In Meredith, New Hampshire, a boardwalk of white and brown wooden-frame buildings recedes inland to a thick blanket of blue-green pines. Somewhere in the forest, theatre designer Dan Daly is overseeing construction of a set.
The venue in the woods is the Winnipesaukee Playhouse, a 200-seat theatre resembling a gigantic barn, its wooden exterior painted in vibrant red and white. Daly has designed a shadowy basement apartment for the 1960s American thriller Wait Until Dark. In September, however, he will be putting the finishing touches to a production nearly 4,800km away in St Stephen’s Green.
That play, part of the Dublin Fringe Festival, is Arborlogues: A Botanical Recital Performed for One Tree, which premiered in 2021 around the time Daly decided to leave New York City after living there for eight years. Since then, he seems to have been spending time in typically attractive east-coast towns. He currently lives in the Hudson Valley, a 90-minute train ride from the city. “Rent is cheaper, and I can go on a hike,” he says.
Daly went to high school in southern Massachusetts and was one of the few students interested in theatre. “We borrowed chairs from the cafeteria and a table from the classroom, and that was the set.” He went on to attend Fitchburgh State University. “It’s where I actually learned there was this thing you could do that connected a lot of my likes. I found this place that was theatre, architecture and making things, and where it can all be shoved together and be set design,” he says.
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He first got a job with the Winnipesaukee Playhouse as a carpenter, helping to build sets during a summer break from college. After graduation, he was taken on full-time as a technical director responsible for constructing sets for all the venue’s productions. The theatre had yet to move into the expanse of its current barnlike home, and was inhabiting the cramped spaces of three conjoined shopfronts in a strip mall. He sounds proud of what they achieved: “We were making theatre with chewing gum, some two-by-fours and a can of paint, and doing really incredible things with just some ropes.”
A knack for inventive, rough-and-ready design would be advantageous when, after designing large and well-financed productions in Pittsburgh, Daly started working in New York City designing for the small rooms of Off-off Broadway. “I became pretty good at filling spaces with materials because I was working at such a small scale. I understood what stuff cost, how big materials were, and how you get bang for your buck,” he says.
He eventually became known for his designs for immersive theatre – a distinct genre where plays typically roam multistorey venues such as bars, restaurants or shopping malls. He spent a chunk of early 2018 working as assistant designer on Behind the City: a sprawling, sentimental play about missed connections between New Yorkers over years, staged across several blocks in Manhattan. He took design ideas jotted down on napkins by the director, and transformed apartments, art studios and alleyways into otherworldly corridors, secret museums and private bedrooms.
Other notable transformations by Daly include a Queens bar converted into the Weimar of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, and an amphitheatre inside a Manhattan mall turned into the garden sanctuary of Oasis, a play about overworked dreamers seen on their daily lunch break.
A play that attracted much attention was Tammany Hall, directed by Alexander Wright (whose romantic, immersive theatre adaptation of The Great Gatsby was seen at the Gate Theatre). Set in the 1920s New York of Prohibition and the Ziegfeld Follies, the play revisited a mayoral election in the days of the influentially corrupt political organisation Tammany Hall. Daly had a lot to work with; the venue had once been the organisation’s clubhouse.
“When you’re doing site-specific [theatre], the space has a history already that you need to choose to either explicitly deny or wrap into the work that you’re doing with it. The space is another reason for being there, whether that’s a tree or an old building, or your own kitchen table,” he says.
It sounds like Daly did not cope well in New York during Covid-19. “The pandemic happened. I don’t know if you heard of it.” With the industry shutdown, he decided to leave the city, and began teaching set design in colleges upstate. There was also something that sat uncomfortably and unresolved about his design work. He wanted to make theatre better for the environment. The ambiences of green spaces were something he could depict onstage – the patio of Oasis, represented by plants and a carpet of artificial grass; the community garden in the comedy Totally Wholesome Foods, its bright shrubs made of cardboard cut-outs. At the end of the day, he was accumulating waste.
“There were a lot of times in New York City when I was renting a U-Haul (a truck rental), going and getting lumber from Home Depot, driving that lumber back to my apartment where I’ve to build a fake something out of it, then getting another U-Haul to drive it to a theatre. When the show ended, I’d rent another vehicle to take all of that to the dump to throw it away.
“I started thinking about, ‘If we’re going to cut down the trees to make the play, why don’t we do the play among the trees?’”
The starting point for making Arborlogues, he says, wasn’t to write a play about a tree. He secured a grant from The Peace Studio, a New York non-profit funding projects about building empathy, which allowed him to commission the playwright Lee LeBreton – a dynamic writer who each week rewrites an ever-changing bill of short plays performed in a New York comedy venue.
“The idea was to somehow build a mirror for the self, so you could do reflective practice against something, and see yourself in something else. We discovered the most interesting thing to do would be to find a tree that you could see yourself in somehow,” says Daly.
They conceived the idea of an audience member being handed a monologue (or “arborlogue”) on arrival to perform one-on-one for a tree, under the protective cover of a red theatre curtain that removes both of them from the rest of the world. The first performance, to a cedar tree in Brooklyn, led to a response that stands out for Daly, when a man re-emerged from under the red curtain visibly stirred. He had been grieving his recently dead father, whose house had cedar floors he just spent weeks refinishing and preserving. Our interconnectedness with trees might be more emotional than we realise.
For each location, LeBreton’s playscript changed, weaving in the tree’s species migration across countries, and the history the plant has observed. A monologue for a white pine in upstate New York drew on revolutionary history, and the seizing of that species by English colonisers for building ship masts. In Larchmont, New York, it was explained to a white heaven tree, an invasive species, why it was marked to be cut down. “You made our greyest, busiest neighbourhoods lush and peaceful!”
“That tree wants a very different story, wants a very different play,” says Daly. He’ll travel to Dublin a few days before Arborlogues opens and complete a site visit. He and LeBreton were looking at an oak tree.
Arborlogues seems to have invigorated Daly, and has launched his company Ofo Theatre (or “Other Forms of Theatre”). Its vision suggests a kind of downsizing of theatre and the creation of plays that, in their small scale, can be equitable and reduce theatre’s waste. Other offerings include: For the Birds, a play for a flock of chimney swifts as reciprocation for their mid-air spectacles; The Story of Lot’s Wife, a riff on Sodom and Gomorrah that forms an unlikely history of salt and homophobia; and Pocket Change, a cardboard tabletop theatre that arrives in the mail with an anthology of plays and a guide for how to stage them.
After designing for already modest-sized rooms in New Hampshire and New York, Daly suggests that downsizing even further may not be something to be afraid of. In fact, new revelations may lie waiting to be discovered. It’s better for the environment. It may not make for bad theatre, either. “Size of space doesn’t really matter,” says Daly, without a sweat.
Arborlogues: A Botanical Recital Performed for One Tree runs at St Stephen’s Green park, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, from September 6th-13th. fringefest.com
