Perspectives / John Conklin John Conklin is a principal figure in American stage design, both for opera and theatre. He wrote and directed The Carving of Mount Rushmore for the 1992 Humana Festival. When Jon Jory called me to create a piece of about an hour on any subject for one Humana Festival, it was at once a total surprise, an intriguing challenge and a source of deep anxiety – even terror. After all I was a designer…what could or would I do with the creation of a dramatic text, with the unknown territory of working in a daily rehearsal situation with a group of (probably skeptical) actors and interacting with other designers not now in a relationship as co-designers but as a “director”? However, as I thought more about it (having blithely accepted), it seemed a typically unusual and creative proposition to have been set forth by Jon and Actors Theatre – a way perhaps of breaking out of the sometimes rigid classification of the theatre – a way of allowing both theatre practitioners and audiences to re-look at the boundaries and contents and functions of the stage and their places in it. I took as a basic text (and title) The Carving of Mount Rushmore – a study by Rex Alan Smith of the life of Gutzon Borglum and his obsessive struggle to actualize his dream – to carve those massive presidential faces into the South Dakota hills. This vision has become an American icon but an icon of what…? Patriotism? Hubris? Self-realization? Ecological vandalism? I worked closely, and with deep respect and affection for, a group of five patient, supportive, flexible actors, a dramaturg and my fellow designers. We collaged historical texts, interviews, memoirs; improvised monologues and interwove these with the deceptively simple poems of William Carlos Williams – the giganticism and overwhelming physical literalism of Borglum’s vision contrasted with the quiet, interior, but equally emotionally committed poetry of Williams. Is this an apt image of the conflicts of expression that the theatre tries to reconcile? – a scale, a drama, an excess, even a kind of crudeness that co-exists with a quiet, almost ordinary, almost hidden depth of feeling that lies quietly beside it?