The Visionary Design Behind The Broadway Musical ‘Maybe Happy Ending’

“Love,” as Maya Angelou wrote, “recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” Love can transcend obstacles. It transforms lives.

And in the case of the Broadway musical Maybe Happy Ending, love inspires two very lifelike robots to recharge in seismic ways. There’s Claire (Helen J. Shen) a Helperbot 5 and Oliver, (Darren Criss), an older model HelperBot 3. They are neighbors in an apartment building on the outskirts of Seoul who have no friends nor connections. That is until they discover one another.

Set in the not-too-distant future, these obsolete HelperBots are expected to be powering down, but love has alternate plans for them. And the power and connection they find in one another are reminders of what it feels like to be human.

As Gil Brentley, Oliver’s favorite crooner (played by Dez Duron) sings: “So tell me, why love? When all things end in goodbye, love? Why did we dream that this fate would not be ours? When even stars up above ask where their glow went…Love lasts one moment. And then that final task: To sigh and ask, why love?”

With book and songs by Will Aronson (who composed the music) and Hue Park (who wrote the lyrics), this intoxicating and completely original production brings us into the world of these HelperBots. Humans are expertly portrayed by Duron and Marcus Choi, who plays multiple characters, including Oliver’s former owner. Directed by Michael Arden, Maybe Happy Ending received ten Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical.

Scenic designer Dane Laffrey brings this high-tech world to neon splendor with shrinking and expanding sliding rooms, video, and an innovative shifting landscape. Working with video designer George Reeve to create video projections, lighting designer Ben Stanton, and sound designer Peter Hylenski, Laffrey’s sets feel like another character in the production.

“The show moves. A lot,” says Laffrey, who was nominated for a Tony, along with George Reeve, for Best Scenic Design of a Musical. “It centers around two characters who haven’t left their homes in years but then decide to go on an adventure. We wanted the audience to feel that journey as viscerally as possible. The world expands visually to mirror Oliver and Claire’s expanding experience of it.”

Laffrey, who is also a co-producer of the show and has a second nomination for Best Musical, remembers the jubilation he felt when he first encountered the show after attending a reading that Arden directed. “I remember knowing right away that it was a really special piece. But also, in a thrilling way, that it was going to be extremely challenging to put onstage,” he says. “And I love a challenge.”

Zooming out as co-producer and designer, what makes Laffrey most proud is the entire undertaking of the production, the totality of it all. “Presenting something that’s wholly original is almost an act of audacity on Broadway at this point,” he says of the show that is now running at the Belasco Theatre. “But telling original stories is the lifeblood of the theater—watching Maybe Happy Ending build its audience and truly thrive is amazing.”

Jeryl Brunner: When you were enlisted to be scenic designer for Maybe Happy Ending, did you instantly have a vision for what you wanted to create?

Dane Laffrey: I try to never enter a process with preconceptions about design. I take nothing about stage design as a given. So I certainly didn’t know exactly what I wanted to create from the jump. I think I had an instinct for how the show wanted to move and that the visual world wanted to be constantly unfolding. And I knew that for many sections of the show we were going to need to be able to move really fast.

A show as complex as Maybe Happy Ending, that encompasses so many locations, needs to be storyboarded within an inch of its life. Storyboarding is typical for my process. It’s essential to see how the whole show could play out in the space you’re developing for it. Once we had a draft of a container, a space we felt could successfully provide all the things the story was asking for, we then road-tested it scene-by-scene. Eventually, through a lot of back and forth inside the storyboarding process, we landed on a design we felt was right.

Brunner: You have said that instead of giving Claire and Oliver’s apartment a futuristic sci-fi feeling, you wanted to evoke real-world references. Why was that so key?

Laffrey: It was very important to me that Oliver and Claire’s apartments felt visceral to the audience. The show is set in the near future, but we didn’t want to overburden the world with sci-fi mythology. Our aim was to collapse the distance between the audience and the story.

The opening song, “the World Within My Room,” shows years elapsing for Oliver inside the confines of his space. It was important that the audience could really feel that claustrophobia and isolation and understand that the tiny room you see in the iris is the entirety of his space, his whole world. Oliver doesn’t understand that he has been retired and left to power down. He believes with every fiber, and transistor, of his being that his owner James will return to pick him up, and so he’s crafted a home for himself that he feels James would be proud of. And it’s full of objects passed down to him from James.

Brunner: And how about Claire’s space?

Laffrey: Claire’s apartment, though an architectural mirror image, couldn’t be more different. She understands that her environment is something of a purgatory. It’s largely empty, void of decoration, and populated only by things that feel discarded, like she is. I find both spaces to be suffused with melancholy, but for quite different reasons.

Brunner: What inspired you to use video to visualize the city and what is going on inside the HelperBots’ minds?

Laffrey: The video is an integral part of the visual world because it’s an integral part of the storytelling. There’s a narrative requirement that we drop the audience into Oliver and Claire’s memory banks. Doing so gave us an incredible opportunity to create a visual language for the entire video design. We learn in these memories how HelperBots metabolize visual information: an almost myopic focus on the human in front of them. When we later use video in more environmental ways, it’s intentionally impressionistic. We once again use the point of view of the protagonists to inform the audience’s experience.

Brunner: You have collaborated with Michael Arden on several productions including Parade, Once On This Island, Spring Awakening and A Christmas Carol. What is the joy of working together?

Laffrey: I am profoundly lucky to have had Michael Arden enter my life when we were both 16 years-old, away from home for the first time as boarding school students. Ever since, we have been thick as thieves. There are so many benefits to a long-term collaboration like the one we share – so much shorthand, so much shared vocabulary. We also strongly believe in pushing each other to approach every project as something entirely new, which is why I think our body of work is so diverse and that the look and feel of each of our shows is distinct. We don’t subscribe to a style, but rather an ethos about healthy collaboration and storytelling that has heart.

Recently, we’ve added producing work to our slate, through our company, At Rise Creative, which is an added dimension to our collaboration we are finding really fulfilling. Our work in that vein includes Parade, The Roommate, Sunset Blvd, Maybe Happy Ending and our upcoming show The Lost Boys.

Brunner: Where were you when you learned about your Tony nominations and what went through your mind?

Laffrey: I was in my apartment in Manhattan. I’m usually too nervous to watch the nominations announced live, but this year I plucked up the courage. I was extremely excited for my co-nominee, our video designer George Reeve, as it was his first nomination. The show is his Broadway debut. And of course for Michael. It doesn’t cease to be a bit surreal to hear your oldest friend’s name in that context. Mostly, it was thrilling to see the show rack up so many nominations. It’s a testament to the very hard work of so many people.