Art Profile: Scenic Designer Czerton Lim

Lim’s set design for “Talley’s Folly” at Syracuse Stage, a show that was filmed and then streamed for patrons last fall.

Lim’s set design for “Talley’s Folly” at Syracuse Stage, a show that was filmed and then streamed for patrons last fall.

Above, a cardboard model of the set for “Talley’s Folly.”

Making a scene

Scenic designer Czerton Lim’s magical creations at area theaters start with a sketchpad, Google searches and “3 a.m. epiphanies.”

BY MATTHEW NERBER

Czerton Lim is not an artist, as far as he’s concerned. When it comes to describing what he does, he’s more comfortable with the term “designer.”

Lim, who has spent the last 20 years designing sets for theater productions, makes a small but important distinction between the two job descriptions. While an artist creates from the “ether,” as he puts it, a designer is first and foremost a problem solver.

“A designer actually has to answer questions,” Lim says. “As a scenic designer, the biggest question is always the script. For me as a designer, I am part of a conversation that creates this world.”

Lim has made a career out of solving design problems for big musicals throughout Central New York like “Elf” at Syracuse Stage, for which he won a SALT Award, and “West Side Story” at Auburn’s Rev Theatre Company (formerly known as the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse and the Finger Lakes Musical Theater Festival).

Cardboard model and tavern scene from “Beauty and the Beast” at Syracuse Stage.

These days, with COVID-19 restrictions forcing theaters to reschedule or cancel whole seasons, Lim has had to reinvent his playbook. He designed the Lanford Wilson play “Talley’s Folly” for Syracuse Stage knowing it would never be seen by alive audience (the show was filmed and then streamed online for patrons last fall), and he has begun work on the postponed “Matilda the Musical,” which Syracuse Stage hopes to present at some time in the future.

“I don’t think it makes theater less, I think it makes it different,” says Lim, who also teaches scene design at SUNY Fredonia. “And how we approach that thing being different is the subtle nuance that I’m hopefully allowing my students to have. Really the most important thing is just resilience.”

Born in the Philippines before moving to Brooklyn at age 7, Lim eventually settled in Virginia Beach. He attended the College of William and Mary as a biology major with an eye toward medical school. Lim says this scientific background gives him a certain openness, curiosity and creativity, which is essential for navigating roadblocks and arriving at what he calls the “3 a.m. epiphanies.”

Lim’s tools are simple: the script, a pencil, a sketchpad and inspiration images from hours of Google searches. His “Matilda” mood board is heavy on shades of gray, while “Talley’s Folly” favored warmer tones. After he decides on an approach, he will doodle and draw before throwing his sketches into Photoshop. Next come digital renderings and the cardboard models. Lim doesn’t rely on a particular style or aesthetic, although he is fond of the clean lines of minimalism, and he prides himself on coming to every production with a fresh pair of eyes.

So how exactly did the former pre-med student end up with a career in the theater? Lim says it was a total fluke, just the result of a kid looking for extracurriculars to beef up his college applications. He stumbled into the auditorium one day after class, and rehearsals for the high school musical were under way. Someone mistook Lim for a member of the stage crew and put him to work.

“I have a distinct memory of walking into that auditorium and seeing all those people onstage, and the noise just kind of hitting me,” Lim says. “If I was going to be scared, that moment would have been it.”

But the theater community was a welcome one for a shy kid, and Lim even acted onstage during those first few years. When it came time to choose electives at William and Mary, he found himself back in a theater class. One course became two, which became four, and when he visited home the winter of his senior year, Lim broke the news to his parents that his pre-med days were over.

Lim says his parents were supportive, even if they were initially “flabbergasted,” and he eventually graduated with a double major in biology and theater in the hopes of becoming an actor. “And then, of course, reality hits you,” Lim says. He quickly learned he wasn’t so much in love with the limelight. “I realized that I don’t necessarily need to be in front of the stage to feel fulfilled,” he says. “Because the thing that I was enjoying was the creating, the world building, the environment building.”

After working as a scenic painter for a few years, Lim received his M.F.A. in scenic design at the University at Washington. He began his career as a freelancer in New York City, though he still considers his first big break in set design to be “Forever Plaid” from the Rev Theatre Company in Auburn.

Lim now lives in Fredonia with his family, but considers Syracuse his summer home because he often works in the area while on break from teaching. Central New York audiences will know his work from the Rev, where he has designed everything from “Sweeney Todd” to “Singin’ in the Rain,” and Syracuse Stage, where his frequent collaborations with director Donna Drake have included “Beauty and the Beast” as well as “Elf” and, if things go according to plan, “Matilda.”

Lim won a SALT Award for his set design on the musical “Elf” at Syracuse Stage. The designer doesn’t rely on a particular style or aesthetic, but favors the clean lines of minimalism and approaching each production with a fresh pair of eyes.

Drake describes Lim as an excellent collaborator. Working on a show requires months of back and forth, with Drake returning with more and more requests. And while he always delivers on the technical side, she says, his best quality has nothing to do with his work on the stage.

“He makes me laugh, you know, he really does,” Drake says. “I like to create magic, and I always say to Czerton when we start, ‘It’s a $10 million budget!’ Which it’s not. But we pretend we can do anything, and it makes us both more creative.”

As the pair work on “Matilda,” Drake continues to encourage Lim to push his creativity to the limits, solving Broadway-size problems with a regional-theater-size budget.

Randy Steffan, the technical director at Syracuse Stage and a frequent collaborator of Lim’s, described one such instance in “Matilda” — Drake wanted to recreate a moment where one character throws another, sending her flying across the stage.

“Czerton and I exchanged, I bet, 10 emails back and forth,” Steffan says. “And often they would start, ‘Here’s the new bad idea for today!’ And we’d both pick it apart a little bit, until we dreamed up something that we thought was in the world of what Donna was trying to do.”

Last fall, Steffan and Lim worked together on Syracuse Stage’s streaming-only “Talley’s Folly” — a first for Lim, who had never designed specifically for film before.

There were some challenges: Lim says the camera is both more and less observant than the human eye, and sometimes it will pick up precisely the thing you’re trying to hide from the audience. He’s excited to bring lessons like these back to his students, especially as COVID-19 has changed the way theater is made.

Teaching has always been important to Lim, and he’s proud to call himself an educator. But can you call him an artist? Drake, for one, disagrees with him on this front.

“He is absolutely an artist,” she says. “So much comes out of his imagination. As a human being, he is a kind, good, loving soul.”

Matthew Nerber is a graduate student in the Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications Program at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.

PHOTOS COURTESY SYRACUSE STAGE, CARDBOARD MODEL IMAGES COURTESY CZERTON LIM