One of them spent three years in architectural school dreaming up buildings until his work-study program made him realize “it was more fun to design forests for Camelot.” The other thought he might be a painter, but then “couldn’t quite figure out” how to have a career in art. Seattle should be thanking whatever mythical muses turned the heads of these guys toward the theater, because BRAD COOK and MATTHEW SMUCKER have become two of the most reliably inventive set designers in town, the latter working on mainstages, the former at the Capitol Hill fringe space, Union Garage.

If you saw a play in the last 12 months and walked out praising the set, chances are Smucker’s name was on it. If you were a shut-in, here are the pleasures you missed: his demented fun-house twist on Thomas Middleton for Annex’s The Changeling; the fences that divided the lives of The Outsiders at Seattle Children’s Theater; the graffitied inside of a schizophrenic’s head for Intiman’s Blue/ Orange; the confined elegance of a trapped wife in Nora, also at Intiman; and, perhaps most memorably, the many-windowed, luxurious Barbie Dream House spectacle that encased another Nora in Strange Attractors, which premiered at the Empty Space in January. In some cases, the remarkable universe Smucker imagined was far more rewarding than what the rest of the production managed to give us.

It’s an imagination fueled, Smucker says, by any number of random inspirationsa director’s cunning vision, a particular painting, or, in many cases, “going to the library and [finding] the book that’s next to the book that’s next to the book that actually is the one you looked up that has some weird picture in it.” Asked about his design aesthetic, Smucker says, “[Usually in] the plays that I’m drawn to, there’s this heightened world or metaphorical sensibility that you can tap into. I like when you get to figure out all the rules for a world from the ground up, because it’s not quite like our world.” His work can currently be seen in SCT’s The Gingerbread Mana fairy tale that no doubt suits his flights of fancy well.

Brad Cook, meanwhile, has been keeping it real for two of Seattle’s fringe companies, A Theater Under the Influence and Theatre Babylon, both of which operate out of Union Garage. Cook basically runs the place, administrating, renting out the front (Babylon’s home is in back), acting in and directing showsand building sets of fairly astonishing veracity on a budget of next to nothing.

His bravura design for the ’20s revival The Racket in 2001in which he was also a featured actorhad two pitch-perfect period interiors on what only looked like an expensive turntable set. “We were going to put a turntable on there, but logistically we couldn’t, and we just didn’t have the money,” he explains. “And all of a sudden, I realized I had 16 men onstage [in the cast] and I’m like, Well, we can pick up the whole thing and move it. And, hey, a couple of pieces of carpet, all of a sudden these walls are sliding. The audience goes to the bathroom, comes back, and it’s like, ‘Where did that come from?'”

At the moment, Cook is trying to shoehorn Jo Mielziner’s original Broadway set for A Streetcar Named Desire into the Garage’s modest 28-foot-by-43-foot back theater; a drawing by the legendary Mielziner graces the script from Dramatists Play Service, and Cook is using it as ambitious inspiration. “If we go lengthwise, we can get pretty much all of it in,” he says. “We’re gonna have enough room to have about four or five feet of street, and then the bedroom, and the kitchen, plus the little sidewe’re gonna have all the elements there. It’s a little cramped, but it all fits.”Steve Wiecking

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