Images of the set design for the original 1922 Prague production are included here, designed by Josef Capek. The Broadway production of the same year, though the nominal designer is Lee Simonson, appears to have followed Capek closely. These documents were consulted in the design of the Handmade Performance productions. Note the hand-decorated props, use of traps for ‘fly and larva’ entrances, and the presence of a prompt box downstage.
Both 1992 and 1998 adaptations were designed by Lauren McKinley Renzetti, in radically different styles. The first was more directly inspired by the original, a unit set with a sloping ramp that shifted from the world of the butterflies to the beetles to the ants with scrim, furniture, props and lighting. The 1992 set had ramps that, when rotated, radically changed colour schemes.
The 1998 adaptation left the original far behind, and created an oversized motherboard, and otherwise abandoned and broken electronic components. The tramp, in this production, has his ‘dream’ of insects not in a seemingly quiet meadow on the outskirts of the city, as in the original, but surrounded by the detritus of the society that has caused his moral and psychological collapse. The ‘insects’ are flying and crawling around in abandoned computer equipment (made, itself, out of cast-off plastic bottles and paint cans), and old television sets. We hoped the audience would make their own connections, both between 1922 and 1998, but also between the structures of the equipment and the structures of society. So, for instance, the ants follow the lines of the motherboard in their drudgery, the chrysalis is ‘hanging’ from a halo of jagged metal, and–most obviously–a wall of precariously piled television sets create a compound eye. This eye watched everything that was performed in front of it, filmed live each night by videographer Tim Lewis, and became another character in the production, a hated surveillance to the Tramp, a voyeur to the more amorous butterflies, and so on. For this production, the audience sat on either side, arena style.