In Th茅r猫se Raquin鈥攕poiler alert!鈥攖he title character, who is bound to a loveless marriage, engages in a dangerous affair with another man, and the two plot to kill her husband. Trouble is鈥� Th茅r猫se (played in the recent revival by Keira Knightley) and her lover Laurent (Matt Ryan) drown Camille Raquin (Gabriel Ebert) on a boat trip down the river, and all the action is played out onstage鈥攓uite the challenge for the show鈥檚 scenic designer.
Yet, Beowulf Boritt earned a 2016 Tony Awards nomination for his work, and the biggest question on audience鈥檚 minds was: How did he create an onstage river at Studio 54 deep enough for Ebert鈥檚 character to drown?
He鈥檚 had experience with water before. 鈥淚 had done a show for the Roundabout a couple years ago called If There Is I Haven鈥檛 Found It Yet with water in it, where we had a lot of problems, and it leaked forever,鈥� he admits. 鈥淪o when we realized we wanted to do real water and make it deep enough that you can row a boat in it and throw someone in it, I emailed [Roundabout Theatre Company general manager] Sydney Beers, and I said, 鈥楽ydney, we need to have a talk about the W word.鈥� I knew that they were going to resist it for a lot of good reasons, and we had a long careful talk.
鈥淏ut it was a challenge. We had to check and make sure that the theatre floor could actually hold the weight of the water because there was a lot of water. It was sort of raked [at the bottom], so it could get deep enough, and then [it was created with] a layer of rubber [followed by] a layer of steel so that we couldn鈥檛 puncture the rubber. Then another layer of rubber [was placed] on top of that because there鈥檚 going to be a lot of violence in it. Knock on wood, we never leaked. I think one day somebody did something wrong, and we got a lot of water spill over the edge into the trap room, but it wasn鈥檛 a leak. Other than that, it was really great.鈥�
Leakage wasn鈥檛 the only obstacle, though. Because water is clear, and Boritt was attempting to create a bottomless river, he had to ensure that audiences in the mezzanine and balcony could not see the rubber pool liner at the bottom. It would 鈥渓ose all the magic,鈥� Boritt says.
鈥淲hat I had them do at the Roundabout is: We bought a whole lot of really, really reflective, shiny rubber, so it would be like a black mirror,鈥� he explains. 鈥淭he shop kept saying, 鈥榃e鈥檙e not going to need to do this.鈥� And, I said, 鈥業鈥檝e done this before. We鈥檙e going to need to do it.鈥� We got in there, and, bizarrely, we just got lucky. It鈥檚 got to be physics and how the light refracts off of it鈥� You couldn鈥檛 see through the water. We checked from every seat in the balcony; we checked all over the orchestra, but we never needed to put the shiny rubber in because you actually couldn鈥檛 see through for some reason.
鈥淓ven from the balcony, when Gabe Ebert went into the water, he just disappeared. You couldn鈥檛 see that he was there. It was about three-feet deep in the middle, but not really deep enough for him to disappear, and yet the light refracting off the water somehow did it, and we got our magic trick.鈥�
When it was all said and done, and the production played its final performance January 3, 2016, Boritt and his team celebrated with a pool party. 鈥淭here are a lot of pictures floating around on my Facebook page of me and my assistants floating around in the pool with swimmies on鈥nd rowing around in the boat,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e went swimming quite a few times, actually!鈥�
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