By Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Linda Gaboriau
Silk Road Theatre Project
October 2010
Directed by Dale Heinen
Set design by Tom Burch
Projection design by Mike Tutaj
Costume design by Carole Blanchard
Sound design by Peter Storms

Production photos

Design process images

The design challenge of Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched is to create a space that supports a story that flows in and out of time and place, sliding backwards and forwards from the present tense to decades earlier, from North America to the Middle East, intersecting as the two adult twin siblings discover the secrets of their mother’s past.  Using clues she has left behind for them, the twins travel from Montreal to Lebanon, working backwards to uncover the truth, while their mother’s story is unveiled to the audience in scenes that move forward and overlap with the twins’ journey. Tom Burch’s set evoked the bullet-ridden buildings and the hot, dry texture of the Middle East, while a large, modern, plastic-looking slab seems to have crash-landed on that environment, providing a ground zero for the present-tense, present-continent scenes. The lighting design idea was inspired by the burning-hot photography of Rebecca Guberman Bloom, contrasted with the cool contemporary interiors of photographer Doug Dubois. Tourism photos of Lebanon provided an inspiration for the romantic lavender side-lighting that underscores the love story fighting for a place in a war-torn environment.

Adapted by Christina Calvit from the novel by Emily Brontë
Lifeline Theatre
September 2010
Directed by Elise Kauzlaric
Set design by Alan Donahue
Costume design by Branimira Ivanova
Sound design by Andrew Hansen

Production photos

There is a lot of music in my work at the moment.

In November, I will light a delightful collaboration between the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lookingglass Theatre.  Peter and the Wolf opens at Symphony Hall on November 6th.  David Kersnar is directing, Marianna Csaszar is designing our set, and Alison Siple is designing the costumes.

Also in November, I am working with Roosevelt University on a pair of operas.  Joanie Schultz is directing Savitri by August Holst.  Blake Montgomery is directing Ravel’s L’enfant et les Sortileges.  Marianna Csaszar is designing costumes, Margaret Goddard is designing the set.

And of course, the aforementioned Opera America Director-Designer showcase.

This fall I will be collaborating on a design for the Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Showcase.  The showcase is a program offered by Opera America, a national service organization for opera.  Finalists in the design competition will present their design ideas to general, artistic and production directors at Opera Conference 2011 in Boston.

George Cederquist will direct our design for Marco Polo by Tan Dun.  Sally Weiss will design set, Mina Hong will design costumes.

Suicide, Incorporated at the Gift Theatre has extended its run.  The little house keeps filling up with people, so hurry up and get a ticket!

by Andrew Hinderaker
The Gift Theatre
June 2010
Directed by Jonathan Berry
Set design by Dan Stratton
Costume design by Emily McConnell
Sound design by Matthew Chapman

Production photos

Research collage and idea sketches
Andrew Hinderaker’s new play Suicide, Incorporated follows a man who takes a job at a firm that specializes in writing suicide notes for clients planning to end their lives.  It is a story with characters who feel real, even though the plot veers into figurative, sometimes absurd, territory.  The challenge of the design is create an environment that supports the reality of characters and helps the audience to believe the situation, while also supporting the path that the play takes away from reality.  The design also needed to support director Jonathan Berry’s assertion that the action never stop, that the central character is struggling to stay on top of life that is moving quickly out of his control.  Dan Stratton’s set developed from research of sparse office spaces and apartments into a set of whitewashed plaster walls that could be either location with the swift re-arrangement of furniture during transitions driven by the central character.  The lighting supports this by creating a distinct color-temperature difference: the office, anchored in hot articifical downlight; and the apartment, where cool backlight elicited the feeling of moonlight throught the dark aparment.  But when the central character collapses into memory conversations with a deceased brother, shifting to a strong back diagonal tinted blue subtly supports a stray from reality.  A final moment in the play revealed the set in an unexpected way, washing the black back wall with white light and silhouetting the walls and the remembered  brother.

Suicide, Inc. opens Thursday at the Gift Theatre at 4802 N. Milwaukee.

Press opening was last night, and we are Jeff Recommended!

Also, Chris Jones has some nice things to say.

Congratulations to director Jonathan Berry and a room full of incredible designers: Emily McConnell on costumes, Dan Stratton on set, Matthew Chapman on sound.  Many loud and repetitive thank-yous to Columbia lighting design student Emily Barbian for assisting on lighting design.

Photos soon!

Congratulations to the House Theatre’s Wilson Wants It All for garnering count-em-up SIX non-Equity Jeff nominations:

Director – Michael Rohd
New Work – Michael Rohd and Phillip C. Klapperich
Original Incidental Music – Kevin O’Donnell
Sound Design – Michael Griggs
Artistic Specialization (Video Design) – Lucas Merino
AND
Play – WILSON WANTS IT ALL (!)

Now that Lifeline Theatre has officially announced their 2010-2011 season, I can officially get excited about Wuthering Heights!  I have always had a love/hate relationship with the tale of the most onerous hero and heroine in all of English literature.  Its such a desperate and depressing story of the pain of passion, and yet I have managed to read the book a few times and I have seen every television adaptation possible.  I guess that’s why it is a “classic.”

I will also be back at Lifeline Kidseries, designing lights for Arnie the Doughnut, an adaptation of a popular children’s book…with music, of course.  And I love doughnuts.

Book and lyrics by Nathan Allen, Jake Minton, and Chris Mathews
Music by Kevin O’Donnell with Nathan Allen
The House Theatre of Chicago (Chopin Theatre)
April 2010
Directed by Nathan Allen
Set design by Collette Pollard
Costume design by Ana Kuzmanic
Sound design by Brett Masteller

Production photos

Research and renderings

Girls vs. Boys started as a workshop at Northwestern University, where director and co-writer Nathan Allen led a class of undergraduates in exploring friendship, love, sex, and the joy and pain of experiencing them all as a young person.  Through a fully realized workshop production with the American Musical Theatre Project and further development by the House company, the story that emerged followed six young people through a night of love and heartbreak, employing a few metaphors to tell the story (guns, rose petals, and glitter) but none so solidly as rock and roll music.
As rock music became the central means to express the amplified emotions of teenage years, the set developed as a venue for that concert.  Collette Pollard used aluminum truss to stake out the space, elevated the band as a backdrop for the action, and created a stage and runways that surrounded a standing-room-only audience.  The lighting design idea was inspired by images of rock concerts, especially the saturated colors washing over a guitarist entranced in an epic solo, and the beams of light piercing through haze.  The light plot was developed with two main ideas:  a surround of white light coming from the truss, and down light in shifting colors.  The two joined in changing, sometimes pulsing combinations to complete the rock n roll aesthetic.