"I’ll just write about what I wanted to write about from the moment I saw it: David Maslow’s inspired set…Maslow nailed the space from its linoleum tile floor... to the exposed ductwork and mock joists ….The genius of Maslow’s scenic design, however, lay not in the cinematic, tactile verisimilitude of what was onstage, but rather in the set’s highly theatrical relationship to the seating around it…[which] both emphasized the fictional conflict inside the walls and ratcheted up the voyeurism inherent in a play that strips its characters figuratively naked…" |
An unlikely love triangle (Ken Bolden, Sharon Brady (upstage), & Chris Cattell) plays out in a suburban Texas basement in Disinfecting Edwin.
“On David Maslow's vivid set, the couldn't-be-bettered cast…play[s] with vivid, almost scalding commitment.”
Ted Hoover, Theater Critic Pittsburgh City Paper Production recognized in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's annual "Best Of" list. One of the joys of designing in a warehouse space is the ability to redefine the actor/audience relationship for every production. This was a play about boxes (physical, psychological, societal…), so expanding the metaphor to the playing space seemed a must. It also allowed me to treat the acting area as a cross between a Skinner box and a hockey rink. We raised the audience steeply so that everyone could look down into the action and placed them in 2 adjacent banks that formed a physical corner (the DL corner of the playing space, to be precise). The rest of the rather realistic basement locale grew from that (I also enjoy that it rained at the casement window).
- DMM |
