Since I’m all settled into Mpls for a little while, I finally have time to tell you all about the show I did right before I left.

It was a modern movement piece to modern pop music- things like Lady Gaga, Britney Speares, and Kelly Clarkson. The piece was written and directed by my good friend Joey. It was a basic boy meets girl, boy screws up, boy leaves girl scenario, with the main character’s thoughts and feelings reflected by two people in matching masks representing their thoughts and emotions, or at times their friends. Because every character was wearing a mask, and because the show was so prop heavy, I had a chance to really design the piece, and if I do say so myself, the piece was very visually pretty. Really fun to watch.

So without further ado, I present to you as many pictures as I can from the process! First up is my unfinished masks, the symbolic ones which were supposed to reflect the painting that the girl made (she was an artist).

This was the painting.

Over the course of the show, the boy spills “beer” on the painting, staining it. SO the masks for the bit where she’s in depression over him leaving needed to reflect that. Finished masks? Voila!

All characters had masks, I just designed the four for the crazy depression-y bit. Here’s a rehearsal shot of the thoughts “haunting” the girl with their masks. The girl is currently just out of frame to the left.

Heather, who is awesome, designed the other seven masks.

Aren’t they pretty? The weird wrinkly one on the bottom is the mask for the grandma character, who provides a wake up call for the girl to move on with her life.

I also got to design the beer that got spilled, and the bottles they spilled from. Regular beer, or dyed apple juice which is what I would have normally used, wouldn’t stain an oil painting. So we used slightly watered down sludge colored paint! Here’s a rehearsal picture of an already spilled on painting being used in rehearsal again.

(She writes truth over the painting at the end when she gets less depression-y)

Of course when you spill beer…

onto anything at all onstage, you need a clean copy of it for each run. So three paintings a go-go!

I had a lot of fun using all these bright colors and creating meaningful, symbolic stuff. Theatre is great.