Alice Through the Proscenium is THE traveler's guide to the strange world of set design. With wry humor, based on the author's experience in regional and civic theater, Alice takes the reader step-by-step through the process: reading the script; then designing, drawing, and modeling; into set building, painting, and dressing; and right through to Strike. This book explains working with the rest of the characters - the design and production teams of director, producers, designers, builders, and actors. Even critics. Because not all the drama is on-stage. With examples and down-to-earth suggestions, Alice is a resource for new or seasoned designers... who may laugh out loud. (Not all the humor is on-stage either.) Theaters, producers, and directors will find insight into set design. There are chapters on design methods and elements; helpful illustrations; an index/glossary; and tool, material, and book lists. Final chapters discuss film and TV production design and a design career. Alice Through the Proscenium comes from my own experience in teaching myself theater set design. I'm an architect, which you'd think would give me a head start, but Things Are Different On-Stage. I hunted all over for a guidebook to scenic design and theater for the newbie - I found plenty of textbooks or construction guides, but I found very little to help me understand this strange new world. I mean, who is a stage manager? What do they do? Whose opinion mattered to me, as a designer? Why did a furniture arrangement that worked in my living room NOT work on-stage? How could I paint a floor as big as a barn? (And why did I have to re-paint it?) When I did, finally, find a book that helped explain theater logic... well, it turned out to be Alice in Wonderland . So I took notes of things I learned as I went along (too often the note read, "Don't do that again!") And those notes grew into this book: Alice . Let it guide you. Clare Floyd DeVries is an architect, a theater set designer, a collage artist, and nowadays a writer on all that.