Playwright Martin McDonagh crafted a morbid masterpiece with his Tony-winning drama The Pillowman, which was covered in this column last year. If you thought he couldn't match the intensity of a show about an author of dreary children's stories whose grisly endings are replicated by a real-life murderer, think again. The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, which recently completed a four-and-a-half month run on Broadway, focuses on the fear and anxiety that spreads through a small Irish clan following the death of the cat of the one family member who happens to be a nasty local terrorist. The irony of a brutal killer who loses his marbles over the death of his closest furry friend is rich with irony and very black humor. The production features loud gunfights, hacked limbs, a blood splattered stage and an actual live feline. The man who designed the sound for this gruesome masterpiece, which is perhaps the bloodiest show that Broadway has ever seen, is Obadiah Eaves, an experienced composer, multi-instrumentalist and off-Broadway sound designer who recently jumped up to the big leagues by doing two Tony-nominated shows simultaneously on the Great White Way. In the past Eaves has worked shows at Radio City Music Hall and The Public Theater, among others, and his accolades include being a Barrymore Award nominee for Best Original Music (King Lear at Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, 2002) and an Audelco Viv Award nominee for Best Sound Design (Birdie Blue, 2005) as well as winning a Lortel Award for Outstanding Sound Design (Nine Parts of Desire, 2005) and an Audelco Viv Award for Best Sound Design (F—- A, 2003). He has worked on shows written by David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams and Woody Allen, and he has been violinist, mandolinist and whistler for numerous feature films, documentaries, television shows and theatre productions for outlets like Nickelodeon, PBS, HBO, Sundance Channel, Arena Stage and the Roundabout.
During a break from his many endeavors, Eaves chatted with FOH about his recent juggling act and his personal approach to sound design.
FOH: In Lieutenant, all the sound seemed like it was natural. Was anybody miked?
Obadiah Eaves: No, but we did some really light miking in the softer scenes just for the balcony. There were no wireless mics, but we had shotgun mics and foot mics for a couple of scenes. Where were they located? There were two tiny foot mics that were embedded in the shale area. It was an important thing to the designers that the audience didn't see anything theatrical, so we had to make sure those were as hidden as possible. We used little boundary mics. Then we used some shotguns that were just offstage, left and right. I think the boundary mics were Crown MB4s. I believe the shotguns were AKG 747s. They were spotted on the table and the armchair area. As you saw, it's a very shallow theatre, but it has really good acoustics. The initial assessment was that we didn't think we would need too much in the way of mics, and the director was not too excited about the idea of using mics anyway.
You have music between every scene. What was your reasoning for the music and for not using wireless mics?
The same director has pretty much done every major production of this show so far. He did the original English production and the West End production. This is the same music that has been used for all of those productions. When I got the music tracks, they seemed like the right music for the show. I knew what to do with them. They also needed a lot of punching up for the system that we were using at the Atlantic during its initial off-Broadway run, so I did a lot of editing on them, but didn't really add anything to them in the end. But I did a lot of engineering on them. This is all the original music from the original production. The antique music from the opening of the show comes from a cassette tape that was apparently in Martin McDonagh's mother's closet, so that pretty much came straight off the cassette with a little bit of EQ to take out the rumble. We did all the editing on Logic with a Metric Halo set-up in my studio.
You recently did sound design for the show Shining City, which had a four-person cast, including Oliver Platt.
That was really something because it was going to be my first Broadway gig, but then Lieutenant of Inishmore was moving to Broadway much sooner than any of us had thought, so I ended up taking both of those at the exact same time.
They opened up within six days of each other!
They both started tech on the same day. I relied a lot on my assistants. My assistant on Lieutenant of Inishmore was Ryan Powers. I'm not really a gearhead, so he actually had a lot do with the design of the system, and my assistant Mutt Huang at Shining City did a lot of work when I was not there. I was alternating days between shows.
How did Shining City differ from Lieutenant of Inishmore in terms of sound design?
In some ways they were the same because there were book scenes alternating with short music interludes. The main difference is that Shining City had a lot more on-stage, practical sounds like doorbells and radios. It was more theatrical in that way. In Inishmore they avoided almost every onstage sound effect to give it a lot of immediacy. You wanted those gunfights and all the violence to seem very real, so you avoided anything that sounded artificial. They were using the real weapons and not accentuating them in any way. Shining City had a lot of onstage sound and was also much more heavily miked in terms of voice reinforcement because it was in a very deep theatre.
What type of board were you running for Inishmore?
We were using a Yamaha DM 2000 with ony an 8-channel SFX system redundant. SFX is pretty much what I use for almost any show now. There are other things that will do what it does, and maybe in a slicker way, but it's so simple to be very fast. So if a director needs a change, I can just do it in a few seconds. It's been very, very helpful to me. The speakers we were using were Meyers, CQ-1s and CQ-2s for the mains, and a lot of UPMs as well as MM4s, which are great for underbalcony fills. I don't how many speakers there were in the end, but our preliminary list included about 25 or 26 speakers.
How many inputs total were you running on the console?
I don't remember how many the console has out of the box, but we added a 16-channel ADAT card for SFX. There were very spare sound effects. There's a cell phone and a winch for the torture sequence. The automation is very quiet, so we added a winch sound. And in that same scene, when Padraic, the title character, runs offstage to save his cat, he slams the door offstage in the warehouse. Pretty much all the gunfire and action was real. They were loud. There was a lot of experimenting with different types of ammunition to make it loud enough for the audience but not too painful for the cast. In that gunfight scene, a lot of the cast wore earplugs.
Compared to a lot of other Broadway shows, you're involved with smaller casts and more minimalist sound design. It's interesting that more and more straight plays do not seem to be as heavy on sound, and the designers seem to want them to sound more natural.
I don't know if it's more than used to be, but I've found that the higher I climb on the ladder and the bigger the gigs that I get doing the straight plays, the less I do music and a lot of sound. It's really the downtown shows that let you go completely crazy.
What shows have you worked on previously?
The reason I was doing Inishmore is that I have been doing half to two-thirds of the shows at the Atlantic for a couple of years now. I was doing sound design. I never really did much assisting or engineering or crew work. I started as a composer and went straight from the low- to no-paying downtown shows to the medium-paying off-Broadway shows. I do music and sound, but I used to be more of a composer/sound designer, but the more I'm working, the less I'm doing music. I do music for television. I did a channel design for HBO Family. I've done a lot of shows for The Learning Channel–"Miami Ink", "Operation Homecoming", "Plastic Surgery: Beverly Hills"–and some commercials here and there, Bell South Yellow Pages for example.
Before Shining City and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, what shows did you work on?
Anything I do at the Atlantic would be off- Broadway, which really just has to do with the size of the theatre. Inishmore moved to Broadway, but it started at the Atlantic. Right before that I had been working at the Vineyard, on a show called Stopping Traffic, and at Playwrights Horizons, on a show called Pen.
Now that you have done these plays with small casts, what kind of Broadway show would like to do next?
This is exactly the kind of Broadway show that I like to do! The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Shining City are my favorite shows that I have worked on in terms of the quality of the show. I think they're great. My brother was in Inishmore, and it's the first time we were able to work together.
Both The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore have a very dark sensibility.
I'm actually doing the sound for a production of The Pillowman at the Berkeley Rep in January, and I'll be doing a lot of music for that. It has great musical possibilities with all of those fairy tale settings.
Did The Lieutenant of Inishmore change much going from off-Broadway to Broadway?
Very little, actually. At the outset it only changed by one cast member, and the goal was to keep it as close to the original as possible, with a couple adjustments because we had a greater budget. We made some of the effects better. But largely it was the same show.
What are the acoustic properties of the Lyceum like?
I don't believe the theatre has been treated in any way. It has good acoustics as it is. It was very difficult to find hanging points for the speakers, because the initial idea for the design was that there was to be a separate sound system each for the orchestra, the mezzanine and the balcony. But we weren't able to find enough hanging points and placements for speakers to make that happen, so the mezzanine and the balcony shared a sound system.
Would you say that you come from the "less is more" school of sound design?
Oh no, I enjoy doing "more is more" as far as sound is concerned!
So it just depends on the show?
Sure. It's all about making sure that the strong points of the show are maximized.
Some shows get carried away with sound design these days.
Miking can certainly be overdone, and a lot of people complain about that. It's often true, but I also think that a lot of people who complain about it would be shocked at what they hear if they went to a musical and there was no sound reinforcement. You wouldn't want to hear a jukebox musical that was lightly miked.
