Tony nominee Edward Pierce chats 'miraculous' 'Angels in America' set

"Angels in America" scenic designer Edward Pierce calls the movement and workings of the epic play's set "miraculous."

He's not being boastful, really. It's just when you have a massive, nearly eight-hour-long production, set in two distinct parts, housed in one theater, there's a lot that goes into maneuvering its changing parts, both on-stage and off.

"It's like doing two musicals in rep, unheard of," said Pierce, who is nominated along with Ian MacNeil for a 2018 Tony Award for his work on the revival. The production stars Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane and is nominated for 11 Tony Awards, making it the most nominated play in Broadway history.

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"We literally use every square inch of the building. There's two intermissions in each of the plays, and the stage crew does not stop at all during those intermissions. They use every minute of it to literally reshuffle the entire stage space so that things that are not needed go down to the basement, things that are needed come up, up and down, left and right, in the wings. Literally everything is like a Jenga game in the wings. Everything is shoved into every nook and cranny so that we can do the next act. In between shows on a two-show day, they have about an hour and half to literally remove all the walls, lay down a new floor, reshuffle all the furniture and get ready for the next show."

Pierce and company worked to adapt the design of the 25th anniversary staging of Tony Kushner's play at the National Theatre in London.

They worked to "adapt the design that was conceived at the National in a much larger venue and take those concepts and more ideas from (director) Marianne Elliott and try to meld all of that together in a limiting and challenging space at the Neil Simon."

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In addition to shifts within the show, each part of "Angels in America" has a distinct feel and flavor that required separate approaches to make the set work.

"As the play and the characters start to dissolve a little bit over the course of the evening, and as the lives of these characters entwine in a web of betrayal and hallucination, all of these things lead to a bit of decay in their dreams and also in the design," Pierce said.

"'Millennium Approaches' has dozens of short scenes in many locations and the goal there was to find a mechanism, and in this instance, it was a series of turntables that had sparsely furnished rooms with walls and jagged edges, as if they were ripped out of a larger structure. That allows us to do simple crossfades in action from one scene to the other so that it's seamless and one scene can begin while the other scene is dissolving and you allow the energy to continue," he said.

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"Toward the end of 'Millennium Approaches,' the dynamic changes in the storytelling and the physical set and environment has to react to that. We have to remove the world we've just established. All of that partial realism of those walls and those spaces has to disappear. From a technical point of view, when we moved it to Broadway, that became the largest challenge of getting the show into the building.

"As we move into 'Perestroika,' that's where the play starts to break down, the characters lose themselves, and everything starts to become represented in smaller bits, a door here, a chair there, a desk there. Where we had started a sense of elements being lined in neon in the first play, more of the spaces are defined simply by neon, no walls, in the second play, so when we get to the very, very end ... we go back to the empty space, the theater space."

Remember the whole logistical shuffling thing, set pieces in hallways and in the basement and the crew constantly running?

"The ultimate challenge of the design is that all of these pieces and parts and doors and chairs and walls we saw all night long, for nearly eight hours, is that at that final moment, when everything goes away, the wall of the theater is revealed, the maskings are pulled away and we look into the wings and we see nothing."

Nothing.

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And leading up to that nothing, Pierce says, is a process on-stage, as well as its complex ballet backstage, that rivals a major musical.

"It follows the same DNA and how you break down and solve musicals. When you have 70 transitions and 70 scenes and high expectations of highly choreographic and incredibly minimalistic, razor-sharp staging and choreography, then you are essentially in the same boat as a musical. It's almost as difficult was when we did 'Wicked.'"

Pierce's decades-long career includes set and lighting design work and collaboration on Broadway's "Amazing Grace," "Holler If Ya Hear Me," The Other Place," "Bright Star," "A Streetcar Named Desire," television projects and more in addition to "Wicked."

He calls "Wicked" a "pivot point" in his career as well as an "honor," being involved from the very beginning and having the opportunity to help shape it "in all the ways you can as a designer," as well as re-creating and adapting it for productions all over the world in the last 15 years.

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"How to create a great musical, and adapt a great musical and how to share that musical with audiences the world over and to work with other theater artists in all different cultures, (it) has really been one of the largest blessings," he said.

To learn more about Pierce and his work, visit edwardpierce.com.

"Angels in America" plays a limited engagement through July 15 at the Neil Simon Theatre, 250 W. 52nd St. For tickets and more information, visit angelsbroadway.com.

Ilana Keller: @ilanakeller; 732-643-4260; ikeller@gannettnj.com