Paul Owen didn't design his theatre career; it evolved organically. The widely respected scenic designer, who has been working at Actors Theatre of Louisville for 35 years, is best known for his strikingly apt designs for the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, which ran March 7-April 8 this year.
Owen has never worked on Broadway, yet he has helped define the eclectic range of design styles found in the modern American theatre, including all three Humana Festival plays that have won the Pulitzer Prize in drama: The Gin Game, Crimes of the Heart, and Dinner With Friends. To honor his long tenure at the theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville has created an exhibit, on display through May 14, featuring photographs, drawings, and models of Owen's set and costume designs.
Owen, shockingly, has no formal design education. He started out in the 1950s as an actor hoping to land a resident job at one of America's emerging regional theatres. After college he was drafted and went through boot camp with Elvis Presley. "He was a shy guy and I was a shy guy," Owen recalls with a chuckle. Together they wound up in Europe — Presley as a driver and Owen filling a variety of Army jobs. It was there, he says, that he found himself undergoing the transformation he would need to have a lasting theatre career: "I matured...from the self-concerned point of view of an actor to a broader point of view. I became a man of the theatre. The world was ready and I was ready to see what I could contribute."
In the early 1960s, Owen went to work for regional theatre pioneer Nina Vance at Houston's Alley Theatre, shifting into design after several years of acting plus directing many children's shows. Soon he was designing scenery, lighting, and costumes. Often at the Alley, he also served as an intermediary between guest designers and Vance, who preferred to deal with actors. When he expressed his discomfort with this arrangement, Vance asked him to design the mainstage shows at the Alley.
"I found acting too constraining, and too much hands-on," Owen explains. "When I started designing, it allowed me to touch all the aspects of a project.... I must confess I still approach the text as an actor or director. That's how I analyze and live with the material." Even today, he says, he reads scripts several times to imagine them from the inside. The challenge of scenic design isn't just solving the technical problems of space, style, budget, and logistics, he explains. The best designs emerge from an intuitive process, a way for the designer "to find out the intangible and the unspoken and introduce that into the physicality" of the play. What's crucial is "having some real sense of how an actor will interpret and how the director will use opportunities to allow those characters to evolve."
A Great Adventure
Jon Jory, former producing director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, says of Owen, "He will never happen again.... Nobody dedicates their life to a regional theatre anymore.... Paul has transcended design. He had such a major role with every major decision at two regional theatres. At the Alley and at Actors, he really served as an associate artistic director."
But when asked what in his career he's proudest of, the soft-spoken Owen, who is 70, doesn't focus on design. Instead he prefers to talk about the importance of regional theatre. "I'm a theatre person, so I'm interested in the organization as much as the work," he says. "Standing on the shoulders of Nina Vance and [other regional theatre pioneers], we were beginning the movement of an idea of a not-for-profit theatre."
Such idealism helps explain Owen's departure from the Alley, accepting Jory's invitation to join a little-known theatre in Louisville, Ky. "It was a great adventure: Regional theatres were still greatly experimental," Owen recalls, noting that when he first arrived at Actors Theatre, during the 1971-72 season, the company was facing an uncertain future following its final season in a former train station scheduled for demolition. "I'm proudest that we came from a threatened, weak little entity that was not making it to the Actors Theatre of today. Jon was brought in as the doctor to see if it could be fixed, and in an 18-month period he made it look possible. [It] became a churning cauldron doing an enormous amount of work and doing it well and sending it on state and international tours."
History tells us, too, that when Jory launched the Humana Festival in 1976, Owen's workload mushroomed. "From the beginning, it was a learning curve," Owen says. "We hadn't done a full-length-play repertory festival before, and the Humana demands such rapidity and variety. Our task is to create the environments that will allow the words to be performed to their maximum." He estimates he has designed 1,100 sets in all, including 800 at Actors Theatre. Because he doesn't draw, Owen must describe his design concepts to others (most recently, Brenda Ellis) for them to sketch.
Owen in Action
As he did at the Alley, Owen also designed lighting and costumes in his early Louisville years. He continued to light the Humana Festival until its sixth season, giving it up to concentrate on the logistics of scheduling, budgeting, and designing the monthlong maelstrom of multiple plays produced on multiple stages.
"Because it's a repertory festival, you have to anticipate and guess at the [design budget] and how we split it," he explains. "We keep pushing to get the scripts agreed upon and the directors by October, but often we don't have all of that put together until December. Once we know the shows, we have to break out and schedule design and construction time, coordinate the prop and scenic shops, project dates for construction drawings, and when to begin each. It's never sealed in stone. The trick is to keep the communication channels open."
Of the 348 premieres in the festival's history, Owen says he has designed the sets for all but seven. "People wonder that I'm willing to risk my career on the festival," he says. "What the hell — this is not a risk to my career. We're creating a vortex of energy. It's high-risk, of course, but you can't walk that high wire with fear."
In a notable shift, however, Owen designed only five of the eight productions in this year's festival, including the play that is most likely to reach New York City first, Theresa Rebeck's The Scene. "His design was flashy and efficient in its ability to move quickly from scene to scene while still giving a strong sense of place to each of the different locations," says Marc Masterson, who succeeded Jory at Actors Theatre and who asked Owen to cut back this season to give other designers a chance to gain the expertise needed to handle the festival's tricky demands.
For many years, Masterson explains, there was no other choice but for one person to design the whole festival: "Someone had to design the plays as if they were all one big set with multiple parts and figure out how all of the pieces fit together. Paul managed to do that and then some. It's important that the premieres are fully realized, so it's a very complicated puzzle that Paul works through to see that each play receives special and full attention."
Even without designing every production at this year's 30th annual festival, Owen still created remarkable sets for Six Years, Sharr White's decades-jumping drama; Neon Mirage, a phantasmagoric anthology; Low, a monologue by Rha Goddess; and the annual — and mercurial — bill of 10-minute plays.
With his 71st birthday approaching in August, Owen wonders whether 2010 — his 50th anniversary in professional theatre — might signal a time to retire. Still, he says, he learned decades ago the folly of trying to design his life. "Paul simply needs to slow down a bit," Masterson says. "But he remains a razor-sharp designer and will have a place in this festival as long as he is interested and able." With Owen, that might well be forever.