Photo courtesy of Unsplash
My senior project was to design the set for Silent Sky. The beginning of this semester the shop crew, which I was a part of, started building what I had designed over winter break. It was really fun. We got all the platforming in place before the cast had even been announced. There were three main areas, moving from stage left to right, the Wisconsin home, the Harvard University workroom and the deck of an ocean liner. We had the three 16 foot walls built and up and ready to paint after spring break. The last day of work we had before Elizabethtown College shut down, we put on a base coat of paint, and I mixed all the colors for the sky. My plan was to create a galaxy on the top six feet of walls that would also be used as projector screens. The Harvard area was set back to add some dimension to the set and gave more of an arc feel to the sky. I was really excited to create the galaxy sky and paint everything. I had two wallpaper designs for the Harvard and Wisconsin home. I’m sad that I don’t get to finish all that. My set will just sit unfinished forever, but I am glad that we were able to put on the play.
My role as scenic designer shifted back to more research. I was tasked with finding the background images that were used. I had already done a lot of this work when I was first researching images for the play, but now I was looking for more than inspiration. I was looking for usable images. I found images of the actual work room that the ladies were in that we used which is cool. For the actual performance of the Zoom Silent Sky I was a projection operator, so my job was to change the background and sky projection images. Everyone did an amazing job rolling with the difficulties of Zoom and being so far apart.
It definitely wasn’t what I anticipated for my senior project, and I can’t say that I’m not disappointed in the change. I’m gonna miss working with the shop crew and associate professor of theatre Richard Wolf-Spencer as I did for the past three years. The theatre was my second home at Etown. It was a place that I felt needed, respected and cared about. It’s been a rough year for the department. I‘m really sad that I won’t be able to pop into the green room and see associate professor of theatre Dr. Michael Swanson and Wolf-Spencer ever again. But this Zoom performance showed me that theatre is possible anywhere as long as there are people dedicated and stubborn enough to make it happen.
