Last night Lukas and I were arriving at the theatre when he received a call from his brother letting him know that his father had just passed away – he’s obviously got a million things running through his mind right now, poor fellow, taking him out of the picture. So this has been an intense couple of days, but fortunately Garcia the props guy has stepped into the breach to help so it isn’t as bad a situation as it might be. We worked hard at getting the tree closer to completion by wrapping branches in lights, mounting little spotlights onto the ends of the branches, rigging the heart of the tree in the centre of the trunk and purchasing more copper for some smaller spirals that will go onto the centers of the branches. We lit the heart of the tree with five of the small spotlights and ran a lot of cable to power everything, then wrapped the branches in light, gauzy pale peach coloured fabric. The result is very attractive, easily the prettiest set I’ve done; most of my work has a dark edge to it, while this is baroque by comparison. As more fabric goes onto the pie the hard edges disappear and the whole piece becomes gentler and more romantic, which goes perfectly with the performance.
The factory sequences are very stylized, making extensive use of the metal things Ethan and I picked up at the Home Depot, which is very satisfying, and the rain sticks I built are working very well. I’ll post photos of the work so far shortly, when I can manage to remember to put the memory card back into my camera before I drive all the way to Santa Barbara and try to take pictures without it…
The play opens this Thursday. If you’d like to see it, let me know so I can see if there are any complimentary tickets available.
Muéveme, Muévete (The Magical Realism Project)
Thursday – Saturday, Feb. 26-28, 8 p.m., Porter Theatre, Westmont campus
$15 general admission, $7 students
Thursday – Saturday, March 5-7, 8 p.m.,Casa de la Raza, 601 E. Montecito Street, Santa Barbara
Free admission underwritten by Montecito Bank & Trusts
