I designed the scenery/configuration for this post-modern examination of the reverberations of the Holocaust. Since the text moves fluidly between nested layers of reality – a haunted writer’s, his vision of his grandfather’s Shahrazad-like existence in a concentration camp, & within the fantastical stories the grandfather tells the Commandant – my goal was to take the audience directly into the writer’s slightly surreal imagination: by turns overwhelmed by the horrors but also at times Chagall-like, soft and longing. The warehouse venue allowed us to create an immersive feeling while maintaining the structured actor-audience relationship the complicated plot required: the audience entered through gates, passing barbed wire,,large piles of shoes and clothing that conjured images of the holocaust (and emptied the company’s costume storage) while impressionistic angels floated at the rear of the space.
