Suicide, Incorporated

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.