‘Anything Can Be a Theater Set:’ Blurring the Lines with Set Designer Mimi Lien
“I started to imagine how those houses affected the lives of the people inside,” Lien says. “Why would someone have that? What kind of person would want to have that in their house?”
Understanding the spaces people inhabit—whether at home or elsewhere—would be the preoccupation that launched Lien’s career. Lien grew up to be a set designer, the first in her profession to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant.”
But hers would be a winding path to set design, with layovers in realms outside of theater, from architecture to visual art.
As she prepares to present her latest project, the world premiere of composer John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, Lien spoke to San Francisco Opera about her journey to the stage in an interview from her home in New York.
“Because I came to theater quite late, with theater design and theater history there’s still so much I don't know,” Lien says. “But I feel like that has actually been an asset because I wasn't ever taught, ‘This is how you're supposed to design a theater set.’ I was like, ‘Anything can be a theater set.’”
From Lincoln Logs to Architecture
Born in New Haven and raised in Cheshire, Lien was steeped in music from an early age. At 5 years old, she started to play both the violin and the piano. Her musical training would prove vital when her career ultimately led her to opera.
But Lien never thought of her household as particularly artistic. Her parents—born in mainland China and brought up in Taiwan—emphasized education above all. They were both college professors: one specializing in computer science, the other in anthropology and linguistics.
Hers was an industrious family. Lien remembers that her father would pick up extra jobs and skills just to “fill the hours of his day.”
“So he randomly ended up having this job as a civil engineer, as a draftsperson at a civil engineering firm. I still, to this day, don’t know how he got that job, because it’s not something that he had trained to do,” she laughs.
“But I do have vivid memories of visiting him at his office, where he had this big drafting table and all these drafting tools and mechanical pencils and triangles and rulers.”
Those tools called out to Lien. She would pick them up and play with them. And at home, she enjoyed stacking Lincoln logs and building blocks. Her mother thought her hand-eye coordination might make her a good surgeon: She was a steady hand at the board game Operation.
But by age 8, her interest had turned to architecture. Lien would leaf through stacks of Architectural Digest magazine, scoping out glass atriums and floor plans for houses. “These are containers for people’s lives. And that was really what captivated me,” she says.
Finding Freedom in Set Design
So naturally, when it came time to go to college, Lien signed up to study architecture. She loved how spaces could be spiritual or symbolic, using form and volume to spark emotion—like, for example, the way the dizzying heights of a Gothic cathedral draws a visitor’s gaze toward the heavens, making them feel ever so small.
Lien’s studies also opened her up to a whole new world of visual art, and she found herself experimenting with everything she could, from figure-drawing to photography. After graduating, she left for Florence, Italy, to study painting.
“And then it was actually there that the light bulb went off to be a set designer, as a way to combine my interests in visual art and architecture and literature and music,” she says.
Painting left something to be desired: “I was trying to communicate three-dimensional ideas in two dimensions, and something felt off about that,” Lien remembers. So halfway through her year abroad, she started collecting found objects in the street, dragging them home to create installations in her Florence studio.
A teacher suggested she try set design instead. It felt like a release. As an architect, Lien feared being bound by building codes and client requests—by the necessity, even, of creating something permanent. Set design had none of those restrictions.
Instead, she would be beholden to the art itself. “The client, so to speak, is a piece of literature or a piece of text or a piece of music,” she says. The medium appealed to the conceptual, sculptural ideas she fell in love with at school.
Upon returning to the U.S., Lien's first jobs in set design were not in theater but in film, working on low-budget independent projects. The narrative aspect of the work appealed to her. The need for natural-looking settings didn’t.
“So that's when theater, or live performance, entered the picture, because I was like: I feel like designing sets for theater would give me the ability to be more abstract,” she says.
Going Beyond the Theater Stage
But Lien was determined to look at theater differently. She found herself wondering: Why does a set traditionally stop at the stage’s edge? Why couldn’t the entire theater be considered part of the experience?
“It was something that was always a little bit anathema to me, that a typical audience relationship to a theater—the space that the audience travels to get to their seat and the space that they sit in—is not considered,” Lien explains.
She started to look at the theater space through an architectural lens, as something to be evaluated and manipulated to create the atmosphere for an audience.
“You can’t ignore the space that an event is in. It’s all part of it,” she says. “The context of where the theater is in the city, the journey you went on to get to the theater—all of that is part of the experience of the event and should be considered.”
Lien went back to school for stage design, and in the nearly two decades since, her art has cropped up from Broadway shows to outdoor installations. She researched fall-out shelters to create the crammed, claustrophobic set for the 2012 play The Whale. She wove white rope into a forest of bare branches for the 2014 dance production The Wanderer. And in 2021, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, she transformed Lincoln Center’s paved plaza into a public lawn for her project “The GREEN.”
Along the way, she picked up a 2017 Tony Award for the wrap-around set of the musical Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, designed to look like a Russian supper club.
A Career Highlight Leads to New Recognition
But she says she got some of the biggest reactions of her career with the 2014 play An Octoroon, by writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. A biting satire about race in America, the play leaps from one setting to another, starting in a present-day black box theater and then jumping across time to a 19th-century melodrama, unfolding in antebellum Louisiana.
“We didn’t really want it to feel like a historical piece,” Lien explains. “And what we really didn't want was for the audience to be able to sit at a historical distance from the material.”
So Lien embarked on a plan to bring the play’s action close to the audience—uncomfortably so. The opening act would take place in a solid-seeming black box theater. But then, as one scene ended and the next began, the back wall of the black box would suddenly fall forward, plummeting toward the audience, landing mere feet away from the front row.
“I wanted to harness an actual, almost involuntary physical response. With something falling towards you, your body just reacts with fear and trepidation,” Lien says. The universality of that fear complemented the play’s themes.
The fallen wall gave way to a white set designed to evoke a Louisiana plantation. Lien filled it with “a sea of cotton balls, just regular CVS cotton balls,” that often would get propelled out into the audience as a second set wall fell.
She credits her work on An Octoroon with helping to attract the attention of the MacArthur Fellows Program, which rewards “exceptional creativity” with a grant of $625,000. Lien remembers working on a project in a botanical garden when she received the news.
“I was wading through seven-foot-high sunflowers when I got this phone call,” Lien laughs. “I think I nearly passed out.”
The MacArthur Fellowship allowed Lien to explore new horizons in her set design. Lien longed to branch out into public art: She didn’t grow up going to the theater much herself, and she saw public art as a way to reach audiences who couldn’t afford tickets.
It also gave her an opportunity to imagine set design outside of her usual commissions. Rather than be assigned to a script or a play, she imagined the “designer as author,” creating original performances of her own.
“I had always wondered what it would be like to conceive of a design or an environment that would then serve as a springboard for a performance,” she says.
“When the MacArthur happened, I saw it as an opportunity because it was really difficult to find time to explore those other avenues when I was just kept so busy as a more conventional set designer. That allowed me. I made the decision to cut back on some of the more traditional projects to explore these other avenues.”
Examining the Legacy of Egypt’s Last Pharaoh
This September, however, Lien returns to the stage for a new production: the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra, an opera by composer John Adams. Lien credits one of his previous works, Doctor Atomic, with giving her a taste for the art form.
The new opera reflects on Cleopatra’s legacy across the millennia, by referencing her public image in three separate time periods. The production design includes nods to the ancient world where Cleopatra ruled, the classic Hollywood era, and the modern-day media landscape.
It’s a landscape that includes monoliths representative of ancient Egypt, juxtaposed against the glamorous, exoticized version of Cleopatra that emerges in 1930s Hollywood. But as Lien explains, the opera’s creative team also wanted to acknowledge how power—especially today, in the internet age—can be constructed through public image.
“The hope is to give agency to Cleopatra, as someone who is at the helm of constructing and deploying her own image,” Lien says. “So we've referenced, for example, Beyoncé as someone who is very much at the helm of her own image and has very carefully constructed how she wants to be seen.”
The issue of how public image was created and deployed was top of mind for the Antony and Cleopatra creative team. As they worked, video began to spread online of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd. Footage of Floyd’s murder sparked widespread outrage—and questions about on the ongoing role of racism and inequality in U.S. society.
“Most of our design process was over Zoom during the pandemic—during this time when we're all talking about representation a lot more than we used to,” Lien explains.
As Lien looks ahead to the opera’s world premiere, she hopes her designs can help communicate a vision of Cleopatra that moves beyond any single media depiction—a vision of Cleopatra that captures her humanity as well as her legend.
That is, after all, the way Lien prefers to look at the world: in three dimensions, not two.
Learn more about Tony-winning set designer Mimi Lien by visiting her website or by experiencing her work in Antony and Cleopatra, opening September 10, 2022.