Rachel Hauck Sets a Scene for Success

The person who designed the set for The Staircase by Noa Gardner was the same person who—in the 1980s—could have handed you a program and led you to your seat. She’s the same person who—in the early 1990s—painted the set you saw before you on SCR’s stage.

And former SCR usher and scenic artist Rachel Hauck is the same person who just received her third Tony Award nomination for set design. That allowed her a moment to reflect on the journey from ushering people to their seats to ushering gasps and appreciation for her work.

“Everyone starts somewhere and I was incredibly lucky to start there,” she said. “It’s incredible to come back. … it really is a chance to reflect on how you got where you landed. I owe so much to SCR. I’m incredibly grateful to the institution for the very long relationship I’ve had with the theatre at all stages of my career.”

Hauck’s career is heading in the same direction as Gardner’s Mother as she ascends The Staircase—three Tony nominations, one Tony Award and a bustling Washington Heights, N.Y. studio loaded with current and future projects. The one-time SCR usher and scenic artist—who had to be coaxed by a friend to work on scenery one weekend during her freshman year at University High in Irvine—found her calling creating captivating, sensory-engaging stage worlds that invite audiences inside those worlds.

Like her set for The Staircase. Hauck’s fifth design for SCR—joining The Mad Woman in the Volvo (2016), The Clean House (2005), Mr. Marmalade (2004) and Sidney Bechet Killed a Man (1997)—brings you into the living room and kitchen of a modest Hawaiian home straight out of Gardner’s neighborhood. The board and batten wood paneling, the Jalousie windows, a hovering-above-the-house mango tree and—of course—the ever-present staircase came straight from the source.

“One of the things Noa talked about constantly was the intense need and desire to see the Hawaii of the people who are really living there, instead of the one represented on TV and movies and by tourists,” said Hauck, whose sister saw the play during its 2023 Pacific Playwrights Festival reading.  “We worked really, really hard to step into his world. We did a lot of research, but the best research we did were the pictures Noa sent us of his neighborhood.

“We worked through different versions of the design, asking ourselves, ‘How do you represent that poetic world?’ Anytime we got too far off the mark of what that world was, Noa was quick to say ‘No. it needs to stay in this place.’ And that’s where we landed.”

“Visually, Rachel Hauck’s scenic design is also an excellent visual ingredient,” wrote C.P. Smith in his Orange County Register review of The Staircase.

Hauck stayed away from the beach cliché, but her most recent Tony nomination came with water. Lots of water. Her captivating set for the Broadway musical Swept Away is equal parts engineering marvel and design visionary. Hauck designed a 19^th century weathered whaling ship that breaks through the proscenium of the Longacre Theatre as a storm sinks it nightly. Four of the 16 crew members scramble into a lifeboat, which is the setting for the musical’s second act.

It literally took Hauck six years to finalize a set that was equal parts workable, repeatable and safe for actors and stage crew.

“There’s no one sentence to describe the engineering sophistication. That’s the beauty of scenic work,” she said. “We took new lumber and weathered it to make it look like an 1880s whaling ship. It’s unbelievable to be invited to imagine something like that, let alone create it. I’m very, very lucky.”

Make no mistake. Hauck is also very, very talented. She won her Tony for her design of Hadestown—winning the prized statuette on her first nomination and only second Broadway show. That magnificent design took eight years to finalize and changed from city to city before it got to Broadway. Once it did, reviewers marveled at the seamless manner Hauck merged a New Orleans bar with a Greek amphitheater—while metaphorically bringing the audience through the doors.

“Rachel Hauck’s set design impressionistically gives us a sense of being in a Louisiana bar at the edge of the world, which allows us to embark on the epic journeys and narrative threads whilst still feeling as though we’re simply being told a vital folk tale over a drink,” wrote the OnStage Blog.

Hauck’s voice is still tinged with awe whenever she talks about that Tony. The former SCR usher, who would lead guests past the Tony sitting in SCR’s lobby when she was in high school, now has one of her own. When talking about everything that went into that moment, she repeatedly went back to her SCR roots, saying she “wouldn’t be in New York without everyone there.”

“It was the rush of a lifetime hearing my name read,” she said about the moment. “I didn’t expect it would go that way. It’s an unbelievable rush and a complete thrill and shock. My mom was there and my sister was watching on TV. My partner, Lisa was there. When they handed me the Tony, well, how do you ever get over that experience? It changed my life.”

The Staircase is more than Hauck’s latest critically appreciated design. It describes her path, her model of success—an apt way of defining how she does what she does. Because all her designs begin with a working model that end up in front of you on stage.

“I just love being in the room with a play. I love being in the room with an audience. I love the chance to define the world for a play that might be completely different than what you did last year,” she said. “Theatre invites a different level of participation from the audience than film or TV. If you can find a poetic language that holds a story, it’s just an intensely personal experience from the audience.

“But as an artist who gets to make it, it’s just very different than everything else. I love it.”