Behind the Scenes: Scenic and Costume Design of East Texas Hot Links
In East Texas Hot Links, place is just as important as people. Set in the Top o’ the Hill Café in (you guessed it!) East Texas, Scenic Designer Jack Magaw had abundant source materials to pull from, as did Co-Costume Designers Christine Pascual and Janice Pytel, thanks to the play’s rich and nuanced characters.
Here, Magaw and Pytel give you an inside look into their designs and their inspirations. Read on to learn more and dive into the world of East Texas.
Scenic Design
Jack: I grew up in Tennessee – just outside of Nashville – and my family’s from southern Ohio, so my background is torn between the Midwest and the South. When I finished college, I just wanted to get out of the South, but as I got older, I found there’s something about the South that just gets in you if you’re raised down there. I spent some time in the Mississippi Delta last year, just trying to understand the place. As a set designer, the physical space that these characters inhabit is what I’m most concerned with, so it’s important to me to actually be in the place and experience it.
We have the red dirt – it’s all over the place down there, I’ll tell you. We have the roadside cafés, which are well-loved places where people have gathered for years and years and years, where the regulars are almost like family to each other. And we have the woods, right?
One of the things I’m trying to accomplish with this design is to put the characters in the lap of the audience, put them in the room, but also make them feel isolated in these woods. The café building is quite a long way from a main road – you’d have to take a dirt road off the pavement, into the woods, to find the Top o’ the Hill Café. The woods themselves are longleaf pines in East Texas, many of which don’t exist much anymore due to logging. In the set, those will be three-dimensional, some will be about 20 feet tall, and then beyond them will be a cut-out that restricts our view of the sky. I wanted it to feel closed-in and somewhat threatening in this forest.
Costume Design
Janice: I want to begin by saying that I’m really humbled, I’m really grateful to work on this production; Ron, Christine, and I go way back.
This is a realistic play about realistic people, so it’s important that we give a sense of place and time. That will tell the audience a lot about different characters and how they choose to interpret style. There’s definitely a difference between older characters and younger characters; in that time period, how you presented yourself was important. It’s a different message if someone’s wearing a suit versus wearing overalls, there’s a differentiation of class, so I’m excited to get into the nuance of each character. We’re going to create this world and tell the story of characters through what they’re wearing.
East Texas Hot Links is onstage from September 6 – 29 and tickets are available online or by calling the Box Office at (773) 753-4472. Step inside Top o’ the Hill Café and meet the regulars!