ESDD Students Meet Tony Award-Winning Scenic Designer John Lee Beatty at Opening Night of Key Largo at Geffen Playhouse

Entertainment Set Design & Decoration (ESDD) students in Jeff Rack's Design Theatre class attended opening night of Andy Garcia’s world premiere adaptation of Key Largo at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, and participated in a meet-and-greet with the play’s two-time Tony award-winning scenic designer John Lee Beatty.

John Lee Beatty is one of the most renowned artists in the American theater. He has designed 115 Broadway shows and countless other productions. Beatty showed the students some of his renderings and discussed his design process in order to give them an inside look at the inner workings of set design.

In a Playbill interview with Geffen Playhouse Manager of New Play Development Rachel Wiegardt-Egel, Beatty was asked to describe the process of scenic design. “It’s an odd combination of literary appreciation and art,” he said. “As a set designer, you read a script and somehow you begin to inhabit it in a way that you don’t quite understand. A lot of it is intuitive. At some point, the script gives you a visual clue—I call it secondary thinking or associative thinking. You get a feeling for what kind of movement the actors are going to have or what kind of enclosure feels appropriate to this specific play.”

ESDD Director Cynthia Patino coordinated the John Lee Beatty meet-and-greet with the help of Karen Gutierrez, Geffen’s Director of Advertising and Audience Development. Key Largo plays at the Geffen until December 15th.