The set of Militant Language: A Play with Sand used granulated cork to simulate sand.

Know Theatre uses humble cork for a magical realism effect.

When Know Theatre chose to produce Militant Language: A Play with Sand by Sean Christopher Lewis, they knew that some inventive thinking was called for. The play is set in an unnamed village in Iraq, where servicemen are guarding a construction site in an unnamed village. Just before the play’s action starts a murder takes place, and in response, sand starts falling from the sky, following the characters PFC Goop and PFC Beed. It’s a literal event in the action of the play—characters refer to the oddness of the sand, at one point one even sticks their hand in the stream—but it’s also a metaphorical touch, as the purpose of the sand is never explained, only hinted at, perhaps as trying to “cover something up.” It was up to Know Theatre’s Set and Lighting Designer Andrew Hungerford to physicalize the magical.


 

 The set consisted of a landscape built out of plywood, covered with industrial carpet and then a thin layer of concrete. This would get covered with sand, which would also fill a central channel, “the river.” But in researching sand, Hungerford realized that it was unworkable due to its weight, the dust it would cause and its price. After talking with colleagues in the industry, Hungerford decided his smaller theatre would borrow a trick from one of the largest shows around, Cirque du Soleil’s Ka.

“What we ended up using was granulated cork,” says Hungerford. As opposed to the Cirque production though, Hungerford needed a different style for his smaller, more intimate theatre. “[It was] in two different grains: a very fine grain and then a slightly coarser one so that we could both have it on the landscape of the set itself and also drop it from the sky. It caught the air in a really interesting way. It had enough weight to fall that it would still pick up some of the air currents in the space and have a really interesting and sort of ethereal look to it.”

The cork was spread over the set for the normal sand, but a little more work was necessary for the falling sand. Because of the intimate set, Hungerford could make two different locations to drop sand from, and still make it look as if the sand was following the soldiers—an upstage and downstage location. In the gridwork above these locations, he placed spiral-drilled cylindrical electrical ductwork on casters. The cylinders were connected with pulleys and rope to a backstage position where stagehands could rock the ductwork on cue, much like a snow bag. Hungerford originally experimented with connecting the ductwork to a variable speed drill motor. The motor was dimmable, and could be controlled from the booth, but was too loud in the intimate space, even with sound baffling.

In the end, low-tech worked best, creating an appropriately magical, menacing effect, but there was still one final issue with all the sand. “After the show we had to blow out all of our light fixtures and our color faders,” laughs Hungerford. “The fans in our color faders started sounding really unhappy about a week into the run.”

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