THE GROUNDLING

After reading the script of an off-broadway play as an assignment for school, I chose a design direction to best express the essence of The Groundling, a play by Marc Palmieri.

I was tremendously moved by this play and Palmieri’s quirky writing of the characters. It’s almost at first, you can’t take the couple so seriously since their relationship seems to consist of arguing. It seems like a waste of time for the husband to try so hard to remind his wife of how they came to be, but by the end of it, I was in tears. I was angry that they’d argued so much throughout the play and felt that it was important to emphasize that and the emotion behind all of the arguing. It was heart-wrenching to read their fighting by the end and how they’d lost their first child to cancer, and being unable to carry on their marriage from the pain. It was an incredible collaboration with the playwright himself and his own comment about my book, that it was “true to the heart of the play and the reality of their relationship.”