This season, acclaimed set designer David Korins designed Adam Bock ’s The Receptionist, directed by Joe Mantello and Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl, directed by Carolyn Cantor. In New York, Korins has designed for the Roundabout Theatre Company, the Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop and Second Stage Theatre. He has worked extensively in the regions and has also designed several productions abroad. In addition to his theatrical work, David works in several different mediums, including film, television, furniture, architectural design and corporate advertising. His upcoming projects include a Broadway revival of Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell and the Broadway transfer of Stew’s Passing Strange. Play Development Associate Annie MacRae sat down with David to discuss his MTC experience.

AM: You frequently work with your wife Carolyn Cantor, with whom you founded the Edge Theater Company, while this was your first collaboration with Joe Mantello. How did the two processes differ, and how did you generate each design?

DK: Carolyn is one of my primary collaborators; we’ve worked on about 15 shows, and seen many productions together. We have a short hand, a whole visual history, a mental rolodex of images that we can pull from.

I feel a huge responsibility to the playwright when working on a world premiere, but in general, to any living playwright. If you’re doing the twenty-fifth anniversary production, you have some artistic license to just create. In the first production, the job of the director and designer is less to impose your style and more to illuminate the text and the story.

Pumpgirl is deceivingly simple looking, but very difficult to design. It goes all over—interior, exterior, forward and backwards in time. It’s one of the densest plays I’ve ever read; and the scenery needs to just get out of the way. Carolyn and I built 7 models and went through many ideas. The county where the play is set is so varied; you can find everything from modern malls to wild fields. Finally when we called Abbie, she mentioned the shrub gorse. I wanted the set to feel curated in the space. Something felt right about juxtaposing the natural with the industrial.

AM: How did your experience differ working in Stage I’s proscenium and the three quarter thrust of Stage II?

DK: The actor-audience relationship is wildly different in the two spaces. In Stage I, you feel that proscenium even if you are five feet from the stage. In Stage II, every audience member has a totally different view, and there’s not one performer that’s more than twenty feet away. The Stage II audience is much more complicit in the action, and there’s a different kind of respect paid to the performance.

AM: How does your research and process differ when working on a new play, a revival, a musical, or a one-person show?

DK: Every single process is different, and the needs surface as you go. Sometimes inspiration will strike in a conversation with the writer or director, and sometimes you find yourself continually redrawing, re-researching. I always start with research and a lot of conversations with the writer if they’re alive. I ask them several questions. At first, they may have no idea what the space is, and then they realize they’re writing about their mother’s living room.

AM: Have you ever had a totally new idea far along in the process? How do you resolve that?

DK: Just because there is a finished model that doesn’t mean the design process is complete. I’ve had shows where in rehearsal the director has said, “let’s re-think the ground plan.” It’s pretty rare, but it’s a work in process until the set is built, until the show opens. Every step of the way, there are fewer things you can change. In previews of The Receptionist, we were changing the eyelashes of the set. We were taking the metal out of those sliding panels and putting plastic in. You continue to digest what it is visually and how it responds to the text and the actors. With Pumpgirl, we did it and it was done. Theater is a collaborative art form, part of that collaboration is the audience. One of the great things about working at Manhattan Theatre Club is that you get to preview for a long period and hear the audience’s response, what it is that they’re getting, which is helpful.

AM: You’ve designed several co-productions, including Yellow Face by David Henry-Hwang which is now running at the Public. How do you plan for this?

DK: Most often co-productions are a financial decision so the producers want to reuse the set. Once we have the jawbones, I think about how it fits into each space. Yellow Face changed after the Taper production. We used the premiere to look and learn about the show, and then we redesigned the set for the production at the Public.

AM: How do you maintain the intimacy of the original design when a show transfers from an Off-Broadway space to a large Broadway house?

DK: You have to maintain whatever originally made the show successful. With Stew’s Passing Strange, the question is how do you allow it to be intimate when you move to a proscenium house. With Bridge & Tunnel, we had to get Sarah Jones—an amazing, dynamic performer— out past the proscenium arch. We solved that by stringing out Christmas lights across the whole house, creating as much of an environmental design as we could in that Broadway theater.

AM: You design for film and television, as well as furniture and corporate advertising. Does that work inform your theatrical designs?

DK: Absolutely. You’re flexing different design muscles. A piece of furniture is made with the hope that it could last for a long time as opposed to the ephemeral theatrical life of scenery. Sets for theater are made to stand up for ten weeks and then get thrown in a dumpster. Designing a film makes you feel like a decathlete. Every day is a different event, designing and dressing new locations. Also, the scale of what you create changes depending on the medium. In Film, the director and cinematographer control everything that you see on screen through editing. In the theater, you’re creating a total environment; the audience member has to choose to engage with the set. You learn what is effective and what is not through creating scenery in all of these different mediums.

AM: This season you’re designing your fourth Adam Bock play, Drunken City at Playwrights Horizons. When I asked Adam about your collaboration, he spoke of the way you’ve endowed each set with a life and a personality.

DK: I feel so lucky to have Adam as a collaborator. I don’t try to design sets any differently for his plays than any other play. He is a writer who creates very specific physical worlds, and a lot of what he’s writing about is how the characters relate or react to their environments.

AM: Is there an instance where you generated an idea from a particularly bizarre place?

DK: All the time. When I was an intern at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Hugh Landwehr told me a designer’s job is to read newspapers, watch T.V. and film, and stare at things. This city is great for that. You’re constantly seeing scenes and sets. Inspiration comes to me from all different places. And the great designer’s one who can pull those details out of their memory bank at the right time and piece them together.