The joy of sets

PROVIDENCE -- The cannons are as small as pencils, the sails the size of cocktail napkins. A host of tiny pirates are attached to the ship by pins. Eugene Lee picks up one of them to demonstrate how, once the set for the new multimillion - dollar musical "The Pirate Queen" comes to life, actors will brandish their swords to fight on the deck of a galleon.

" [We ] build the models like little kids," he explains. "We use little furniture . Sometimes we need atmosphere, so we have a little smoke machine. We used a lot of smoke when we were working on this ."

The computer has become the standard tool for set designers to create sketches of the eye-popping worlds they will unfold on stage. But Eugene Lee isn't like most set designers. This three-time Tony Award winner is defiantly old-fashioned. While he's designed some of the most technologically sophisticated sets ever seen , he begins his process the same way: with a pencil and sketch pad, hunched over an antique oak drafting table in the overcrowded studio he shares with an assistant here.

This is where Lee threw a clock down the staircase, spilling out its metal guts to help him design the gears and pulleys that frame the stage in "Wicked," the smash hit for which he won his latest Tony . This is also where he has designed the sets for Trinity Repertory Company since 1967 -- and where he still creates small sets for student productions at Brown University.

Throughout his five-decade career, Lee has stubbornly hewn to his values. He uses real, rusty metal, not painted wood . He creates set doors and windows that actually open and close. He puts the audience close to the actors, and makes their seating uncomfortable if it's right for the production.

"Eugene is a set designer who's famously said that he hates scenery," says Oskar Eustis , artistic director of the Public Theater , and former artistic director of Trinity Rep, where Lee has been resident scenic designer for 40 years. "The reason it's such a joy to work with him is he's never designing the scenery, he's designing the room in which theater is going to take place. It makes for a much more vibrant conversation about what we're going to work on together."

Lee occupies a unique place in the stage world , equally comfortable at designing sets for Broadway, regional theater, and fringe theater. And for television: Since the first episode in 1975 he has been set designer for NBC's "Saturday Night Live." He will be inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame Jan. 29 . Lee has also just been nominated for Britain's Laurence Olivier Award for the London production of "Wicked."

The Gershwin Theatre , where the hall of fame ceremony will take place, is a familiar haunt -- in 1979, when it was the Uris Theatre , it housed Lee's mammoth sets for "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ." "Wicked," in which Lee translated novelist Gregory Maguire's fantastical Clock of Time Dragon into a giant moving puppet over the proscenium arch, plays there now.

Lee says he's just as happy designing an 1880 s insane asylum for "Mrs. Packard" at Princeton's McCarter Theatre as he is doing "The Fantasticks" at Trinity or the highly anticipated "Pirate Queen" headed to Broadway. "It's all the same thing," he shrugs.

Recently he created the grimly lived-in stamp dealer's office for Theresa Rebeck's "Mauritius " at Huntington Theatre Company, and made a sofa appear to float in mid air in Caryl Churchill's "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" in London. He's also squeezing in a personal project: rebuilding the theater at Hope High School, near his Providence home.

With tufts of white hair that stick straight up and sporting green wool pants and suspenders, Eugene Lee looks the part of the old New England salt. He wears bow ties so he will always be allowed in his many yacht clubs. He owns six boats.

When he opens his mouth, he sounds as hesitant and faltering as Woody Allen . Colleagues say he's shy. But, they add, he's famous for getting his way.

"I like strong-willed and complicated and talented people," says Edgar Dobie, former executive director of Trinity Rep and executive producer for "The Pirate Queen. " "Someone like Eugene is very demanding."

Lee lives with his second wife, Brooke , a painter who manages his affairs, in a 1911 brick house in a neighborhood of stately homes on Providence's East Side. He takes a reporter for a spin around the city in his 1965 olive-drab Range Rover, gears complaining as he climbs up and down the hills. He checks in on another studio he set up in order to teach classes in set design for Brown University students -- empty now, because Brown and he are still in negotiations to establish a set design program there.

He then drives over to Trinity Rep, to confer with carpenters over the set for the theater's "Dublin Carol" -- an undertaker's office -- which uses bricks he supplied from his own property.

Meanwhile, there's "The Pirate Queen," which has just closed in Chicago and will open in previews on Broadway in March.

For this musical, by the "Les Miserables" and "Miss Saigon" team, about an Irish heroine who took on Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, Lee has created a massive ship, filled with sails, rigging, and cannons, whose prow juts out into the orchestra pit. The prow moves up and down primarily the old-fashioned way, by block and tackle.

"He's the sort of designer if you could figure out how to rewrite the laws of physics to figure out what he wants to do, you'd do it," says Dobie . "But he's as comfortable coming up with a straightforward theatrical solution as the big ideas."

For his part, Lee mutters, "It's a little more complicated than other things I've done."

When Lee was growing up in Beloit, Wis ., the rule in his family was that if you wanted to learn something, you got a book. So he started young in figuring out how to make things work. Theater was also in his blood: His father was an actor and his mother worked backstage in community theater.

"Everything I'm doing now, I did in high school," he says. After a short stint at the University of Wisconsin, which didn't have a design department, he showed up, unannounced, at Carnegie Mellon University (then called Carnegie Tech) with just a sheaf of designs from high school productions. Carnegie accepted him, as did the Art Institute of Chicago (he got bachelor's degrees from both, despite not finishing). His MFA is from Yale University School of Drama .

He worked in Philadelphia with film and theater director Andre Gregory in the late '60s. Around that time, lighting designer Roger Morgan put him in touch with the artistic director of Trinity Rep, Adrian Hall , who was looking for a set designer. Lee and Hall hit it off; neither was interested in doing conventional theater. He arrived in 1967 and never left.

"People termed what we were doing 'environmental theater.' " says Hall, speaking by phone from his home in Van, Texas . "You got the audience around the event as close as you could."

"The Visit," which is set in a train station, was performed in a real Providence train station, with passengers embarking and disembarking around the audience, which was seated on benches.

Others took note of Lee's daring style. Famed avant garde director Peter Brook heard about a three-story set Lee built for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music . "They had just finished putting in seats," Lee says. "I ripped them up, made the audience sit on uncomfortable benches." So Brook asked Lee to come help with a theater project he was doing in Iran.

For much of the 1970s, Lee designed shows in conjunction with his first wife, Franne Lee , a costume and production designer.

When he finds professional collaborators he likes, he sticks with them. He and director/producer Harold Prince go way back; Lee designed Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" for Prince in 1974, winning Lee a Tony. In 1979, he got his second for the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler show "Sweeney Todd," which Prince also directed and which really broke Lee into the big time.

It was one of his more elaborate sets, with a peaked roof of dirty glass, steel trusses, and mechanical barber's chair that hurtled its victims down chutes to the basement. Lee filled up the Uris Theatre, the biggest house on Broadway, with a re assembled old Rhode Island foundry. " The stagehands at the theater still remember how heavy the set was ," he said. " You had to knock away bricks to support it. You can still see the scars all these years later."

While Lee sketches and designs his shows in Providence, he spends half the week in New York. In his midtown office, he, associate designer Edward Pierce , and several assistants work on commercial projects. Today, a group of Japanese set designers and prop vendors are in town to talk about upcoming productions of "Wicked" in Japan. Pierce says with all the other productions of the show going on -- this coming year it will play engagements in New York, Los Angeles, Japan, Germany, London, and Chicago, as well as on national tour -- it's important to normalize the design, so that each production looks the same.

"It's 'Wicked' in a box," says Pierce. "Add a little water, poof! You've got 'Wicked.' "

Pierce has been working with Lee on and off for about 10 years. "He's an utter genius," he says. "A quirky guy. He has such a depth of experience and perspective on design. I bring new thinking and new technologies to a guy who sits in a carriage house, designing with a pencil and paper."

Lee visits his New York office in between duties at his main "day job" -- designing for "Saturday Night Live."

Back in 1975, producer Lorne Michaels was looking for someone to provide a backdrop for a new, edgy kind of urban humor. Lee envisioned blending audience and performers in a way never previously tried in TV variety shows. Instead of the audience sitting in a block at the back, Lee broke them up into clumps so that cameras on wheels and the sets could be moved around them.

In Michaels's office overlooking the "Saturday Night Live" set, with its battered leather chairs that look like they've been chewed by lions -- or Will Ferrell -- Michaels says: "Eugene came in from the theater wanting a balcony and seating on the floor. Balconies don't exist in television."

But, as he and many others say, Lee is good at advocating for what he wants. And he got his balcony.

Michaels adds, "I think he's a genius. I did from the first day I met him. He understands how to involve the audience in the show. He's not changed much since the beginning, except that he's gotten more successful."

Down the hall from Lee's office is Studio 8-H, the home of "Saturday Night Live." In front of the "home base," an architectural homage to Grand Central Terminal where the host holds forth, are clusters of swiveling boat chairs he had installed for the audience. In the back is scruffy scaffolding for more audience -- the "balcony" he wanted. On this Friday, a day before the show airs, sets for a talk show, a restaurant, and the Oval Office are all being touched up.

"It's like summer stock, midtown," Lee jokes.

As the show airs on Saturday night, he goes home. A Town Car picks him up and drives him to Providence, where he'll stay till Wednesday, then start the whole thing over again.

With all the acclaim, all the shows that have dazzled and moved audiences and critics, what Eugene Lee feels most passionate about right now is a relatively small project: renovating the theater at Hope , a public high school just down the street from his home. In 1938, when it was built, the school's theater was a high-end performing arts center.

"A few years ago I looked at it," he says. "It's got a nice, big, open fly loft, dressing rooms. Behind the stage is a dance hall and music room. It's a beautiful building, but in disrepair. I went to a high school in Wisconsin with a fabulous stage. I probably wouldn't be in the theater if I hadn't had that."

So Lee paid to have the place cleaned up, got a fabric supplier to donate material for a curtain, sent an architect and a builder to draw up a preliminary budget. The $9.1 million project is awaiting a green light from the mayor. "It'll be a little arts complex," he says, "potentially as good as any on Broadway. It's worth doing right. And it can be accomplished."

Why, after all these years, has he remained in Providence? "I supposed any successful person who got a TV show would move to New York," he muses. "Sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake; I don't think so. I love Providence; it's a silly, wonderful, city-state. You get to know people. The mayor and a congressman come to parties. You can't do that in many states. I just sit here, waiting for the phone to ring."

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.