PETER BLOOM

Staff photo by Gregory Rec

If all the world's a stage, then Peter Bloom has created six worlds in the past year alone. Bloom is a carpenter from Portland who has been building stage sets in southern Maine theaters for eight years.

He recently finished constructing a set at Biddeford's City Theater for the musical revue Closer Than Ever, which opened Friday.

In Bloom's world, backstage looks like a typical house construction site with a table saw, a chop saw, piles of lumber and plenty of sawdust.

But Bloom's stage sets are anything but the 90-degree box construction typical of most homes.

Take his latest set, for example. In the center of the backdrop is a curved wall made with thin sheets of plastic. On either side are two electric blue trapezoidal walls of thin plywood that have doorways coming out of their corners. Out of the left doorway, a descending walkway snakes around a piano and leads to a platform sloped at a rakish angle toward the front-row seats. At stage left lies a circular stage backed by another towering curved wall.

"There's not a right angle anywhere in the set," Bloom says, smiling.

All the odd shapes, angles and curves are precisely what keeps him interested in building theater sets. He says each new set provides new challenges.

"That's what I've always loved about it; it's not just brainless hammering," he says.

Bloom works off a designer's drawings and he says the trick is to take the designer's idea and to make it all fit so the set comes to life around the actors.

Bloom's ability to do just that is why Patrick Dullea, a set designer from Portland who designed the stage for Closer Than Ever, seeks out Bloom's expertise time and again.

"It's his knowledge of the material and the artistic process that make what I have done on paper come alive," says Dullea. "He's the best of his kind."

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