I designed the entire production, supervised construction, and painted much of the scenery myself. I remember enjoying scenic painting enormously, and it's something I haven't done in years.

One of the major scenic elements was a full-stage backdrop inspired by the cover of a Broadway songs compilation CD. I adapted the artwork into a stylized cityscape, incorporating translucent areas in the sky and white architectural bands. For the realized drop, I used aniline dyes to spray the sky and left the white areas unpainted, allowing them to glow vividly when backlit.

At the time, I was also quite taken with the visual style of the 1990 film Dick Tracy. Its bold colors, graphic architecture, and comic-strip aesthetic influenced a scenic hanger I designed for the "N.Y.C." number. The unit included functioning center doors, which I learned the hard way needed safety latches to keep them closed when the scenery was flown.

Warbucks's mansion took another approach to the graphic imagery I was exploring. I developed a money motif, using chrome oxide green as a dominant base color, with beige and gold architectural details throughout. Most of the molding was painted rather than constructed dimensionally, reinforcing the two-dimensional comic-strip inspiration. Looking back, I also suspect I didn't entirely understand architectural molding at the time!

The mansion's main scenic unit was an enormous raised platform with a central staircase. I designed a railing incorporating dollar-sign profiles to be cut from three-quarter-inch plywood and painted with gold Rosco scenic paint. One of the students' fathers volunteered to cut the shapes with a basic jigsaw. I imagine he was cursing my name by the time he finished, but I recall the result being quite successful.

With the rediscovery of these materials, I decided to reconstruct some of the scenery as 3D models in Vectorworks. I used the original drawings and scans of my thirty-year-old paint elevations, along with digital image tools, to develop renderings suggesting what these scenes might have looked like.

Looking back, I'm rather impressed by the ambition of my eighteen-year-old self, but there are certainly things I would reconsider today.

I remember the mansion wagon being enormously cumbersome and difficult to move. More importantly, much of the scenery seems designed to create attractive pictures rather than actively support the performers and action of the play. I hadn't yet learned to fully consider blocking, movement, and the practical needs of storytelling. For example, my original orphanage design included only two beds. The director wanted a bed for every orphan, and we ultimately found a way to accommodate them.

There are also conflicts in the visual language. The Dick Tracy-inspired NYC hanger doesn't quite belong to the same world as the backdrop. I had plenty of visual inspirations but hadn't yet learned how to bring them together into a cohesive design.

If I were approaching Annie today, I would absolutely want to revisit that comic-strip aesthetic but explore how it might become a consistent visual language throughout the production. How could two-dimensional imagery interact with dimensional scenery, lighting, and perhaps projection? How might that graphic style better support the storytelling?

For Hello, Dolly!, I designed an entirely new proscenium environment downstage of the theatre's existing architecture. I suspect I had been inspired by the elaborate scenic environments of large British musical productions of the period, particularly those produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Transforming a high school auditorium into something grander seemed appropriate for Dolly, especially with the opulent world of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant. Though I'm not sure I even knew the word "opulent" at nineteen!

The proscenium was a substantial construction project, with dimensional molding, dentil details across the top, decorative doorways, and valance drapery. Apparently I'd learned a little more about architectural molding since Annie!

I recall we also constructed a passerelle around the orchestra pit, extending the playing space into the audience area, although I haven't found that portion of the design in the surviving drafting.

One of the painted backdrops was an in-one drop, allowing scenes to play downstage while larger scenic units were struck or reset behind it. It's a familiar musical theatre convention, but I'm rather impressed that I understood and employed it at nineteen. I also remember designing the artwork to fit neatly within the proscenium's molding and drapery.

For the hat shop, I designed a central revolving unit that transitioned from the exterior to the interior. Once turned, it joined adjacent stage-left and stage-right wagons to complete the shop.

I wish I had more visual documentation of this production. Somewhere there was once a photograph of me standing beside the completed proscenium, but I haven't been able to locate it. This was long before everything was digital, and I didn't yet appreciate the importance of archiving my work.

Looking through the drafting today, I'm intrigued by my early interest in scenic transformation and the architecture of the theatre itself. The proscenium and passerelle changed the character of the performance space, while the rotating hat shop and in-one drop addressed the mechanics of theatrical storytelling. I'd be interested in exploring those ideas again, particularly how architecture and scenic transformation can become expressive elements of a production rather than simply its physical framework.

At the same time, I wish I could return to the production with a deeper understanding of its visual and cultural influences. I don't remember all the reasoning behind the original design choices or precisely how the Chinese visual concept developed. Today, I would want to spend more time researching the artistic traditions behind those images, particularly Chinese landscape painting, its approaches to space and composition, and the symbolism of the moon in Chinese art and poetry. I would also seek out collaborators who could bring additional cultural and artistic perspectives to the process.

I'm also intrigued by how contemporary technology might intersect with those traditional visual ideas. Pipilotti Rist's Pixel Forest, an immersive installation of thousands of suspended LED lights, suggests an entirely different way of creating a forest through light and color rather than physical scenery. Could the imagery and spatial composition of Chinese landscape painting coexist with a luminous, pixel-based environment? I'd love to explore how these seemingly different approaches might come together to create the otherworldly realm of Midsummer.

I would love to sink my teeth into Midsummer again, not necessarily to reproduce this earlier concept, but to explore its possibilities through deeper research, experimentation, and collaboration.

By 2003, my professional work was increasingly focused on lighting, but I was still looking for opportunities to design scenery. Othello, produced by Africa Arts Theatre Company, gave me another chance to combine both disciplines.

The production took place in a particularly unusual venue: a small theatre carved out of the former Show World Center, an adult entertainment establishment in New York City. The conversion was, shall we say, incomplete. Remnants of the space's previous life remained, including stripper poles in the lobby and a distinctive fixture with red light bulbs visible in the production photographs. I suspect we simply weren't permitted to remove it.

I designed a series of burlap-covered hinged panels attached to the side walls. These could open and close, altering the shape of the playing space and revealing or concealing areas just outside the central action. Under certain lighting conditions, the burlap also produced a scrim-like effect, allowing performers to be partially visible behind the panels.

Fragmented architectural arches suggested a more substantial environment without fully enclosing the space. A painted floor helped define its visual composition, much as the reflected moon had done in Midsummer several years earlier.

The theatre itself was a small, shoebox-shaped space with a low grid and limited scenic possibilities.

Much of the scenery was constructed in the theatre over a relatively short period. I also sourced materials through Materials for the Arts, New York City's creative reuse program. I remember dyeing some of the free fabric in the bathtub of my New York apartment.

My central challenge was finding a way to make this confined space accommodate the many locations of Othello.