Sound Designer Miles Polaski discusses the ways in which he worked with the entire SWEET TEA team to compose his sound design.
Part of the challenge when doing any kind of design for a play is discovering and setting up the rules of the play. In other words, what kind of conventions will we use, why, and how do they help support the arc of the play?
Sweet Tea has been a collaborative and organic process between the designers, director and our actor/playwright to find answers to these questions. The world of this play and its structure give a sound designer freedom to have some fun. So figuring out where to start wasn’t clear right away. Once we knew what the sonic pallet of the play was we needed to understand how we could implement our choices. After seeing a run through of the play for the designers it was clear to me that this play contains 3 forms: E. Patrick Johnson speaks in first person; the characters monologues; and Countess Vivian. The structure of the text as well as the staging of each of these sections made it clear that these sections needed to have different sonic support. For example, when EPJ speaks as himself we can embrace a more stylized world where underscoring helps support the text. And when we are in character monologues a more natural atmospheric sound scape helps support these moments.
Of course, we have now finished our technical rehearsals (where we compose and set all of the sound into the play) and some of the rules have changed. Which is to be expected in a highly stylized show such as Sweet Tea. We began to discover what worked and what did not and we shifted our tactics accordingly. But I won’t talk about those changes here - I’ll let you hear for yourself when you go see Sweet Tea.
