On the Playhouse Marx stage, King Lear (Joneal Joplin) stands on a carpet of earth. Behind him is a massive shaft of clear glass and steel, set on a diagonal. Caged inside is nature, which occasionally erupts — thanks to the magic of lighting design — with swirling clouds, rain and fog. Streaks of stage lightning occasionally snarl into brief life.

        In Lear, design elements blend the primitive and post-industrial into an unsettling atmosphere. Costumes of exotic fabrics can't quite be connected to a single time or place. Musical underscoring subtly adds to the somber, moment-out-of-time effect.

        One look is an invitation to ask: How'd they do that?

IF YOU GO

What: King Lear     When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7 p.m., Sunday through Oct. 5     Where: Playhouse in the Park Marx Theatre, Eden Park     Tickets: $30-$42. Any unreserved seats are half-price day of show purchased between 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Playhouse box office. 421-3888, (800) 582-3208.

        Not easily.

        “It's all imagination,” lighting designer Thomas Hase notes. “We're creating a world unto itself.”

        “That's hard to do well,” set designer Karen TenEyck inserts.

        “And easy to do badly,” costume designer Susan Tsu says.

        In the final week of rehearsal, Lear's design team found a few minutes to sit down and talk about how they do what they do.

        Conversations began last winter. Mr. Hase was lighting Dark Paradise,and Playhouse producing artistic director and Lear director Ed Stern started talking generalities. “He said he was interested in some kind of (lighting) grid upstage, for some play, he didn't even say the title.”

        A month later, Mr. Stern started chatting with Ms. Tsu. “Ed was interested in nomadic societies, people on the cusp, coming out of living off the land.”

        Costumes with Renaissance lines changed character as she layered on influences from world cultures: jewelry and patterns from Tibet and Nepal, boots and trousers from Afghanistan, fabrics from Indonesia and India.

        “What you see are items from cultures whose visual identity has remained the same for a long time,” Ms. TenEyck observes. “What we're doing (scenery and lighting) is cold and slick. The costumes add humanity.”

        Ms. TenEyck committed to the project in April. “Ed wanted a dirt floor and a grid overhead to hang lights. He was interested in the elements — water, fire, air, earth. I thought it would be interesting if a grid, as a scenic element, could capture all that.

        “A lot of times when you're designing you're influenced by what's it front of you,” she says, and explains her inspiration for one of the production's key scenic elements. “I was driving here from Cleveland, and the car rental place had an angled wall.”

        Mr. Hase agrees, “It's where you are and what's going on in your life. I had seen this quirky Beowulf that didn't have a time frame and was a mix of elemental stuff and industrial.

        “I grew up in the Ruhr Valley,” he continues, “and in the '80s it was all about oil refineries and abandoned factories and warehouses, all falling apart.”

"Parking lot look'

        Those references have found their way into Lear. Dawn is translated by using deep yellow lamps for “a sodium vapor parking lot look,” Mr. Hase says.

        “This isn't "long ago, in a place far away,' ” he says. Using lighting elements that contemporary audiences can reference helps draw them into the immediacy of the action.

        Douglas Lowry, part-time composer and full-time dean of the College-Conservatory of Music, began his discussions with Mr. Stern in June.

        “I saw preliminary set designs,” Mr. Lowry says. “It's important to know if I'm writing for an historical period. I asked Ed whose music might suggest the tenor, the tone he wanted, and we listened to a few CDs.”

        They talked some more, discussing which moments in the script Mr. Stern felt needed scoring.

        Then came hard creative decisions. “What may sound dark and brooding to someone may sound sentimental to someone else,” he says. And what is prerecorded “can easily sound phony.”

        Mr. Lowry wrote 46 musical cues using string quartet and piano. Some float near the subconscious, like the prelude music. A gradually intensifying drum sequence is layered with sound effects; the nine fanfares called for in the script are played, but not by the traditional trumpets.

        This is the largest production Mr. Lowry has scored. “I had a ball,” he says.

Next, the details

        Meanwhile, back on stage, after the overall design was agreed on, attention was devoted to details. Several kinds of soil were considered before one was chosen and several tons laid out on the Playhouse stage floor.

        Ms. TenEyck wanted it as dark as possible, easiest for a lighting designer to work with. But from far away the deep brown chosen can look like a carpet. The solution is that it gets worked through with a hoe before every show.

        “You see the floor a lot, the actors spend time on the floor, it becomes a backdrop,” Mr. Hase says.

        To the rear of the stage is a mural, painted on both sides so a second texture is visible under lighting. When the design elements play off each other “you can see a vague image of the empire that everyone is trying to capture,” Ms. TenEyck says.

        “I didn't want it to look too pretty,” she adds. “It's polluted, corrupt.”

        Ms. TenEyck is particularly pleased with Lear's throne, a set piece that dominates the opening scene and that's hard to pin down to a time or place. It's arts and crafts from the turn of the 20th century, a movement which borrowed from design of the 1400s.

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