Designer adjusts set of ‘Lady Day’ until it’s just right

LAWRENCE — Striking the proper balance between glamour and decay and between realism and emotion is the idea behind the set Rana Esfandiary has designed for the KCRep’s Oct. 8-27 production of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill.”

An assistant professor in the University of Kansas Department of Theatre & Dance, Esfandiary doesn’t like her work to be too literal, if she can help it.

“I try to focus on ... hidden meanings in the play, and how we can show that to audiences without being so direct,” she said. “I hate it when people try to force-feed an audience something. They can work it through themselves. We don't need to tell them everything.”

Esfandiary said the scenic design for “Lady Day” vacillated before landing on something that will evoke the right mix of feelings.

“I do not look at past productions, because I don't want my design affected by them,” Esfandiary said. “I just do research on the topic. And that was especially true for this one, because I wasn’t familiar with the main character, singer Billie Holiday. I'm not a jazz listener, so I had to do research from scratch.”

Esfandiary said playwright Lanie Robertson notes in his instructions to producer/directors that Holliday actually performed in 1957 at Philadelphia’s Emerson’s Bar and Grill.

“It was a real place, but there are no photos from the inside,” Esfandiary said.

So instead, she sought out images of similar clubs from that era, including watching a documentary film about Holliday she found in KU’s Spencer Research Library.

“When I watched it, I sympathized with her life and her tragic death caused by addiction and so on,” Esfandiary said. “But when I talked to the director, Nedra Dixon, she was like, ‘Billie Holliday never thought about her life as sad. It was just the life she lived, and she enjoyed it.’ So she told me, ‘I don't want to portray this as a sad moment. ... It should be a celebration of Billie Holiday.’”

Esfandiary had to balance that in relation to the playwright’s description of the main character returning to a now abandoned place.

“The point of the design is that you should be able to see that it was once a cool place ... But right now it needs a little bit of TLC,” Esfandiary said. “The director liked it, because she wanted me to stay away from portraying this place as a cheap, rundown jazz bar.”

In fact, Esfandiary said, she and Dixon went back and forth a couple of times to make sure they found the right balance in depicting this jazzy, smoky, yet now empty bar.

“At the beginning, the set was looking really classy and ... we would run out of budget with the first sketch,” the KU professor said. “The director also wanted to see a more intimate space, where Billie was closer to the audience and is embraced by the whole environment.

“So I went to the polar opposite, and then the director was like, ‘No, you went too far the other way.’ In the end, we met in the middle, and that's what collaboration is. It was a very friendly conversation throughout the whole process.”

Esfandiary is excited to work once again with the KC Rep (she also designed the set for its “Twelfth Night” in 2022), whose in-house technical and carpentry staff make a designer’s life easy, once the drawings are done, she said.