house rules

A. REY PATMATMAT

MA-YI THEATER COMPANY 2016

Overview of the set with the board-game hallway. Seating was on two sides of the room.

Rod and Henry in Rod's apartment

Rod in Ernie's Hospital room. The columns are part of the architecture of HERE's stage.

Twee and JJ on the rooftop

Momo and Henry in the hospital break room.

Momo, Twee and Vera play Mah-Jong.

Vera mediates between Twee and Momo

Vera's experience of the stroke

Rod and Henry at the fancy Pan-Asian restaurant

Twee and JJ's postcoital "I spy"

The brothers and sisters together in the Hospital break room

Rod confronts Henry in the Hospital hallway

Learning Tagalog

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.