Photos by Don D. Lewis and Chrys Rynearson

“Does anyone here have a hog? I’m actually 100 percent serious.” —Sharon Graci, artistic director of PURE Theatre, during a curtain speech

CUT TO: one week later, and I’m sifting through images of Sharon getting as close as she could to her new swine friends at Magnolia Plantation.

PURE’s new play, Hogs by Rodney Lee Rogers, is a modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People set here in Charleston, SC. This poster is draft three. Rodney took the picture. Some of the others we didn’t use showed Sharon nearly putting “lipstick on a pig.” Another had a fantastic peacock peeking in to find out what was going on. I started to go with the idea that the title would be written in lipstick, but we ultimately decided that a baconized look was even better. The calendar is a new thing on our posters, something I wanted to do to give PURE patrons an easier way to navigate the varied scheduling demands of sharing a space with a church. Also new is the “world premiere” banner that will reappear later in the season when Spencer Deering’s show Sheep’s Clothing debuts. So many special events happen at PURE that it’s sometimes hard to track it all or fit onto a poster. I think the layout here keeps things relatively simple and manages to get the newsflashes across (BYOBaby, guest speaker Dana Beach, two pay-what-you-can nights, a preview, and performances that start in one month and end in another) without being overwhelming.

I ended up going back over the image with some “slop,” because it’s about hogs, after all. Usually I try to keep things relatively clean and “PURE,” but a play called Hogs was destined to get a little bit messier. The grunge also helped to neutralize some distracting background stuff, notably a wooden post that was just sticking up in the middle of most of the good pics.

Rodney’s update of the story tackles themes of sustainability, technology, and tourism, among other things.

American Theatre Magazine recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. This is the black & white congratulations ad from PURE Theatre. Clear & simple, capitalizing on the limitations of a grayscale ad and the small size of the ad space (about 2″ x 5″).