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I shot Dublin-based Pan Pan Theatre’s excellent touring production of Oedipus Loves You, running through June 1 at Performance Space 122. This shoot breaks in my brand-new lens, the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM.

I shot The TEAM’s new production, Architecting, at 3LD. The work-in-progress preview opens today and runs for 5 nights, before the show leaves for Edinburgh for a world premiere.

I shot press & publicity images for Camp Summer Camp, a show created by the house and production staff of Performance Space 122, happening this August. These are staged, documentary-style photos of an outdoor slip-n-slide session involving people in suits and colorful liquids.

I was gaffer for Lincoln Lab’s short video, Six And A Half, and took some photos on the set.

The beautiful location was China 1 in the East Village.

I shot Kevin Augustine’s Bride at Miranda’s request.

Lighting design: Miranda Hardy
Set design: Tom Lee
It happened at Performance Space 122.

After 3 months of labor, the monacoreps.com redesign is complete. The new image-heavy site looks and feels nothing like the old one, and is my most ambitious web design yet. Thanks are due to April at Springthistle for her incredible coding work.

Update: my design has been blogged by an art producer!

Eileen and Miranda on Peter Ksander’s set for Jay Scheib’s Untitled Mars.

Production Photography for Chicago-based theater company 500 Clown, of their critically acclaimed New York production of 500 Clown Frankenstein and 500 Clown Christmas at Performance Space 122, in December 2007.

500 Clown are: Molly Brennan, Adrian Danzig, Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, and Paul Kalina

Lighting Design: Ben Wilhelm
Set Design: Dan Reily

A friend’s friend from England mentioned to me after seeing 500 Clown Frankenstein two nights ago that the show really held his attention because it completely transcended “American theater’s tendency to over-dramatize” by being unexpectedly down-to-earth. To him the play was successful because it broke down the wall between the performers and the audience and inspired whole-hearted laughs and emotions from him: it lacked the blatant technical artificiality and intellectual pretentiousness that prevented him from ‘getting into’ other plays he has seen in the US. The story of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s classic tale of the mad scientist and his terrible creation, nowadays lends itself more easily to kitschy and colorful parodies than honest, powerful performances.

500 Clown’s approach to classics (Shakespeare, Shelley, Brecht) is anything but direct. The three performers put on their respective clown personalities, their kind of alter-egos, who in turn attempt to perform the classics. So the characters of Frankenstein are mediated twice: by clown Kevin, clown Bruce, and clown Shank, then by actor Molly, actor Adrian, and actor Paul.

Clown Kevin and clown Shank greet the audience as they walk into the theater, improvising playful gags that engage audience members individually and directly. Throughout the show, the clowns will interrupt the proceedings to seat latecomers in a humorous fashion. The content of the show itself revolves around the numerous non-diegetic artifacts of the theater: dysfunctional lighting, floor prop, set pieces, clown Bruce’s illiteracy, and the clowns’ overall incompetence at transforming the physical space of the theater and transporting the audience into the realm of the story. By being in clown, the actors introduce more noise than signal into this production of Frankenstein, turning the story of Frankenstein into pure comedy about the pretense of honesty in live performance.

And that is precisely what makes the experience of watching 500 Clown feel to many people like what theater should be: more noise than signal. Stories that transform an audience shouldn’t ignore that audience by the use of a strict fourth wall, nor should it try to ignore the audience’s knowledge that there is a guy behind the lighting board pressing buttons to make light cues happen. Clowns are as imperfect as the old medium of theater itself, through which artists struggle to suspend disbelief with the most basic of means. It is through the mannered, clumsy and desperate personalities of clowns that Molly, Adrian and Paul manage to bring theater back to its purest state, and make an honest connection with an audience no longer sensitive to expensive stage tricks. In so doing, they manage to lift the audience above the kitsch and do justice to some of the darker and more meaningful themes in Shelley’s work.

500 Clown Frankenstein runs through this Wednesday 19th. 500 Clown Christmas runs from Friday 21st to Sunday 30th. Both shows take place in the upstairs theater of Performance Space 122.

Lighting design for What if Saori had a party? (Saori’s Birthday) by John Moran, with Saori Tsukada, Katherine Brook, and Joseph Keckler, at Performance Space 122.