DGA Press and Awards - Newsday, 2001 Sept. 1999

Star Pupil's Homecoming Sets the Stage for Mystery
By Steve Parks

Originally printed in Newsday, April 20, 2001

Len Borovay didn't hesitate when asked if David Gallo, award-winning set designer, was one of his best students ever. "He was the best," said Borovay, drama and set design teacher at Sachem South High School and director of Theatre Three's current production of Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap."

On opening night at the Port Jefferson theater, Gallo, who had also just completed the set for the new August Wilson play, "King Hedley II," at the Virginia Theatre on Broadway, took a seat one row in front of his former teacher. "It was extraordinary coming back here to work," said Gallo, who got his professional start at Theatre Three, designing sets for "Barnum," "Gypsy" and "Orphans," among other shows. "It's been a long time since I was allowed to paint and staple and do all that hands-on stuff." (Union rules forbid Broadway set designers from any work beyond designing.)

Though "The Mousetrap" has been running continuously for 49 years on London's West End, where Gallo has also worked, this Long Island opening night would mark a first for him. "I almost saw 'Mousetrap' in London," he recalled. "I stood in the theater lobby, debating with myself. It wasn't a cheap ticket."

He read the script last year, after his former teacher asked Gallo if he'd like to do a homecoming design at Theatre Three. (Gallo started his career there 14 years ago, when he was a 22-year-old just out of college.) Artistic director Jeffrey Sanzel had just announced a new season and hired Borovay, resident designer for Theatre Three's downstairs Second Stage, to direct the Agatha Christie whodunit.

"The set is like a character in the play," Gallo said, gesturing toward the stage. (A recent and sterile black-box production on the Island proves his point.) "The manor calls for architectural overscale, giving a sense of a greater amount of space. You've got all those entrances and exits. But I didn't resort to the cliche of tapestries to hide behind."

That's why he made the doors flanking each side of the stage so large, suggesting the grandness of Monkswell Manor, a suburban London bed-and- breakfast mansion where a murder closes Act I in "The Mousetrap."

Russ Behrens, who designed the lighting for the show, built the set to Gallo's specifications so the designer could complete the painting that creates the impression of intricate molding and masonry in 2 1/2 days.

Other grand-scale accents include a tied-back curtain interrupting the slope of an arch in front of a stage-left staircase and floor-to-ceiling latticed glass door and window.

Gallo called friends at the Manhattan Theatre Club for many of the props that accessorize Monkswell Manor. "I collected a few chits," he said. You need proper furniture, for instance, to support lines like: "She pinched the best chair."

Gallo credits his onetime teacher and mentor for pointing the way to his career in theater, which has earned him three Drama Desk awards, two Lucille Lortel awards and one Obie award for such productions as "Epic Proportions," "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," "The Lion in Winter," "A View From the Bridge," "Little Me" and "Hughie," directed by Al Pacino.

"In high school, I thought I wanted to be a film director," Gallo said, "but I learned that what really fascinated me about film was how it looked. And onstage, you pretty much control how it looks."