musician and composer, currently producing an album for The Joy of Harm. He spoke with Artistic Apprentice Elizabeth Dinkova about his process and the interaction and collaboration between the different design elements.
ED: What was the original inspiration for your design for Tribes?
RR: My biggest inspiration and challenge for this design was trying to express what it would be like for a deaf person to experience music. In practical terms, that means putting the subwoofers below the audience, so that they could feel the sound more than hear it, as well as working with lower frequencies to make sure there was something to feel. In the first scene transition, I played with that idea with Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Designing Tribes in this way was an eye-opening experience for me because, most of the time, I imagine I’m designing sound for a hearing audience; this show enabled me to introduce and appreciate the Deaf perspective and how a deaf audience might experience the sound, and changed how I think about design.
ED: How did your ideas evolve through watching rehearsals and the tech process?
RR: A lot of the time, plays prescribe what we should see and hear at various points in the script; however, a play is only alive to me when I see and hear it acted out firsthand. So I had some original ideas about the music selection, but my choices were swayed by seeing, hearing, and talking to the actors in the show. For example, Michael Tolaydo (the actor playing Christopher) really struck me as a Rolling Stones guy. The script called for opera in a lot of the transitions, but I felt like this family does not need opera, but rather something with more grit. The background music in the scene in which Billy and Sylvia meet was based on the vibe and chemistry of the actors. I added some sirens to the soundscape based on the pauses to create a feel for the outside world. So, basically, after meeting the people, I threw out notions of how other people do the play, or how it had been done in New York, and went with my instinct because ultimately the audience’s experience of the play is all about how the actors work within it.
ED: How did you collaborate with the other designers and how did the other designs affect your choices?
RR: The set design, and especially the back wall, led me to the gritty feeling behind a lot of the sound. Kathleen [Geldard]’s clothes, which were so odd and wonderful and real, convinced me that nothing could feel fake with the sound: the radio sound had to really come from the radio, you had to hear the laptop actually playing the opera. Collaborating with Matt [Richards] and his lights was about tempo and time and space. It led me to decisions about how loud the sound could get, where it was sourced, and where it required bumps as opposed to fades. The biggest collaboration in the show was between sound and projections. Erik [Trester] and I worked extensively before tech to get the right edits for the sound and video so that they matched up; the show was so visually stimulating that we had to get the timing perfect. For the magical moment at the end of Act I when Sylvia plays the piano and the projection of Claire de Lune comes up to work, all departments had to work together. We put in the most intensive work on our parts for a moment that lasted 15 to17 seconds. But that’s the beauty of it all: you put in all this work and in the end it comes together and you see it all working.