Tuck Everlasting by Claudia Shear & Tim Federle

One of the biggest challenges of Tuck Everlasting is creating the tree set piece where the Tucks find the Fountain of Youth. The main challenge of the tree is that two characters have to be able to climb it, stand on the branches, and one has to be able to go out on a limb & jump off it. The tree had to be very stable so we decided to build it on a half-circle plywood base, using a lot of angled supports on the inside, and using a cantilever to balance the “limb” one of the actors had to stand on.

Once the tree was constructed, I experimented with a few ways to create a bark texture for such a large scale & decided to use large sheets of paper maché over a thick chipboard that was stapled over the wooden skeleton.

To paint the tree, we used a base coat of brown, then several layers of brown dry brushing in a range of shades, a final dry brush of very pale brown, and then added moss & plants around the trunk and roots.

I initially designed the circus stands to look like they were homemade out of boxes with tattered fabric awnings, but there were concerns that they would be too heavy, so we switched to simple rectangular faces with small shelves, which I designed & then hand painted.

For the Tuck house, I designed three pieces that were double sided to be the Tuck kitchen on one side and their attic on the other. On the attic side, I wanted it to look unfinished, like the construction was stopped halfway through to compliment the clutter in the attic.