Scenic designer sets stage for storytelling
Oakland’s Nina Ball has made her name devising heightened sets for theater that are far more than just backdrops
If in your Bay Area theatergoing, you’ve marveled at the ingenuity of a set — a striking overall concept, a clever and efficient use of space, a sense of fun or magic, a freedom from the constraints of realism — there’s a good chance it was designed by Nina Ball.
It’s not just that the designer is prolific, but she is that. Her resume lists almost three full pages, singlespaced, of design credits with a wide range of companies where she works — from American Conservatory Theater to Shotgun Players, from Oregon Shakespeare Festival to San Francisco Playhouse.
You’re also likely to know her work because it is no mere backdrop to action, no bythebook illustration of stage directions, but an essential component of a play’s storytelling, as much a factor in your overall feeling walking out of a show as its acting or script.
I always come back to her design for “Period of Adjustment” at San Francisco Playhouse in 2011, back when the company was still in the 99seat Sutter Street space now occupied by Custom Made Theatre Company. Ball stuffed the pastelhued home in Tennessee Williams’ Christmas comedy with ruffles and lace, so that there was barely
room to breathe, then rendered the rooms not as they’d be in a real house, but cut up, scrambled and reassembled, then aligned along a diagonal, creating almost an M.C. Escher effect. The whole conceit cannily established the possibility for a tectonic shift later in the play, where subterranean rumblings physically crack apart the walls.
“Most of the scripts you’re handed are actual, real places,” she says. “Often, there’s not many that you get to be so abstract with. But it’s the heightened realism that’s interesting to me. How do you take realism, tweak it to a place where it’s recognizable still — it’s still a room — but something is, sometimes it’s off. Sometimes it’s exaggerated. But what are the things that are pushing your themes, that still make people feel, ‘OK, I simultaneously know this room and am bothered.’ It is affecting them.”
Lining the walls of her Oakland studio, next to jars of paintbrushes, a 3D printer and a dressform mannequin (she’s also a costume designer) are almost 40 set models, each the size of a couple of rooms of a dollhouse. She jokingly calls them “spider houses,” since they don’t get dusted often. But that belies their craftsmanship. Ball says that often, she takes a photo of her model and then her finished, fullsize set from the same angle, and only a trained eye can tell which is which.
Ball loves what she calls “moments of transformation” in scenic design, “when something changes the volume of the space or changes the air in the room.” She loves when the audience gasps because of a scene shift, or when the set makes real or completes what a character is going through, when the feeling is so strong that the world around a character has to change.
In American Conservatory Theater’s “Top Girls” this past autumn, Ball’s design in the first scenes used candy colors and took advantage of the Geary stage’s height, suggesting the sweep of time and space from which Caryl Churchill’s characters hail. Then, in the final act, a very contained room got wheeled out, and all the furniture and knickknacks on it looked brown even if they weren’t actually brown, as if even the sunlight here were dirty and faded, reflecting the smallness and sadness of a new character’s life.
Ball, 44, grew up in Livermore as one of eight children and took a circuitous route into scenic design. She studied marine biology at UC Santa Cruz but wasn’t thrilled by the water toxicology jobs her peers were taking. She veered back to an early love of art when she moved to New York, where she studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Ball thought she would be a studio artist in painting, sculpture and photography. But then “the white canvas thing is real, just that blank canvas pressure of, ‘What are you wanting to create?’ “
She missed collaborators. She missed “the analytical, plus the creative.”
Ball found theater again when she took a “random” introductory theater class at City College after moving back to the Bay Area. She calls it a “gestalt moment,” one that “redirected” the rest of her life. From there she got her master’s in set design at San Francisco State, where one of her professors was Mark Jackson, who has since worked with her on 15 professional shows.
Now one of the most soughtafter scenic designers in the Bay Area, Ball just started teaching a class at UC Berkeley called Design in Performance, where she counts both English and electrical engineering majors among her students. Her work will next be seen onstage in Octavio Solis’ “Retablos: Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border,” produced by Word for Word at Z Below, with performances beginning Feb. 22.
Her concept designing that show, set in El Paso, Texas, kept returning to “the earth under their feet.” Same with “Confederates,” which she’s designing at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. What does the ground feel like as characters walk on it? With the Word for Word show, “there’s that sense of patina over everything, with something long ago.” She wanted “a vast landscape image with patinated edges and saturated colors, something that felt distant, faraway, coming in and out.”
Solis’ stories fuse memory and imagination, the germ of something real with the way we embellish it, refract it. There’s a “fuzziness and fluidity” with his tales, Ball says. “Between each of them, there’s a connection, but only a little. Sometimes you’re like, ‘That couldn’t have happened. Did that actually happen?’”
“I’m really into simple stuff, like empty spaces, but beautiful empty spaces,” Jackson says in an interview at his offices at ACT, where he runs Studio ACT. “And Nina’s really good at that but then finding a way to complicate the space in some significant moment, where the set helps tell the story.”
In Ball’s first professional show, Shotgun Players’ “Macbeth,” directed by Jackson, Ball made a fashion runway split in half to form a gladiator pit after a defiant speech by the tragic hero. “It really underscored Macbeth’s bravado and how he’s going to go down because of that, because he says the final line, whatever that was, and you hear all this cracking, and the stage splits under his feet, and these pointy logs come at him ... and he falls into the pit and runs out of there,” Jackson says. “So the punctuation of his ‘go out and fight’ line is to have the earth drop out from underneath him.”
He says Ball understands how a set is a “canvas for costume and actors,” how it holds the actors up for the audience. There’s something so natural about her designs, he says, that “the staging will just happen,” as if the actors know instinctively what to do and where to go on her sets.
In conceiving a design, Ball finds herself frequently returning to whatever her initial impulse is the second time she reads a script (the first time she reads just for fun) and then distilling, distilling, distilling, which is frequently driven by budgetary concerns. In our interview, Ball refers to two sets that both cost two times their budget. She imitates a producer’s panic, then, to show her unfrazzled response, mimes languidly taking a drag on a cigarette. “We will salvage the essence,” she says, as if that were her job description. There will be no “death by a thousand cuts.”
“We spend all this time creating, but we spend sometimes an equal amount of it cutting things away,” Ball says. “So learning that, that freedom, that mourning it for a moment, shed a single tear, and move on and just know it’s for the betterment of the show.”