Work in Progress

I just wanted to share the behind-the-scenes process for this shot. The photo shoot was pretty quick at the end of a rehearsal, about a week and a half before the show opened. The set for Yankee Tavern wasn’t built yet, so we pushed together some bars and threw some black curtains over a couple of room dividers. The main light came from a full-blast remote Speedlight SB 600 that was handheld on a stepladder. In post, I changed the color of Katie’s shirt to match the woman’s dress in Hopper’s painting. Also adjusted the color on the bar and the back wall, filled in the dark background, and adjusted the lighting. A printout of the original “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper is visible on the right edge of the bar in the unedited photo.

“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.