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In your face: Hunten Nesbitt Spence at work.
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Details
Illusion on Demand
December
2000
by Bruce Fellman
Hunter
Nesbitt Spence is about as close as you can come at Yale to a magician.
Spence, a lecturer in technical design and production at the School
of Drama, creates props for Yale plays, and over a University career
that has spanned more than 30 years, he has created theatrical illusions
that range from masks and fake fish to Shakespearian dream scenes
and Yiddish folktale shtetls.
In an entertainment
world increasingly dominated by high-tech special effects, Spence uses and teaches
techniques that are as old as the theater itself. "I weave baskets, do upholstery,
make dragonfly wings out of wicker, and I'm pretty deadly at needlework," he explains,
the soft drawl of his Southern childhood still present after three decades in
Connecticut.
Spence, who is in
his mid-60s and formally "retired" last winter, grew up in Virginia, the son of
parents who were adept at crafts. (His mother was a seamstress, his father a carpenter.)
An aspiring musician as a teenager, he also became skilled at taxidermy, which
he learned via a correspondence course. His facility at turning the dead waterfowl
he was brought by neighborhood hunters into realistic specimens would later prove
extremely useful.
"Much of my inspiration
comes from nature," he says, explaining the procedure that went into making the
seagull for the Chekhov play of the same name. "You can't simply use a real gull,
but because I knew birds, I could create a believable one out of millinery feathers
and those of Peking ducks."
Restless and realizing
he didn't have the training to succeed at a music conservatory, Spence joined
the Navy and, among other things, learned macrame. After the service, he completed
a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater at Virginia Commonwealth University,
and in 1969, he settled at Yale as propmaster of the Repertory Theatre.
In the thick of Vietnam
turmoil, one of Spence's first jobs was to develop the props for
a particularly gory production of King Lear. Director Edward
Bond's concept for the play called for an eyeball-extracting machine,
a gruesome illusion the propmaster achieved with fake blood and
grapes. "Dozens of people walked out, and several actually fainted,"
he recalled, chuckling about one of the more controversial nights
at the theater.
Spence is perhaps
best known for the detailed masks he's made for numerous shows, as well as for
a pair of nautical-inspired masks he created for a society fundraiser. "When you
put on a mask, you enter another world," he says. "You can become another person,
or another species."
One of his favorite
projects, however, involved non-facial anatomy. With considerable
glee, Spence described how he cast penises for a variety of shows,
most recently the Sam Shepard play, The Curse of the Starving
Class. In his search for a source from which he could sculpt
a clay model, a trip to a local adult bookstore proved unfruitful,
so he turned instead to Playgirl magazine. "I can tell you
that all men definitely weren't created equal," he quips. "If you
can't laugh, you'll never exist in the theater."
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