Riccardo Hernandez hates scenery. Even the mere utterance of the word makes his flesh crawl. There is just one catch: He is a Tony-nominated set designer (Parade) who has made a successful living at it since his 1992 graduation from the industry-venerated Yale School of Drama. Paradox or perversity? Not according to the 33-year old Argentinean-born Hernandez, who has transmuted his aversion into a style that has brought him a legion of assignments (Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk, The Tempest with Patrick Stewart) other designers would pulverize a million flats for.
"People tell me that I have a style because of what I think about theater," says Hernandez. "I go out of my way to do things that are not scenery-like. I like installations in space. Everything that I do has that approach."
Hernandez defines the bane of his existence as "flats and stupid little details that are phony and that you know are totally made up." He says he'd rather incorporate real material, such as the black velour he used in Parade to create the insular, walled-in surroundings and the windows which were made from metal. "I like to use reality which becomes even more surreal and theatrical at the same time."
Growing up in Buenos Aires, Hernandez, the son of a opera singer, longed to follow in his father's footsteps -- save for one unfortunate snag: He couldn't croon a note. But he he wanted to forge his destiny in the theater. By the time he was 12, the precocious Hernandez reached a decision with a canny self-awareness that belied his age: He wanted to be a set designer.
After graduate school, Hernandez was awarded the distinguished Princess Grace Foundation grant to be the resident set designer for the off-Broadway theater, INTAR. From there, his career has soared. Outside of designing sets for innumerable productions at The Public Theater, he has also lent his talents to such premier regional theaters as Arena Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Rep and Goodman Theater. He even made a foray into his first love -- opera -- (even though it was as a set designer) designing Amistad, based on the recent Spielberg film about a slave revolt on a ship bound for the New World, by Thulani Davis and Anthony Davis at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.
Like any skilled craftsman, Hernandez adheres to a work scheme that has yet to fail him: He always speaks to the director first. Then, assuming a very architectural stance, he sizes up the space that will become the incubator for the daring concepts Hernandez enjoys hatching. The genre of the project -- musical, straight play or opera -- plays a significant role in the ultimate shaping of his designs. Yet there are times, especially when Hernandez is working on musicals, that he must swallow his bile and use the clunky sets that make him wince in pain "because that's just the way it is."
Complicated period pieces, such as the musical Parade (about the tragic, real-life case of Leo Frank wrongfully accused of killing a 13-year-old girl who worked in his factory in 1913 Georgia) and Amistad, presented challenges that both confounded and engaged Hernandez.
"In the case of Amistad," says Hernandez, "George Wolfe [The Public Theater's artistic chief who directed the opera] wanted to do something very early Americana. So there was a lot of research there. He also wanted to work with sketches before we even got onto a model, which is rare for the two of us, because we've always done models. With a musical like Parade, it's a completely different ballgame. It's about solving all the logistical problems at the same time you're creating a world. You have to get from scene to scene to scene and a musical takes a really long time to design just for that reason."
Conceiving the design for Parade had an extra-potent catalyst: Harold Prince. The fabled musical theater director, who was at the show's helm, urged Hernandez to get the "visual gesture" of the piece down first before proceeding onto more specific details.
"Actually that's the way I work anyway," explains Hernandez. "I go for the bold idea first and then we go into the specifics."
For Hernandez, his "bold ideas" in Parade consisted of a tableau of surreal metaphors that evoked a microcosm of stark oppression and doom: the omnipresent tree that did not move, the prison resembling an grim industrial order and the cutouts depicting faceless jurors deciding the fate of Leo Frank. The latter conceit -- used as a recurring motif with the cutouts also resurfacing on floats, intensifying the already ominous landscape -- was spawned by a budgetary fluke. No money was left in the coffers to pay for extras to play the jury!
One project that makes Hernandez swell with pride was his work on the Broadway smash Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk. Not only did this show cap a benchmark moment in Hernandez's professional life but it also afforded him a chance to collaborate yet again with Wolfe, a person whom he greatly admires.
"That was a wonderful experience," says Hernandez. "It was very different from Parade because Parade was a tragedy based on a real story -- even though Funk had a lynching and things that had to do with the suffering of the black people in America. Funk celebrated the rhythm of the culture, so it was a completely different experience."
Now that the stardust has temporarily receded from Hernandez's Tony-nominee haze, he is currently fresh at work, designing sets for a production of Naomi Wallace's The Trestle of Pope Lick Creek directed by Lisa Peterson at New York Theater Workshop (the venue that launched Rent). He also recently designed the off-Broadway revival of Albert Innaurato's uproarious 1970s comedy Gemini.
Unassuming and affable, Hernandez takes the recent media hoopla in stride. But then, he doesn't have the time to take it any other way. Working on multiple projects simultaneously because "unfortunately in America, that's the only way to make a living -- you're forced into it," Hernandez is a designer in demand. Just don't broach that dreaded "s" word.
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