Kate Noll is in France
“I had to think about it and be like, ‘Maybe I’m bad at this, and that’s a good thing. It means I’m good at something else.’” — Kate Noll on failure
When Kate Noll was five, her father took her kicking and screaming to the San Francisco Opera. Her father was a supernumerary (an extra in opera terms) in the 1994 production of Mephistopheles, Arrigo Boito’s operatic adaptation of Faust. Though Kate was initially interested in one of the parts for children, things took a turn once she got to the opera house. In the end, she made it backstage, where she saw a theater set in person for the first time.
But the scenic designer, whose work on John J. Caswell, Jr.’s play Wet Brain just closed at Playwrights Horizons, didn’t watch its critically acclaimed run from the wings. When it premiered, Kate was already in France.
When we meet for our Zoom interview, she’s sitting outside in her grandmother’s backyard. She’s six hours ahead, and the sun is setting behind her. There is something anachronistic about the bucolic setting. Kate, who wears her hair up in a bun and a black dress over a printed blouse, looks equally like the lead in a pastoral play as she does an in-demand scenic designer.
Growing up in Berkeley, California as a self-described art kid, “The choice to become an artist was not apparent. That was just naturally what I was.” Her father is an architect, and her mother is a former children’s book illustrator. Both come from what Kate describes as a “heavy, heavy art background.” Her maternal grandparents met in art school at Yale, where she’s been told her grandfather was the first person to graduate with a master’s degree in painting. The house where she’s spending her summer in France belongs to her paternal grandparents, a poet and a chef.
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Painting and Illustration, Kate followed a boyfriend to Amsterdam. There she worked as a studio artist for two years before returning to New York to seek out more collaborative mediums. She transitioned to the film industry, which she remembers as “real burnout.” “I’m not good at doing what people tell me to do,” she explains. Though she’s only “mildly” into astrology, she thinks being a Scorpio sun and Leo rising might have something to do with it.
Before transitioning to scenic design, Kate remembers trying and failing at many things. “I had to think about it and be like, ‘Maybe I’m bad at this, and that’s a good thing. It means I’m good at something else.’” A chance reconnection with a classmate from RISD led to her learning about the Yale School of Drama, the prestigious program that’s been turning out theater heavyweights for a century. But what attracted Kate wasn’t the pedigree. It was that she could learn to design opera sets for free. She applied and got in.
At Yale, Kate met directing student Dustin Wills. Wills, the director of Wet Brain, has become one of her most frequent collaborators, someone whom Kate tells me her husband, an architect, calls her “other husband.”
Kate describes Wet Brain as her most challenging project yet. The set is built on a turntable and, throughout the ninety-minute play, rotates like a Lazy Susan. Eventually, it reveals what lies beyond the claustrophobic house and the looming tree that dominates the play’s first two acts. The dramatic reveal has been the subject of critical acclaim, which Kate finds affirming. She left before previews to return to her husband and children in France. At the time, she suspected she had failed.
Wet Brain is not only Kate’s first show since the pandemic, it’s also her first since becoming a mother. I ask if having two children has shifted the way she thinks about theater. “It’s made me less tolerant of bullshit, that’s for sure,” she says. It’s also caused her to reflect on money and the sustainability of a career in theater. But while she’s reaching, as she puts it, “a financial crunch point,” she admits she can’t say no when Dustin, a “genius” who believes in her, calls with a new project.
A rosy-cheeked child pops into the frame. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here,” she asks as she picks him up and introduces me. This is William, her one-year-old son. I say hi as Kate segues back to Wet Brain, with William still on her lap. Like all things with Kate, this transition feels effortless, even though I’m sure there’s more to it. “I probably made 38,000 of the right decisions and 10,000 of the wrong decisions. You have to have a lot of faith.”
When we wrap up, Kate tells me she’s on her way to cocktail hour. A gin and tonic awaits her, along with the cigarettes she only ever smokes in France with her grandma. Right now, cocktail hour is a ritual, “pretty much the pinnacle of the day.”
This piece was written as part of the SVA Design Writing & Research Online Summer Intensive 2023. Learn more at designresearch.sva.edu.
