Little Children Dream of God
by Jeff Augustin
Directed by: Josh Brody
Costume Designer: Amy Sutton Lighting Designer: Bo Tindell |
University of California San Diego
Theodore and Adele Shank Theatre April 2013 |
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Many immigrants come to the United States to escape the life they have led in their homeland, but our pasts are inextricably part of us, so we can never have a truly new beginning. Augustin’s new play explores this theme through the life of Sula who floated in a tire from Haiti to America so she could give birth far from her abusive ex. She wants to raise her son free of her ex’s influence but still feels the allure of his vivacious voodoo energy.
I designed the set around a hanging expanse of cloth whose undulations evoked the sea that Sula had floated to America on. Defining the spaces of her life with this flowing, unsteady material maintained a feeling that all the characters of the play were adrift and unable to find a steady place to build their lives. Whether the room was a poor immigrant’s apartment, or a rich couple’s home, the walls of their lives all trembled with uncertainty.
On a technical level, the script required a eleven separate spaces and continuous rapid transitions between them. The hanging cloth allowed us to define very distinct spaces that could be transformed in seconds by raising and lowering different sections of the cloth. The play began with Sula sitting in a suspended tire with the cloth draped over the set to create an ocean, so the audience’s first introduction to the cloth was as flowing water.
"The Event of a Thread" by Ann Hamilton: http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/projects/armory.html
I designed the set around a hanging expanse of cloth whose undulations evoked the sea that Sula had floated to America on. Defining the spaces of her life with this flowing, unsteady material maintained a feeling that all the characters of the play were adrift and unable to find a steady place to build their lives. Whether the room was a poor immigrant’s apartment, or a rich couple’s home, the walls of their lives all trembled with uncertainty.
On a technical level, the script required a eleven separate spaces and continuous rapid transitions between them. The hanging cloth allowed us to define very distinct spaces that could be transformed in seconds by raising and lowering different sections of the cloth. The play began with Sula sitting in a suspended tire with the cloth draped over the set to create an ocean, so the audience’s first introduction to the cloth was as flowing water.
"The Event of a Thread" by Ann Hamilton: http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/projects/armory.html