Circle X Theatre’s world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, designed by Gary Smoot, was the most visually evocative production of any show I have ever written. The tableaus and scenic effects were so unique and so profoundly stunning that it’s damned near impossible to describe them in words. So imagine how depressing it has been these nine years to think that the only two surviving images of the show were this…
And this…
Now don’t get me wrong: the incomparable Kellie Waymire ravishes us posing above as the troubled proto-supermodel Jacqui Potts*; and Blink Bodie (Kevin Fabian) flanked by his spokesmodels (Jamie Bullock & Daniele O’Laughlin) wrapped in Old Glory certainly hits the “American” part of the title on the nose. On the other hand, not only do both shots fail to tell us anything novel about the show, they also, more importantly, don't tell us what we don’t know about it, thus piquing our curiousity enough to maybe come see. Compare them with this newly unearthed shot, again of Kellie as Jacqui...
This not only screams “sex”, but “mystery”, “exposure”, and somehow, oddly, “death” itself. If we had captioned this “Jacqui Potts about to enter the bardo realm by dropping acid and posing nude for the first time”, we might just have been able to get your butt in one of Circle X’s seats, mightn’t we? Why we did not try to sell the show with the countless more evocative images than those first two, I will probably never know. The fact is, however, that because those two shots were used for publicity, they alone survived. Or so I thought for nearly a decade.
A lot of life got lived between 2002 and now†, and the rolls of film that all of us knew were captured in that meticulous marathon photo call somehow disappeared somewhere along the way. I confirmed the loss when I started blogging here at Just Wrought and wanted to write about how I love to work with designers as early as possible in the development process. Even though I was living in New York City when I wrote ABOD and Gary Smoot lived in Los Angeles, we somehow managed to meet in Seattle over a long post-9/11 Thanksgiving weekend, and in the living room of Gary’s boss’s house we brainstormed ways to stage the bizarre effects I was imagining.
I described the process in my essay on designers:
We needed three isolation booths for the afterlife contestants. I wanted something straightforward and on the nose, similar to the glass boxes they used in Twenty-One. Naturally, Gary zagged off my zig. We went through a lot of ideas, including bubble packs for life-sized action heroes, file cabinets and morgue drawers. Finally he landed on simple genius, and of course had the skill and the luck to bring it together: three identical, perfectly white refrigerators, with plastic magnet letters to spell out each enclosed contestant's name. When the intense gelled Fresnels were focused on them, the white surface utterly transformed into whatever deeply saturated color the lighting designer chose to call up. The “contestents” blithely climbed in and out of them, emerging unexpectedly from one after entering another, like so many peas in a karmic shell game. For the audience the layers of meaning dawned almost imperceptibly but no less forcefully for that: the three fridges were uniquely American icons of consumption, comfort, death and banality all at once, and as they were signifying these things, it was also obvious that they were nothing more or less than refrigerators, or isolation booths, or maybe some vast gentle joke played on everyone from patron to playwright. When Gary’s designing the sense of play never leaves the play, even if the play involves death at its very core.
When I wrote that I had no reason to believe anyone would ever again be able to see what I was trying to describe. When I called Gary to ask if he had captured any photos for his own records, he said he might have, but that he would have to dig for them when he had some free time. That’s Smoot code for, “It ain’t gonna happen.” Gary never has free time. Even so, a few months later he told me he had looked and hadn’t find anything. Now we were both bummed.
Then, a few months later, I was on the phone with Tim Wright, the current Artistic Director of Circle X, pitching him a new script when a mini-miracle occurred. Tim casually mentioned that he had the ABOD production shot negatives and if I wanted, he would send them to me! The rest was logistics. This past week I got the negs developed to digital at a respectable mom and pop photo shop, and spent most of Saturday uploading the images to Flickr and Face Book and tagging them with the names of old friends.*† I smiled all day as folks involved with the production chimed in to say hello, share memories,tag more photos and grab shots for the profile pics.
So you wanna see those fridges, and how well they worked? Well, in lieu of a few thousand words, here’s a few pictures…
*Deep inside information: It is a testament to Kellie’s wide-spectrum of talent and tireless dedication that she also helped to sew and hang the sumptuous red curtain behind her in this shot.
†Not to mention death: Kellie Waymire died in 2003.
*†You can enjoy the full set on Flickr, here...
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