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A Life in Design

After audiences filed into the Peninsula Players’ theater to see Around the World in 80 Days in 2009, the set transported them to dozens of global locations through a rotating, metal jungle gym of ramps, staircases, levels, platforms and firefighters’ poles: a dizzying display of theatricality designed to surprise audience members at every turn. And through those surprises, it succeeded in doing everything that Jim Maronek sets out to achieve when he designs a set.

“The more theatrical, the better,” he said. “I love tricking people into thinking that something will happen, but then they are delightfully surprised.”

Maronek has many design credits in Door County and well beyond, including on and off Broadway. He spent years as the resident designer for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where he was also a professor of design at the Schools of the Art Institute. And locally, if you’ve seen a production at Peninsula Players or Northern Sky Theater, you’ve more than likely seen Maronek’s work.

Jim Maronek Submitted.

His life in theater began at a young age. As early as junior high school, Maronek remembers sketching and designing plays from his imagination. From there, at only 17 years old in 1950, he began his first professional job working with Peninsula Players where, for the next four seasons, he designed sets and lighting elements for many productions. 

His job as a designer is to bring to life the playwright’s script and the director’s vision for it. The collaboration is a close one, he said, but it also depends on the individuals involved. 

“Some directors have strong feelings from the beginning on how their production should look,” he said. “Other directors rely heavily, sometimes entirely, on the visions of their designers. A designer has to be able to step in and provide that vision when called upon.”

For Maronek, each play is different. Some scripts inspire him to respond with a strong artistic voice, and others require a more routine design. But he always tries to include an element of surprise.

In a production of Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, Maronek designed a set that unfolded before the audience’s eyes, built to surprise every step of the way. He created the effect by littering the stage with shipping containers and crates. As the production evolved, each box opened to reveal the next piece of the visual presentation.

“Theatricality is my preference,” Maronek said. To him, theatricality is based on the foundation that theater is live, which requires him to employ techniques that fit each theater’s specific qualities to create the most exciting productions. 

In some situations, that means finding creative solutions for unusual challenges – such as the Around the World in 80 Days set. The play takes place in dozens of locations, and Maronek’s solution was that twisting, gymnastic machine on a turntable, which gave access to different sets.

It’s one thing to create a striking design; it’s another to produce one that can also be built. That means a lot of technical work goes into set design that may never be seen by anyone beyond the carpenters and painters. 

Elevations, sketches, specifications, measurements – everything must be documented before construction can begin. For the machine Maronek created for Around the World in 80 Days, for example, he had to first create a scale model, simply because there was no better way to explain the design. 

Maronek was an integral part of redesigning Northern Sky’s outdoor stage at Peninsula State Park, back when the theater was called American Folklore Theatre. Falling in love with the outdoor space and all the fun they had with it, Maronek worked on more than a dozen plays for Northern Sky. He was called on once again during the construction of its Gould Theater, where he promoted the idea of shifting the outdoors inside, which led to incorporating rough-sawn cedar planks that echo the planking of the stage he designed for the park installation. 

Designers must keep the theater in mind when producing any set because the elements that are available in one theater may be limited in another. The same goes for designing something outdoors, or a set that will travel to more than one venue, as was the case with many of Maronek’s designs for Northern Sky. 

“My favorite show of all for Northern Sky is Guys on Ice,” he said. “It was designed originally to be indoors at the Ephraim Town Hall, which is extremely limited, but then moved into the park theater outdoors.” This presented a sort of “reverse challenge,” he said, in that it can often be easier to move an outdoor show inside, where more technical elements become available. 

Maronek’s initial work at Peninsula Players inspired a lifelong love for Door County, where he now resides. After retiring as a DePaul University professor emeritus, Maronek opened Silver Poplar Studios in Ellison Bay, where he displays his latest endeavor – fine art – alongside some of his set designs. 

But Maronek is also still designing – as recently as 2020 for both Peninsula Players and Northern Sky, but both productions were canceled because of the pandemic. 

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