A theatrical model is a not-so-humble tool. Meticulously created to scale, a scenic designer’s model is often the first fully realized three-dimensional version of the world of a play. Models are a promise and proxies for yet-to-be-constructed sets that clarify production concepts, stabilize costume and lighting designs, and help a director hone their imagination and blocking. For many in a production team, we have our first experience with a designer's model on the first day of rehearsal. Models exist within–and are ciphers for–a dense network of pre-production labor; they make legible a director's concept, a dramaturg's research, lighting and costume designers’ renderings, and even the playwright’s script itself. A new cast, eagerly assembled, uses the model to imagine their labor and characters’ environments in more concrete ways than gaff tape floor outlines and rehearsal props. Producers rely on models to translate disparate design elements into a unified vision and guide conversations about form, function, and cost.

Peter Brook, arguing for theatre’s self-assertion in the present as a form of “Immediate Theatre” in The Empty Space, articulates the process of “[preparing] a play toward performance” as beginning when directors establish relationships with the subject and design.(1) Certainly, pre-production processes usually reflect Brook's emphasis on design as emerging prior to rehearsal and performance; the director and designer collaboratively decide on a clear vision for a ground plan to guide blocking, delineate playing areas for lighting and ensure performers’ safety, among other benefits. But what if design emerges prior to a subject as well? “Subject,” Brook's gloss for “play,” is central to the performance relationship between actor and audience, and the rehearsal relationship between actor and director.(2) Prompt’s musicals issue of “Sets and Plays” inverts the unidirectional relationship between designer and playwright, wherein the playwright creates an exacting world in a script that scenic designers must translate to the stage through the director’s concept. 

In seven digital installations, Prompt challenged music theatre artists to write an original composition inspired by set models that scenic designers crafted for other productions. The results are a mixture of the haunting and campy–as in Samantha Roberts’ “Artificial Inspiration” and Melissa Yanchak’s “Lost at Sea,” both a response to Bea Chung’s set design featuring a giant rubber ducky amidst gray geometric shapes–to more conventional historical fiction, like Laura O’Connor & Cameron Fox’s Irish hornpipe-inspired “Raggy Boys Song,” responding to Richard Finkelstein’s stark industrial brick set. While the task is unusual, to be sure, it is not altogether foreign: designers hired to work in repertory are often constrained by set needs for a wholly dissimilar production.(3) Challenging musicians to write for a given world is a more revolutionary process: decisions about a period, tone, character, or stage mechanics are no longer solely the librettist and composer’s choosing. While some may find such constraints limiting, the challenge allows educators and artists to reexamine and revalue the model as a tool. It prompts us to ask; how does the model change when it is not in service of a playwright or director’s vision? As a way of answering this question in our theatre classrooms, I offer three methodological avenues for consideration with students: 

1.Model as Dramaturgical Invention

Dramaturgically, a play is a world wherein nothing happens by chance. Elinor Fuchs reminds us as much in “EF's Visit to a Small Planet,” a slim and authoritative essay that guides nascent and mature artists alike in articulating the conditions of the “small planet” on which a playwright’s character’s life. Students can often see the playwright’s conspicuous craft without guile when we remove rhetoric of chance from the conversation. Therefore, it is helpful for Play Analysis, Design, and Directing students to view an array of theatrical models alongside their reading of scripts and librettos to draw specific connections between text and craft. Still, Fuchs compels us to move further, writing, “Of course you can construct meaning in this world in many different ways. Construct it in the most inclusive way you can. There will still be more to see.”(4) Fuchs invites us to open up a play’s world for experimentation in novel ways. The directive to construct inclusively opens possibilities for access and equity and reintroduces chance and change. Alison Oddey and Christine White pose a similar invitation in their introduction to The Potentials of Spaces (2006) when they ask, “How does the space change and develop the project?”(5) For Oddey and White, space is full of “poetic intention,” where we are invited to “envisage what is possible” in a place where “fiction and reality come together to promote each other.”(6) Given how designers use playscripts as a site for invention, asking writers to build from models presents an opportunity for creatives to support each other’s work equitably. Playwrights routinely invited to imagine new worlds for us to realize from scratch might find working from a model a thrilling change of pace. In contrast, designers allowed to create a design a world entirely of their making without a textual anchor might experience the opportunity to develop with an unfettered imagination for the first time. 

• Show students the images for each model and ask them to read the object closely. If good design tells you how to use a thing or space, ask your students what kinds of invitations the model is extending. What kinds of movement and ways of being feel at home in the model’s world? Which are alienated? What stories do you imagine might take place here? How do you know? 

  2. Models as Negotiated Reading 

Stuart Hall might characterize the praxis of the eight composers as a form of negotiated reading, where their individual biases and interpretive contexts shape their creative responses to each model. Following Hall and Peter Brook, traditional set design is a form of creative play where the designer works in “a sympathy of tempo” with a text and its movements.(7) The composers in this issue are tasked with reattuning their craft to resonate in a specific space. Hall’s concept of negotiated reading comes to us from his consideration of media texts like television and film. A negotiated reading is not simply how one receives a text (partly based on dominant and preferred social codes) but also how any interpretation reflects one’s interests, position, and experiences. How do these musical theatre composers’ interpretive contexts and biases impact their work? What are these writers encoding in their compositions, and do their works reflect individual processes for decoding the models? Given the typical expectation that the function of the model follows a play’s form, can the inverse be true? Do the models’ forms demand particular musical functions? 

• Marvin Carlson argues that our “traditional emphasis upon the dramatic text, both written and performed, has often led us to neglect the other conditioning elements of the theatre event.”(8) One way of clarifying this dilemma for students is to ask them to read and listen to the one-minute musicals in small groups, purposefully withholding the design models. Then, task each group with using the text to envision the physical world of the musical using only the given composition.(9) Push students to attend lyrics and score, accounting for tone, atmosphere, and tempo. Can they “[sense] what shapes [seem] to be in the text”?(10) Encourage them to discover or craft rough visuals to help communicate their readings of the musical's world. Ask each group to present their "world" alongside a rationale for its relation to their given musical. Finally, reveal the musical's given model and guide students in a comparative conversation between their models and the professional model. Are they surprised? What points of connection, if any, exist between the student worlds and the inspiration model? What do the differences suggest about how the group received the playtext? How did the composers read the model? Using this line of inquiry helps open up a conversation about creative processes and the indeterminacy of a given text. 

3. Models as Ecological Performance 

We live in an unprecedented age of ecological degradation. Human behavior taxes our planet’s complex ecosystems with overproduction and pollution, and we compromise Earth's ability to recover from the strains of humankind when we unthinkingly eliminate biodiversity. Theatre, as an art form, is notoriously wasteful. From paper products to set dressing materials, the close and strike of productions usually lead to bins overflowing with detritus. We must proverbially clean the slate for our next show, after all. Shakespeare's fool Jaques declares, “All the world's a stage,” but the dire changes in our climate suggest that we are the fools for not being better stewards of our performance spaces. Many theatre departments and companies indeed reuse materials across multiple productions, but they pursue this economy because of the demands of financial necessity rather than a desire to adhere to environmentally-conscious practices such as reducing labor and carbon emissions. Works such as Ellen Jones’ A Practical Guide to Greener Theatre (2013)(11) and Theresa May’s “Greening the Theater: Taking Ecocriticism from Page to Stage”(12) task us with integrating ecocritical approaches to theatremaking ranging from waste reduction in auditions and scene shops to thinking ecologically to expand our notion of environmental justice and equity to include ecological communities alongside racial, gender, and disability paradigms. Eco-conscious scholar-artists like Bonnie Marranca and companies like Bread and Puppet demonstrate the appetite and creative play that ecocritical art produces. This issue of Prompt templates a practice of upcycling design, the “[utilization of] old goods as materials to create an artwork.”(13) Costumers regularly “pull stock” to repurpose clothing constructed for different productions, but we cast aspersions on pulling stock on other forms of design. How might producing habits change if we commit to upcycling one design every third or fourth season? Compensation and creative accreditation issues must be addressed, but these are hardly insurmountable. Regional companies with annual productions of The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, and Dracula already do much the same thing without significant financial loss or audience anxiety. So, where is our consternation located? In the fear that upcycling design is “cheating” as artists or stymieing the creative process? Would these attitudes change if we measured these concerns against a company's solvency or our environment’s health? 

• Theatre productions may be ephemeral, but we generate a fair amount of ephemera during each production. Using the models, you might extend the Prompt challenge to design students by asking them to upcycle three elements from each set into a new rendering. This is a good opportunity for faculty and visiting designers to lay out processes for taking inventory of stock and upcycling materials for new purposes. Conversely, you might take each musical and task students with programming a material history of the model; these might articulate the model’s material makeup, past production use, and position as a point of departure in the new musical production. Can students trace the ecology of inspiration across texts and cultural references? How about their own labor? What forms of theatrical ecologies do students imagine themselves as networked within? 

These sites of spatial and musical invention invert conventional uses for the theatrical model, serving as a powerful example of what bell hooks characterizes as the liberatory potential of space: “Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice.”(14) When we liberate the model from the story it is made to tell, what next? In this issue, eight music theatre writers repurpose the theatrical space envisaged by a model to harness its creative potential. We might think of this creative practice as interrupting a model's given narrative, divorcing a world from the text and story it is trying to communicate. We can also understand this practice as literally scripting a new life for an object whose use-value is exhausted. The models in this issue are an inspiration point and invitation to capaciously think about creation, collaboration, and communication in theatre.