Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
By Tom Stoppard
Click an image for more information. Directed by Dayane Mounsib Asst. Directed by Ella Greenway* Scenic Design: Julie Guilbeau* Assistant Scenic Design: Quandranea Mouton* Lighting Design: Ava Marchand* Costume Design: Dayane Mounsib and cast Puppet design/fabrication: Julie Guilbeau* This play was a super low budget passion project for the director, so everything you see here was completely funded by herself and the cast and crew. We used a black box space on UL's campus and actor blocks to build the set, and the decorations were designed by myself and my assistant, fellow student Quan Mouton for under $40. I will break down the nature of this production more in image captions. The puppet I created for this play came to be as a result of losing our actor set to play Claudius. Dayane Mounsib was very familiar with my interest in puppets and my lack of opportunities to squeeze them into my curriculum, so she asked me to create a puppet to fill the role instead. The puppet ended up being the first of three puppets I created during an independent study supervised by Marty Aikens in my final undergrad semester. * denotes student artists
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The Set
For this particular production, the scenic crew (myself and my assistant designer, Quan Mouton) collaborated heavily with the lighting designer (Ava Marchand) to create a minimalistic set with lighting as the focal point. I had worked with the director of this show before, and I knew she preferred to use actor blocks as her primary set with designed scenery serving as a backdrop. We were not allowed to paint these blocks for "Rosencrantz and Guildensten," so we decided to leave them alone and focus our efforts on the walls of the black box. Since this production was originally going to be in the round, it was important to Quan and I that the design fully circled the room. We toyed with designs involving posters, empty beer cans, and giant cardboard televisions, but we ultimately decided to create scenery that would complement the lighting for the show, which (along with moving actor cubes) helped show scene transitions. Since the design was student funded and both myself and Quan were leading other design teams for the show, we decided to go for a very simple and cost effective design, which involved CDs pinned to the sound dampeners all around the room.
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The Puppet
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Puppet Process
Sketches and Thumbnails
When Claudius was recasted as a puppet, I was in the process of creating my own puppet design and fabrication independent study curriculum. I decided to use Claudius as my hand and rod unit project. (See Ratrick and Timon for the other two puppets I made in this independent study.) Since "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is a comedy, I wanted Claudius to read as cartoonishly "puppety" as possible. I took heavy inspiration from classic hand and rod puppet media like Henson's Muppets and "Fraggle Rock," as well as the puppets from "Avenue Q." The director and I decided it would be fun to design the puppet to look like the original actor it was replacing, UL associate professor of theatre, Carl Ganieri. This led to the puppet receiving multiple nicknames, such as "Carldius" and "Puppet Carl."
Build
