In which Lemons are Squeezed

Let's put some marks on the paper and zero in on this environment:

We'll need an entrance/exit, someplace that can serve for standup bits, a landing place for solo spots, and something that can serve for twosomes. And that blue backing is part of the mix, so we need access to it as well.

A comfortable path of travel is audience left to audience right. So we'll reverse that. That would put the entrance in the extreme right location, which sites it near the real door to the studio. Maybe we can use that at some point.

There are three lighting hotspots, so we'll have to cheat either the standup bit space or the duo space. Don't know how we might use the duo space, so we should put something there as a placeholder -- but let's not do full design development just yet; park a couple of the nondescript backings there and leave it for now. Let's focus on what we know we'll need.

Might as well play off the Masterpiece Theatre/Alaistair Cooke association, so the host solo spot/landing place will be in the vacuformed library. And we could use a chair; but not a comfy library chair; we want the nastiest, rattiest chair we can find, and I know how we'll get that for free. And we're not "reading great books", but "watching dumb movies", so we could use a teevee. Might be cool if the teevee was fed program that we can control; should just need a piece of coax and an adaptor, but this is a building full of teevee engineers -- they can figure that part out.

If we go with the Wee Concept, everything talks or potentially talks. But we don't have puppeteers to work these things. But we can cut portholes into the flats, and we can hand stuff through the flats -- thank you, Thing. We can also hang sleeves with gloves, and various limbs, from parts of the set -- doesn't make any sense, but we can reach in from the back and manipulate them live. It would be funny to have these things hanging there doing nothing in establishing shots, and then they suddenly start moving during a bit.

We've got a fake entry piece, so we'll put that near the real door; it might be interesting to show Barb coming through the real door, then coming through the set entry.

It all needs layers upon layers of detachable Stuff, but most of the detachable Stuff needs to be semi-permanently affixed; according to Da Rules, we don't have time to attach anything on site, the whole thing needs to be plopped in place in fifteen minutes or less. So maybe we start with one layer stapled on, and add Stuff throughout the run. That will buy time to solve the detachable problem. It would be cool to have the set like a Louise Nevelson piece, just a bunch of shadowboxes full of "toys"; but we don't have time or money for that. Yet.

That's it. Layers of junk. Some loose, some fixed. Slash some color across it that offsets the costume colors -- maybe find some kids and turn them loose with spray paint. Let's just draw this up to scale, color it, and we'll take it in to WLEX's scene designers tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what they think.