Creating the world of Choir Boy | Designer Max Johns

Nancy Medina and I started our design journey for Choir Boy the same way we do for all our projects... 

We sat down and read the play together. Tarell’s writing is so rich and teeming with ideas that it took us several weeks to get through the whole play because there was so much to discuss after each scene. 

Alongside detailed research into the American prep school system we asked what it means for young Black men to be educated in spaces that adhere to a white European design legacy. What does it mean to experience adolescence in an environment with little to no privacy, and where being your true self is stifled by the pressures of prestige and conformity?

We discussed how the school environment, in which the entire play is set, both nurtures and restricts the young men, the institutional architecture serving to enforce that restriction of freedom and individuality. But at the same time the school hall is a place of potential, of community and coming together. We start the play at the 50th commencement ceremony of the Charles R Drew Prep School so there is a palpable sense of history and legacy that haunts the space and looms over the characters that inhabit it. 

The hall space that we arrived at for this design serves as classroom, graduation venue, dorm, and shower block; environments in which the characters experience the pains and joys of growing from boys to men, in which they push against the limits of how they are perceived in the world. There is a deliberate ordinariness to the space that underscores the poetry of the singing that reverberates through its walls, the shafts of light that pour through the windows, and the movement of people across the floor. In the opening moments of the play we disrupt the naturalism of the hall by breaking through the back wall to briefly reveal the full depth of the Bristol Old Vic stage, a glimpse into the possibilities that lie beyond the school walls.

The American prep school setting might not be familiar to UK audiences but I hope that the space we’ve created will evoke the familiar spirit of the kind of hall in which they might have rehearsed with a school choir, sat exams, or had their first kiss at a school disco.

Max Johns, Set and Costume Designer on Choir Boy
maxjohns.com