The University’s Resident Ensemble Players (REP), a company of some of America’s most experienced stage actors and actresses, produced Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good in March. The play takes place in one of the first penal colonies in 1788 Australia, and the set design was simple: a stage full of sand and one 43-foot mast from a sailing ship.
The challenge was determining how to create a giant sandbox on the Thompson stage in the Roselle Center for the Arts.
The technical staff first had to determine if the stage could handle the structural load of 30 tons of sand; the wooden structure built to contain the sand; various prop tables, chairs and wooden trunks; and the weight of 10 actors.
Once the staff established the safety of the distributed load, the next step was sand research. Technical Director Pete Brakhage visited three quarries and one supplier around Delaware looking for color and cleanliness.
“I would wind up purchasing sand from a quarry near Dover, which is a Coastal Plain deposit that is much cleaner than anything else I saw, presumably by virtue of water percolating through it for millennia,” Brakhage said. “When damp, it looks like Atlantic beach sand, and when dry, it is fairly white. All the other sand in the area is contaminated with silt and iron — there is a lot of organically produced bog iron in this area from the marshes that preceded the Coastal Plain. We had to avoid the iron specifically so that the costumes would not get stained.”
The next task was getting all that sand into the building and onto the stage. The solution was low-tech: 12 people, 8 wheelbarrows, 5 shovels and several tubes of muscle pain relief cream.