Selling a Stage Brand

By the end of September, people driving through Westwood will be greeted by banners bearing the image of a mysterious gentleman peering from behind a curtain, beckoning passersby to the Geffen Playhouse. The man is Joseph Cotten, and no, he’s not being brought back from the dead for a stage adaptation of “The Third Man.”

A photo of Cotten, gleaned from a 1940s movie magazine, offered Manhattan illustrator Paul Davis the perfect pose to inhabit the frame of his sophisticated teaser promoting the Geffen’s new season. And there’s more to come.

Davis, known for his New York Shakespeare Festival posters, has crafted an acrylic portrait for each play at the Geffen next season. His graphic interpretations of David Eldridge’s “Under the Blue Sky,” Debbie Allen’s “Pearl,” Rebecca Gilman’s “Boy Gets Girl,” Richard Nelson’s “Franny’s Way” and Neil Simon’s “Rose & Walsh” have found their way into brochures, posters and newspaper ads.

Ads for the Pasadena Playhouse’s current season also benefit from a unified “look,” courtesy of Iconisus designers Stephan Lapp and Erma Yucel. They were hired last summer to devise the promotional campaign for “Biloxi Blues,” “The Blue Room,” “A Class Act,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Blue,” “The Syringa Tree” and “Plaid Tidings.”

These designs are part of a new effort to create an overall identity for the theaters and to capture the attention of potential theatergoers.

Yucel, a Turkish emigre who moved to Los Angeles four years ago, and Lapp, who studied at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and spent five years in Disney’s movie marketing division, had previously specialized in ad campaigns for TV specials and films including “Spy Kids” and “Time Machine.”

Their work on behalf of HBO’s “Robin Williams: Live on Broadway” special was recently splashed across the side of a nine-story building at Sunset Boulevard and Doheny Drive in West Hollywood.

Shifting from a movie marketing mind-set to a theater campaign meant taking a more subtle approach--and not simply because the budget was smaller.

“With the Pasadena Playhouse, it was interesting,” Lapp says, “because they aren’t usually dealing in stars.” Except for Phylicia Rashad in “Blue,” the plays had yet to be cast when Iconisus began its work. “So part of our challenge was to put a human element into something without actually showing anyone’s face,” Lapp says. For example, “The Waverly Gallery’s” art, assembled from stock photography sources on a computer, reveals only fragments of a woman’s face broken into rough shards arrayed within a picture frame.

“We couldn’t show an actual person because it may be someone who doesn’t appear in the play,” Lapp says. “But we wanted to have the eyes, because that’s something that draws in the viewer.”

By contrast, Lapp says, creating movie posters is frequently a matter of making the stars’ faces as big as possible. Lapp remembers generating more than 400 “comps” for the film “What Women Want” at Seininger Advertising, where Lapp and Yucel both worked before starting Iconisus two years ago in Beverly Hills. The studio went with a poster emblazoned with the faces of Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt.

In a star-driven marketplace, every last blemish commands attention. “You’ll get handwritten notes from actors saying, ‘Take this wrinkle out, it makes me look older, but leave that one in, because it makes me look cute,’ ” Yucel says.

Last spring, Iconisus started looking for clients who would allow the designers to stretch their creative muscles. At the same time, Pasadena Playhouse was contemplating an image make-over.

“It was my desire to get a consistency of design from show to show, so even before you took a careful look at the information on the poster or postcard or whatever, you would know, ‘Oh, that must be a Pasadena Playhouse production,’ ” says Sheldon Epps, the theater’s artistic director.

Epps and his colleagues also aimed to communicate the range of work at the theater. “I really wanted to convey the idea that we have tremendous theatrical diversity,” he says. “We’re sort of saying, ‘The building you come into is always going to be the same. But when the curtain goes up and the light goes down, everything that you see on the stage is going to be quite different from one show to the next.’ I hope the design becomes like opening the back door of the theater and peeking in.” Beyond the specific productions, Epps and company wanted to knit together a unified design for the season. “The work that Iconisus has done has an elegance about it that I certainly hope people would associate with the theater,” Epps says.

“A word that we were using a lot when Iconisus came along and started talking about working with us was branding--branding the Pasadena Playhouse. We were definitely conscious of creating a visual brand that you would recognize immediately and hopefully identify as connected to the theater.”

“Branding” had yet to become a buzzword in 1975 when Davis created his first poster for the New York Shakespeare Festival. The play was “Hamlet,” the star was Sam Waterston and the producer was Joseph Papp. During the next 16 years, Davis produced 51 posters for the prestigious New York nonprofit theater, some of which were reprinted in “Paul Davis Posters and Paintings” (E.P. Dutton, 1977).

Drawing on his background as an illustrator of book jackets and magazine articles, Davis introduced a soft-sell alternative to a field previously dominated by a literal-minded style that spelled out the credits but left little to the imagination. In Davis’ hands, “ego copy” listing directors, actors--even the name of the theater--was banished, the better to focus the viewer’s attention on a single compelling image.

Designer Paula Scher followed Davis at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival after Papp died in 1991. Her typographically driven posters for contemporary plays such as “The Diva Is Dismissed,” now in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, featured aggressive fonts within surrealistic photographs. Scher’s hard-edged designs served as an announcement that a new artistic regime under George C. Wolfe had begun.

In 1986, illustrator James McMullan began an equally fruitful association--41 productions and counting--with the Lincoln Center Theater. The contemplative characters populating his gouache paintings for “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Arcadia” and “The House of Blue Leaves” are emblematic of the dark, dramatic tone associated with much of the work produced at the Manhattan nonprofit theater.

About the time Scher and McMullan were developing a visual identity for New York clients, David Silverman was doing much the same in L.A. for the Actors’ Gang, albeit on a scruffier scale.

Silverman had met Tim Robbins when they were classmates at UCLA. In 1982, when Robbins and his Actors’ Gang theater company needed to promote their inaugural production, “Ubu the King,” they turned to Silverman, who used pen and ink for a stark black-and-white poster. For 13 years, even while producing “The Simpsons,” Silverman turned out dozens of rough-edged street posters that translated the company’s anarchic spirit into punk-inspired imagery.

“I was sort of getting in touch with my inner Ralph Steadman,” says Silverman, referring to the illustrator famous for the lacerating drawings that accompanied Hunter S. Thompson’s Rolling Stone articles in the ‘70s. “There was an aggressive nature to the play, an aggressive nature to performances, therefore I guess there was an aggressive nature to the way I did the drawings.”

Two years ago, Lisa Wagner, a New York freelance art director for Entertainment Weekly, GQ and other magazines, moved west to join her fiance in L.A. Hired by the Geffen in 2001, she urged the playhouse to borrow a page from Manhattan’s artist-theater tradition. “If you look at New York, there were some historical moves artistically with the theater community out there, which I thought would be interesting to kind of bring out here.

“Instead of using photography, which for me has been pretty much the dregs because you’re dealing with poorly lit images from theaters or 8-by-10 promo shots of actors, we started thinking about another kind of visual language. ‘Give [the project] to somebody who can turn it into a piece of art’--that’s where we were all trying to go with it. We started thinking in that direction at the Geffen last year, for continuity, for vision, for a narrative structure.”

For the Geffen season winding down, Wagner worked with local artist Justin Wood. For the new slate, Wagner says, “we decided to get a little more traditional in the image-making, based on comments we’d gotten, and I immediately thought of Paul Davis. We wanted to create something quieter, something that would actually add a new layer of story.

“It was all kind of based in the tradition of Paul Davis and the Shakespeare Festival.”

But there was a difference. When creating posters for Papp and company, Davis would often attend rehearsals to get a first-hand sense of the play’s creative direction. That couldn’t happen in his long-distance collaboration with the Geffen, conducted entirely via e-mail and phone.

“It helps of course to talk to the director and the costume designer and the actors so you can find out what they’re going to do with the piece,” Davis says, “but that just wasn’t possible in this case.”

Instead, he had to find his muse with the pages of each play. “The answer is almost always in the script”--he pauses--”or the questions. Questions are better, of course. You don’t want to tell the whole story in the poster, although that’s one of the tendencies--people want more of what the play’s about. But I think it’s much better to give them a desire for more.

“Essentially it’s the same problem whether it’s going to be a poster or a small ad: You want to get people’s attention and intrigue them.”

Wagner served as liaison between Davis and Geffen producing director Gilbert Cates, managing director Stephen Eich and artistic director Randall Arney.

She says the creative process was seamless--until they got to the fifth play of the season. Traditionally a “to be announced” selection, the slot was filled with a world premiere of Neil Simon’s “Rose & Walsh” just days before Wagner’s production deadline.

“There had been this talk of this new play that they were going to get in at the last minute,” Wagner says, “and sure enough, it was this Neil Simon play they decided to put in that space. It got tricky because but they didn’t want to reveal anything about the play through image or what was written about it. So it was a delicate issue of not revealing too much.”

Davis’ solution was simplicity itself: no faces, two hands. There was one more hurdle. “All of a sudden there was this [situation] that Neil had to approve the image, which we hadn’t had to go through in the other plays,” Wagner says.

“Paul had a week to pull it off and didn’t have that much time to renovate it either. When Neil saw the sketch, I think he was uncertain, and then he saw the finish and he warmed up to it the night before I had to get the materials to the printer. So it worked out. I think that image is gorgeous.”

But does it glow?

That’s the criterion that resonated for Wagner when the season brochure was discussed at a Geffen staff meeting. “Steve Eich said something that stuck in my head. He said, ‘I want the brochure to be something where if somebody places it on a coffee table, it just starts glowing,’ ” Wagner says.

“So I just got back from the printer a couple of hours ago and I’ve put the brochure on my coffee table to see if it was glowing.” She laughs appreciatively. “It’s pretty lovely.”

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Hugh Hart is a regular contributor to Calendar.