How Theatre Baton Rouge scenic designer Ken Mayfield brings stories to life
When Ken Mayfield was a child, his mother would often ask about books he was reading. He always replied in the same way: elaborate explanations of each character and event, descriptions of scenes featuring lush trees or old, creaking houses—vivid detail.
She’d laugh, and Mayfield kept reading. From these stories grew an imagination for form and design.
As an adult, the scenic designer and associate technical director for Theatre Baton Rouge still spends his days in his imagination. Mayfield is usually juggling three plays in different stages of development. He’s responsible for set design, construction and coordination with sound, lighting and costuming teams.
With his workload, he has to be open to inspiration whenever it strikes.
“I always want to be thinking about what’s ahead of us, because I have to give the time to let inspiration hit. Sometimes it hits as soon as I read the story. Sometimes I’ll be watching TV, and an image will pop up on the screen, and I’ll have to pause so I can take a photo and work that into some sort of design that I’m working on,” Mayfield says.
Ken Mayfield welds a hand rail to be used in the production of Company, which runs March 6-22 at the theater.
Mayfield was studying engineering at a small Tennessee community college in 2007 when his speech professor gave him the leading role in The Importance of Being Earnest. It was then that his love of storytelling met the stage.
“Basically, once I stepped onto the stage, I never looked back,” Mayfield says. As for the engineering degree? It comes in handy for building set pieces as safe and functional as they are visually striking.
From Tennessee, he followed his now-wife—TBR’s managing artistic director Jenny Ballard—to Louisiana when she got a spot in LSU’s Master of Fine Arts acting program. He picked up his first scenic design work at Playmakers of Baton Rouge. In 2010, he got involved with TBR, assisting with the set of A Christmas Carol. When the organization’s previous technical director prepared to step down, he was ready to take over.
Now, Mayfield’s life is a flurry of prop collections and collaborative meetings, paint smudges and sketched-out schematics, lighting cues and notes scribbled in the margins of scripts.
“The hardest part for me is the transition from page to stage,” Mayfield says of his job. “You’re trying to make it as perfect as you see it in your head—in your mind it’s very intricate and detailed, and having to produce that in reality is a challenge.”
The process begins when Mayfield first receives a script for an upcoming production and conceives a rough concept of where and how the story should take place.
He shares his initial ideas in the first of many production meetings with directors, lighting designers and costumers, who help expand and tweak the concepts to flesh out the show.
Next come floorplans of set design followed by weeks of construction—long before actors first step on the set to rehearse blocking and choreography.
If all goes well, the following step is the “tech” process, a series of rehearsals that fine tunes every technical element, from the way set pieces are arranged onstage to lighting cues to the timing of a doorbell chime. Repeated run-throughs and dress rehearsals of the full show polish up any remaining kinks in the machine in time for opening night.
Mayfied sits behind a desk on the set of Other People’s Money, which ran in February.
By the time the first curtain rises, bringing a play to life has usually taken Mayfield an average of three to six months. And if he’s done his job, most of the audience will be too wrapped up in theater magic to think about the countless hours of behind-the-scenes labor.
His job is to make it all come together so that the actors can shine, he says. With works like 2013’s Les Miserables, the difficulty of the project is matched by the emotional payoff of sitting back to watch the show. Les Mis has been his favorite work so far at TBR, based as much on his own efforts as on the grace and beauty of the performances.
“Seeing an actor take the form of a character for the first time with all of the elements in place is really just a beautiful, beautiful thing. … I don’t know how else to describe it other than pure fulfillment, when it really all comes together and you touch people’s lives with the story that you’re telling,” Mayfield says. “There’s nothing else like it.”
Theatre Baton Rouge has a full season ahead with Stephen Sondheim’s Company starting this month, French farce Boeing Boeing in April and The Music Man in June.
But with keen vision and a talented team at his back, Mayfield is up to the task.
