Another Wrinkle or two

I have worked on very few what could be called Science Fiction plays and A Wrinkle in Time was one of them.

As it turns the play that I am currently working on is the Rocky Horror Show.

What other plays have I worked on that might be called Science Fiction?

Little Shop of Horrors and if you push it Dracula and maybe the Wizard of Oz might count but that is about all.

A few other plays have had some Fantasy moments, but few have been true Science Fiction stories like A Wrinkle in Time.

The play is based on an award winning children’s book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time

So with a modest budget I had to show the story of a young girl traveling through time and space looking for her father.

The design was mostly a unit set of different platform levels and a few moving pieces.

Stage curtains were hung so only some parts of the set were revealed when one of the curtains was flown out.

A Tesseract moment

One of the moving pieces was a platform with walls that represented the “Real” world house of Meg and her family but it soon was moved offstage as the journey began.

So with just wooden platforms I had to figure out ways to make magic happen onstage.

To start on the stage floor I painted a spiral galaxy spinning outward they same way that the yellow brick road does in the Wizard of Oz.

We had some neon tubes so I mounted them under the platforms and it gave them an eerie effect for some scenes.

We rented some Black Lights and used some Day-Glo and Phosphorescent paints on the set and costumes.

The big Brain with a large frame filled with bubble plastic and small white Christmas lights behind.

The Man with Red Eyes had an old football helmet that had two red Christmas lights attached and it looked good when he was atop his tall tower.

To fill the space I used some old rope and scrim scraps to make a funky hanging moss type of drape.

The scrim was cut into long narrow strips and triangular cuts were made into them to give a leaf type effect.

The rope pieces were unbraided and hung down like twisty vines.

The final High-Tech touch was to hot glue just a few pieces of Christmas tinsel here and there on it.

We also had fog but needed something special for the Tesseract or time jumps.

The Lighting Designer had about a dozen photo strobes and camera flip-flash unit mounted to different places on the set and all the wires were run to Stage Right.

There on Stage Right was a nail board with all the control wires attached.

To trigger the effect a student would run a wire that was attached to a car battery along the nail board to set off the flashes.

Nailboard for SFX

It worked well, looked good and the kids screamed each time it was used.

There were a few other special things like some disco rope lights in a street light globe on gold painted garbage can.

The set was a lot of fun to work on but regrettably the acting was in a word Awful.

Now to be honest it was in part the script and the style but I just hated it and for years I could not even look at the show photos without hating it.

One of the lead actors was especially bad and when he was late coming in for a performance we almost sent someone on with a script in hand and knew he would be better but unfortunately he came in at the last minute.

**I do have more photos and will scan them soon**

Updated 3/4/18