I had my first preliminary design meeting last night. Myself, Pete Fry (our TD), Zac Chandler (our PSM), Lawrence Dial (our director), and Brian Giles(Set Designer).

The topic of conversation was beef a realistic short play about two brothers in the winter after 9/11 trying to get a grip on their relationship and their future. They are personally changing because of their circumstances and choices and the world around them is changing in the wake of 9/11 and the hip-hop culture war. Our design challenge is to create an apartment setting, that is at once real enough to support the story, but suggestive enough to invoke the larger world.

From a lighting standpoint at least in the early going that means bringing the cyc into play upstage to suggest a larger world going on around this enclosed space. It also means, in my estimation, that the apartment needs to look and feel very realistic, but the world around and beyond it can be a color-field. A suggestion of a larger world.

It was a good first meeting, I can’t wait for more of these with all the plays.