Piece: GO. PLEASE. GO
Written by: Emily Feldman
Production: 2016 Wagner New Play Festival

Director: Will Detlefsen
Set: Charlie Jicha
Lighting: Alexandra Miller-Long
Venue: Theodore & Adele Shank Theater
​Date: April 2016

This piece was my third collaboration with the excellent playwright Emily Feldman.  Emily's theatrical vision in her writing is succinct and complete.  Her brand of quirky banal realism is able to reveal deep truths about and almost Woody Allen type view of humanity in large strokes that encompass us all.  These episodes are punctuated by random acts of theater: a line dance, a song sung in another language, a dance number, etc.

For the design of Go. Please. Go., a play that spans the lives of the plays protagonists it was necessary to  show the passage of time.  We sensed that the musicality of the script dictated that these transitions would have to be quick and light so as to not break jokes and references that were the result of juxtaposition.  Inspired by subtle sounds from The Play Company's production of Toshiki Okada's The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise we spent weeks fine tuning the perfect "click" that would signal a "bump in time".  Eventually the answer came in the combination of a foley wooden tap and an enveloped oscillator.  These two disparate elements combined to make a familiar yet undefinable event, much like the celeste-saxophone-piccolo trio from Ravel's Bolero.   These "clicks" eventually grew in conception into the metronome representing the character's lives.

On a technical note: the entire set was a theater sized carpet box.   Special care was given to speaker placement to ensure that the image of the sound events would come from the box itself and not from the theatrical grid above the audience's head. The only sound which was sourced from above was the clicking of the metronome representing time.