house rules
A. REY PATMATMAT
MA-YI THEATER COMPANY 2016
Directed by Ralph Peña
Set Design: Reid Thompson
Costume Design: Martin Schnellinger
Lighting Design: Oliver Wason
Sound Design: Fabian Obispo
Photographs: Web Begole
With: Tina Chilip, Jojo Gonzalez, Mia Katigbak,
Jeffrey Omura, Conrad Schott, Tiffany Villarin,
James Yaegashi
For this world premiere production of Rey Patmatmat's play, director Ralph Peña approached me with a challenge: can we come up with a production that has no set transitions? The play had quite a number of locations, from apartments to hallways and rooftops, as well as multiple locations in a hospital. The play is about two intertwined Filipino-American families living in New York, working in hospitals and navigating life, love and death in one really eventful year. These families love board games; and many of the scenes in the play take place over a game. We landed on a multilevel design where all the locations in the play could coexist on stage, surrounded by a board-game like hallway. The audience was on two sides of the space; we had one wall of the space as an apartment wall, actived by lighting when appropriate, and one as a hospital wall, lit in the hospital scenes. There was a hospital curtain that pulled around the space of the hospital room.