16-05-2025
Creating a world for Helperbots: Dane Laffrey on the scenic design of ‘Maybe Happy Ending' (exclusive images)
'Making theater, especially musicals, can feel super mysterious and alchemical. You're looking for energy and you're trying to get lightning in a bottle,' says Dane Laffrey of the process of creating an original Broadway musical. He earned a Tony nomination for the scenic design of Maybe Happy Ending, a tuner which he also produced with director Michael Arden through At Rise Creative. Laffrey describes the show as the 'little engine that could' in a new interview with Gold Derby. 'There's just something so special about it,' he explains. "The idea, the score, what it stands for, and the humanity that it's trying to cause us to focus on by telling a story about non-humans.'
Maybe Happy Ending tells a story of two retired Helperbots named Oliver and Claire, played by Darren Criss and Helen J Shen, respectively. These obsolete androids use their remaining battery power to venture out into the world and discover the sensations of wonder and love which make life worth living.
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Photo by Matthew Murphy
When hearing this short description, it's tempting to label the show as science fiction. But Laffrey cautions that for all the high-tech automation in his gargantuan sets, he is 'cautious' about describing the piece as sci-fi. 'When you get into science fiction, you're ultimately talking about an imagined world, or a world that is based in something we know, but that is greatly expanded and there's a lot of mythology that's needed,' he explains, 'But the story of Maybe Happy Ending is really, really focused. It's like a closeup on these two characters. And so we wanted to be really judicious with the world building around it.'
One way that Laffrey conveys this closeup is in the specifically detailed living quarters of Oliver and Claire. They each exist within a small cube-like room in the Helpbot yards. 'There's a mid-century aesthetic that sort of permeates Oliver's world because it permeated his owner James' world,' describes the designer, 'it feels like it's an inherited visual vocabulary that he really glommed onto. It's in his clothes, it's in the objects in his place, it's his obsession with vinyl. It's all that stuff. It has a sort of beautiful nostalgia about it.'
Photo by Matthew Murphy
The design for these living quarters is inspired by a building from the 1970s in Tokyo, which imagined a world where every occupant could purchase an identical modular unit. These units could actually be removed from the building, should the residents decide to move, and slotted into other modular skyscrapers around the world. The idea never caught on, and only one such tower was ever built, which Laffrey was able to see in person before it was demolished. 'They were these little cubes that were these kind of all-inclusive modular things that had all of the top shelf conveniences of the day in 1972,' he remembers. 'So, an eight-track and a bench that became a desk. And it was all very carefully thought about to condense a life into the smallest amount of space possible. So that felt both practically, or logically, the right kind of architecture to imagine would exist for these Helperbots. But also there's some shared DNA there about a beautiful idea fallen into obsolescence.'
Laffrey also conveys space and movement through what he calls 'irises' within his set design. He uses panels to direct the audience's eye to a small portion of the stage, before the view expands and opens up to reveal more of the world. The feeling is akin to scrolling through images on a smartphone or flipping through cells of a comic book. 'A big part of the reason why we wanted to start so small is to give us somewhere to go,' notes Laffrey. 'The first image of the story proper is a tiny little closeup. It's just a little frame around HwaBoon, Oliver's plant. And from there we open a bit more. And then when Claire first appears, we open a little further. It has a feeling of slowly expanding from something so small.'
Photo by Matthew Murphy
The backstage area is limited at the Belasco Theater, which requires Laffrey to play a precise game of Tetris in his use of space. This is especially true when the musical opens up into a road trip story which requires the set to feel expansive. 'I think what we were connecting with in the very early stages is that a big part of this show is not just about people who are trapped in a place, but it's that they decide to leave,' explains the designer. 'You've got to be really economical with how you use the space and how you expand it gradually so that when we get to the field of fireflies, which wants to feel kind of boundary-less, that it actually is. You can't really tell where things begin and end. It breaks the fourth wall and it includes the audience and the house, and it sort of has no edges.'
Laffrey also mentions the 'enormous overlap' between physical, automated sets and the video elements. 'We were given an extraordinary opportunity here where the idea of analog versus digital, or human versus digital, is so much a part of the story that it felt like something we could really allow to grow out of the storytelling,' he describes, 'as opposed to be used as a tool to replace scenery that wasn't there.'
Photo by Matthew Murphy
One of his favorite digital elements is the proscenium arch, which most audience members don't identify as a series of LED tiles until a key moment in the story. He collaborated with video designer George Reeve on the function of the proscenium. 'There's this huge, surprising moment where for the first time we're sort of experiencing the way that the robots experience information exchange, that suddenly this whole thing comes to life,' Laffrey describes excitedly. 'We have license to not feel like it needs to be photorealistic, that actually we've kind of taught the audience that [Oliver and Claire] don't see things quite like that. They kind of see what's right in front of their face and they're processing information about it … it's an amazing gift to have all of those ways to set this up and build a visual vocabulary that was derived from the core of the storytelling.'
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