McKowen's artwork for
Roundabout's Major Barbara
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Who designs those gorgeous production posters for Roundabout Theatre Company? Meet illustrator and graphic designer Scott McKowen, who has a special relationship with Roundabout — and with George Bernard Shaw.
Front & Center: Next season will be your tenth year creating posters for Roundabout’s productions. How did you start doing this and when exactly did you begin collaborating with Roundabout?
McKowen: I went to art school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and was also doing some work in the theatre department there in costume design. It was hard to decide between theatre and art school, and in a funny way, the theatre posters are a nice niche combining both. I was studying drawing and painting, but also enjoyed photography, engraving, etching, printmaking, and type design. When I discovered graphic design, I realized I didn’t have to choose between these things; I could continue to do all of them. And I think that’s why I still really enjoy what I do, because the world of each play carries you into some new creative area.
The first poster I ever did for Roundabout was the famous production of Anna Christie, with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson, in the 1992-93 season. I’ve really enjoyed the collaboration with the company, its artists, and staff over the years, and I’m thrilled that our association has continued for ten years.
F & C: How do you typically begin working on a poster design?
McKowen: Generally I have a conversation with the production’s director and designers before starting. For example with Juno and the Paycock last summer, I had extensive talks with John Crowley about the world of the play and where he was going with the production. It’s different every time, but generally the directors are really helpful in giving me a sense of their priorities, which I try to reflect and include in the image that represents the production.
The assignment is always to try to distill a single image out of the text, looking for something that somehow sums up what the play is about and gives people a sense of the experience of seeing it. This is the mysterious part of the assignment. My wife, Christina Poddubiuk, is a costume and set designer, and she calls it "connecting the dots." The dots are all the points of reference — the play’s historical period, the social milieu of the characters, the director’s concept, the casting, and the emotional state of the characters at various points. Once I’ve established an overview of all these elements, I step back and look for a visual idea to string them together. A good poster has to communicate many of these things in a single image, and the best ones often work on several levels at once. It’s different every time and there’s no single solution or right answer. Sometimes everyone likes the very first pencil sketch; sometimes we have lively discussions for weeks.
I wanted to show a passionate and charismatic Barbara ... I find the play very bold, and I wanted the poster to reflect that.
F & C: You have particular expertise with Shaw’s dramas. How did you approach the poster design for Major Barbara?
McKowen: I’ve done five Roundabout posters for plays by George Bernard Shaw: Candida in the 1992-93 season, Misalliance in 1996-97, You Never Can Tell in 1997-98, Arms and the Man in 1999-2000, and now Major Barbara. I’ve also been lucky enough to work with the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada for the past fifteen years. I think that my experience with plays by Shaw and his contemporaries opens up a greater understanding. The more you know the period and these plays, the easier it is to come up with images for them.
For Major Barbara, I happened to be driving past a Salvation Army shelter in Toronto, and noticed their big red shield on the wall with the diagonal Salvation Army wordmark. It struck me that this logo (which would have been familiar to the first audiences who saw the play in 1905) is a very strong design — so I adapted it, changing "Salvation Army" to "Major Barbara." I wanted to show a passionate and charismatic Barbara, so I placed her in front of the huge shield holding a blazing torch and she’s screaming! It’s an image of urgent protest in a black and dark night. I find the play very bold, and I wanted the poster to reflect that. Barbara’s social concerns run smack into her father, and this is painful, even though Shaw gets his message across with trademark wit. The Salvation Army’s motto is "Blood and Fire," and Barbara’s father points out that this might be the motto of his profession as well.
F & C: For Candida you drew a man on a settee with a feather quill in his right hand, clutching a page to his forehead out of frustration—or maybe in love. Papers litter the floor and they all have Candida’s name written on them. Where did you get that image?
McKowen's artwork for
Roundabout's Candida
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McKowen: That’s Marchbanks, the young poet, who is one of the three main characters in a triangle in that play. He’s the young poet idealist who is infatuated with the title character. He’s obsessed with this woman and there’s a scene in the script where the two of them are sitting by the fire late at night, and he says that all he really wants to do is say her name over and over again. And I just imagined him in his room—this is not a scene in the play at all—writing out her name over and over and over again.
The image also came from a painting by the British painter Stanley Spencer called "Love Letters." (Looking at images from the history of art is an important part of my process.) There are two figures in it, a young boy and a young girl, sitting in an armchair. The boy has his face buried in these pieces of paper, and I loved that and used it as a jumping-off point.
It’s interesting—often merely illustrating a scene from the play is not the best idea for a poster. A poster really has to be an icon that sums everything up in a much broader, more universal way, to get to some truth behind the play.
F & C: The poster you did for Roundabout’s Three Sisters in 1997 illuminates that principle particularly well. Can you describe it?
McKowen: There’s a woman, presumably one of the sisters—it probably doesn’t matter which one—in the dark holding a candle. It’s a three-o’clock-in-the-morning scene, perhaps after the fire in the Third Act. It suggests how the play’s sisters try to find their way through all of this confusion, try to figure out where they belong, where they want to be. So I thought holding a light up in the darkness, trying to make something out, would express that in a pretty universal way.
F & C: Your poster illustrations have a distinctive look and feel to them. Is this related to the materials you choose? What medium do you work in?
McKowen: I work in scratchboard, which is an engraving medium (like a woodcut). Scratchboard is a piece of cardboard with a specifically prepared surface of hard white chalk. Then a layer of black ink is rolled over the surface. I scrape through that ink layer to the white surface underneath with a knife, so in effect I draw the white lines into the surface with the blade. It’s basically the opposite of drawing on a piece of paper with a pen; I’m drawing white lines into an all-black surface.
It’s a black and white medium, which is one of the reasons the images — I hope — feel right for classic plays from the early modern period. A lot of the great illustrators from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s worked in scratchboard. If you look at books and novels and magazines from the time you can see the wonderful things they did. It fell out of fashion for a long time, but now there are a few illustrators picking it up again and doing all kinds of things with it.
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