OK, so I'm a little behind...

The title says it all, at least about my blogging.  I know that I have been remiss in documenting my process this time.  The truth is, I have really struggled with what to say about my process for American Idiot.

Scott and I laid out the basic staging months ago, while Heathers was still on stage.  The original staging for American Idiot makes a ton of sense.  After the opening few minutes of the show, our three "heroes" each take separate, parallel journeys.  The show is written that these stories happen simultaneously, yet interwoven within the lyrics of each number.  For the most part, there are not defined, individual scenes with blackouts in between for scene changes.  The focus of the action shifts, often mid-song from one to the other. Or, with a small bridge.

This implied that we need to have three distinct playing areas that we can separate the action and clearly shift between them.  In a black box, we have a lot of flexibility to pull this off.  Scott and I decided to lay out the stage along the long wall of the theater, making it 50 feet long.  I laid out a seating plan with the seats on risers tiered along the lobby wall so that the audience walks in, down a short vom and is facing the stage, in traditional proscenium fashion. (See the plan above)

To define the three playing areas, we decided to use very similar vocabulary to the original production.  A single piece of furniture in the middle of a pool of light would tell us where we are and with which hero our story is unfolding.

For Johnny, we'll use a bed...a mattress only really...stained and shabby.  This is his journey icon for when he leaves suburbia for the big city and ends up in a shabby apartment somewhere, caught in the drug culture.


For Will, a small shabby couch...the couch in suburbia that he never leaves, that he is tied to by his mistakes and his choices.

For Tunny, his changes.  He starts with a recliner, but his recliner, a suburban device, is really a metaphor for what is to come.  Pretty quickly, he sees glory in the life of a soldier and signs up, being shipped off to war.  His recliner is replaced by a gurney... his "new recliner" after being permanently disfigured in combat.













All three furniture devices (four really with the gurney) are on wheels so that they can move around as needed to free space for the action that is required in one of the other guys worlds.  This allows me to expand and contract each of their worlds as the story shifts from one to the other without ever allowing them to overlap.

There are a few fixed components to the set that I have to address, but more about those in the next post.
R