RESEARCH TRIP TO CHARLESTON SOUTH CAROLINA

Back in October of 2021, Awoye Timpo (director), Arminda Thomas (dramaturg), and I flew to Charleston South Carolina (where Alice Childress sets her play “Wedding Band”) for a couple days of immersive research. We walked the streets mentioned in the play, toured the islands, and walked and walked, soaking up the ghosts and layers of history.

“They killed 'em . . . all the dead slaves . . . buried under a blanket-a this Carolina earth, even the cotton crop is nourished with hearts' blood . . . roots-a that cotton tangled and wrapped 'round my bones.” -Julia

VISUAL REFERENCES

In addition to our trip to Carolina where we found the majority of our conceptual inspiration in the elements of water, dirt, sweetgrass and air, we were also inspired by Julie Dash’s 1991 film “Daughters of The Dust”

EARLY DESIGNS

Alice Childress has set her play “Wedding Band” in “three houses in a backyard”. We were interested in the layers of boundary suggested by the text, and creating a mutable space built with natural elements rather than architectural. We wanted to lean into a shared communal space that was less naturalistic than traditionally expected - inspired by Ben Okri’s thoughts on naturalism:

"Naturalism did not speak about certain aspects of the world I grew up in. Naturalism only speaks about the world that you can see and implies that everything that happens to us as human beings has a cause and effect that is visible. But the tradition that I grew up in also has that element—that part of the world that you see, the most important part of it is the world that you don't see, and that's not in naturalism. So, if you're going to tell a story about the part of the world that I come from, you have to break the box, basically." - Ben Okri

Thanks to Lukas White & Ethan Brown for the incredible rendering work!

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

The original design envisioned a large flooded grassy landscape with a floating island of Julia’s house (see above). Unsurprisingly perhaps, it proved a bit too ambitious in terms of cost, weight of water, engineering, insurance, etc. So, my “favorite” next step of the design process started, which is “value engineering” where we try to maintain the heart of the concept and ideas, working within the bounds of the budget and production limitations. We were also wrestling with how literal to be with the boundaries of Julia’s “house” and you can see the progression to where the final design ended up, where Julia’s bedroom WAS the backyard, which WAS Julia’s bedroom… (thanks to Lukas White for the Cinema 4D rendering brilliance!)

PHYSICAL MODEL

The computer model was helpful for experimenting with light and water reflection (see above), but not great for helping people understand tangible space, and not great for the actual texture, color and layout of the sweeetgrasses, so we also made a physical model in 1/2” scale and 1/4” scale. Maniacal grass fabrication by C De la Cruz, Gaya Chatterjee, Teresa L Williams!

SCENE SHOP PROCESS
Daedalus scene shop outdid themselves with making a wildly difficult set that was meant to look quite simple (just some grass and dirt). The dirt had to be waterproof though…. Thanks again to James, Deliah and the entire team at Daedalus!!

TECH
Like many productions this season, we were challenged by COVID on many levels - first on the front end, pushing our opening back a week, then leading up to first preview when we had to cancel the first 2 performances and lost some tech time due to positive cases. We made it through though with Grace and ice cream (thanks Awoye!).

PRODUCTION PHOTOS
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