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At the end of every other day this semester, student Amaris Puzak picked up a handful of Daily Lobo newspapers. Papers in hand, Puzak rushed off to prepare for another 10-hour workday. Her task?
Papier-mâché.
Puzak is the set designer for “Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline,” a play presented by UNM’s Department of Theatre and Dance. The show’s protagonist is Zastrozzi, a man driven to avenge the death of his mother. Puzak said she designed the show’s set based on this character’s worldview.
“The director and I got really into rust and decay, so we wanted a rusty element to everything,” Puzak said. “You have to see the show through Zastrozzi’s eyes to make sense of it, and in his first monologue, he talks about how the world is ugly and that’s his conflict.”
“Zastrozzi” is the second time Puzak has been in charge of set design for a show, and this set is a rusty Goliath. Arching gateways stand near one corner of the set, a towering staircase leads off the other end while hanging glass windows and crumbling walls of foam bricks dominate the stage. Each piece of the set looks fractured as papier-mâché rust crawled throughout the stage’s architecture.
“You’re creating that world with your set. You’re setting up what’s happening. You’re setting up context of how you think the show should be. You’re creating the world that everything is supposed to be happening in,” she said.
Puzak began working on the set in July, pulling ideas from Gothic architecture and Giovanni Battista’s “Imaginary Prisons,” a set of prints that showcase giant twisting subterranean vaults. Puzak received help from the University’s theater shop courses and professor Ross Rauschkolb since the beginning of the project.
“(Puzak) is a very visual person; she likes to start with a sketch, flesh out how an arc is going to look, how a geometrical pattern is going to look, and then adjusts it for when any other constraints we might have,” Rauschkolb said. “A lot of designers pull things from their imagination and hand it to the shop. Amaris is a far more hands-on person; she’s been in the shop from the get-go, trying to perfect what the different looks will be.”
Rauschkolb, the show’s technical director and production manager, was in charge of creating some of the set’s larger pieces. The set was compiled mostly of recycled materials, reused lumber, newspaper and compacted sawdust.
He said the set’s sprawling and decaying nature adds a lingering mood to an otherwise verbose play.
“With a show like this that’s really wordy, the audience needs to be in a certain mindset when they walk in. And with something like this on stage, the audience is sitting there going ‘What do I look at first? Can I look at all of this at once?’” he said. “Once they’ve seen that and when the actors get on stage, they’ll be a part of that world and they’ll forget the real world for the brief time they’re in our theater.”
Puzak said watching her set be torn down will be a bittersweet experience after the show ends on Sunday.
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“I think that’s what’s surprising for some people: just how much work is put into a set that’s used for two weeks and then it’s gone, you tear it down,” she said. “That’s the beauty of this art form, if you really love it, it’s great, you get to see it, it’s going to be taken down and you’re never going to see it again. It’s the good and the bad part: you get to start something new.”
“Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline”
by George F. Walker
directed by Bill Walters
UNM Rodey Theatre
Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday at 2 p.m.
$15 general, $12 faculty and seniors, $10 staff and students
