Theatre in the round.  Or at least, the rectangle.  It keeps a photographer on his toes!  Nylon Fusion Theatre Company presented their full length piece, Unmentionables, at Theatre 54.  It’s an intimate space, which I’d worked in before, as a fight director for a production called Homeward Bound.  For that one, they eschewed the traditional floor plan of stage at one end of the long room and audience at the other.  Instead, they put the barracks in which the is set all along one long wall, with the audience opposite.

In Unmentionables, director Montserrat Mendez and set designer Kyu Shin set the two playing areas (a Hollywood agent’s outer and inner offices) in the entirety of the space, save a 4′ strip around the space where the audience is seated.  The space is small, so there are no bad seats, but certainly where an audience member chooses to sit will affect which story lines are intimate and in their face and which are a bit more remote.  Of course for me, this meant running circuits of the room, trying to catch each moment from just the right angle.  Frequently, I’d be waiting for actors in a scene to hit a good position for where I was, only to give up and move to where the shot was, JUST in time for them to move to the angle I’d been waiting for! 

The lighting by Gilbert Peatro was lovely.  He had a challenge, creating two distinct areas with as little bleed as possible.  He made use of some LED instruments, mixed with traditional instruments, which gave some rich, saturated colors.  However, as I learned in this show (and the next one — Scenario: Script to Perform), the light they give is challenging for cameras.  It will be interesting to see the changes and adaptations I’ll have to make in the coming months and years as LEDs become more prevalent.

The show itself was very well done.  a 1930s tale of Hollywood, where everyone has a secret and everyone is trying to make it big – whatever that means to them.  Well directed and well acted, it was a pleasure to watch while I was shooting.

Nylon Fusion is starting a busy season and their first show of the year is one of their This Round’s on Us short play series.  This year they’ve parted ways with the holiday themes and are doing a series through time.  This first one covers 1900 to the 1920s.  Themes included WWI, Vaudeville, women beginning to come into their own and art and literature.  As usual, they had a tight group of 11 plays split between their 7:00 and 9:00 shows.  All but one were set in the time period (though a couple had time travelers from the current day), with the lone outlier set in current day, but inspired by the Charleston.

Nylon Fusion moved to TADA! with this iteration.  The space is fairly traditional — a relatively deep space with a raked audience.  It was deep enough where I decided to sit in the front row to get the best reach with my lenses.  It’s also a fairly wide space (by NYC standards) so I needed all three of my lenses (16-35, 24-70 and 70-200) at one time or another.

The lighting was a stock plot, with a LOT of blue in it, which had to be corrected out in many cases.  It was also fairly uneven, which made shooting and post-processing challenging.  It’s so hard to make a single plot (which might be the house stock plot) fit 11 different shows.

Next up will be the 1930s – 1940s. The Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and WWII.  Should be some good stuff!