As I write this, I am still unsure of what my set will look like. The responsibility of set design is something that I’ve never actually shouldered, it’s among the things that I would usually count on people like the director and techies for. I’ve always been an actor, aside from a few times doing stage managing and soundboard work as a child, I have very little experience working behind the scenes. But now that the show is online, and the stage is whatever’s behind me, it becomes solely my responsibility.
Despite the separation, I still receive a lot of help from my friends, and my family (who seem less than excited to have me constantly bouncing ideas off of them about taking all their art off the walls). It’s an opportunity to look at the room where I’ve spent most of the last seven months as somewhere else. No longer is it a ground floor media room where I go to physics class and write papers, now it’s a hotel room where I go to be interrogated about a murder! The closet becomes a bathroom! The futon gets used as a bed for the second time ever! The hallway stretches longer than the house, accommodating dozens of other rooms on the same floor.
And in the end, it will all return to the room it is. I’ll continue to write papers in here, the hallway still leads to the kitchen, but it will be forever immortalized as a hotel room in the show. I hope that seeing this show shot entirely in our houses will inspire you to look at your own house this way, and who knows, maybe you’ll make some real changes too.
