In 'Faculty,' Students' Absence Speaks Volumes

Ethan Bowen, left, Michael Russotto and Megan Anderson in "The Faculty Room." (By Stan Barouh)

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company goes back to school with Bridget Carpenter's "The Faculty Room," a look at the darker side of a suburban high school's dysfunctionalities revealed through a tight clique of teachers. The play takes place entirely in the teachers' lounge -- that cluttered, institutionally ugly retreat from the noisy halls and classrooms of the fictional Madison-Feurey High, somewhere in the middle of an American nowhere.

Carpenter's play draws on the relationships among three teachers who relish their faculty room time. And to give the unseen but oft-spoken-about students a presence, director Howard Shalwitz turned to sound designer Michael Kraskin and lighting designer Jay Herzog. Together this pair collaborated on ways to unobtrusively introduce student life into the scene transitions. This was a dream assignment for Kraskin, who grew up in Bethesda and attended Sidwell Friends School before building a career as a sound designer in Chicago and New York.

"My favorite thing to explore with sound is the subtleties of environments, the suggestion of offstage space and using that to comment on or score the scene," Kraskin says. To get authentic sounds, Kraskin went on recording expeditions to several Chicago area high schools, where he gathered ambient noise from football games, dances, hallways and cafeterias.

Kraskin explains that he worked with Herzog to paint an aural and visual picture of the typical high school experience in snippets played during the scenic transitions. "We discussed what the transitions were meant to do," says Herzog. "Did they need to take us to the energy of the students? Did they need to talk about the kind of year we were trying to portray?"

Lighting designer Herzog's experience with professional-level video production was limited, but he was willing to give it a shot. Joining the production team when the academic year was nearly over, he did not have the option of shooting locations in an authentic school setting. He instead scoured the Internet, searching public domain sites for video clips; he also used clips put on the Web by the general public.

"The idea was how do we move through the life of the students -- the slamming lockers and so forth?" says Herzog, who avoided using close-ups to protect his subjects' anonymity. "I heard Michael's sound design work and looked for video clips that showed kids walking through the halls, playing in marching bands and so forth.

"When Michael and I would look at the worlds mesh, the marching bands were there because I heard the sound with the marching band." And worlds meshing is exactly what playwright Carpenter eventually achieves with the characters in "The Faculty Room," as the unnamed students play an integral role in the stunning climactic moments of the play. As Kraskin puts it: "It's a large epic event, but we're isolated from it inside of this faculty room. We need to allow that suggestion, that largeness and that epic feel to occur and be a part of the play without ever having it appear on stage."

The Faculty Room Woolly Mammoth Theatre 202-393-3939 Through July 9