Problem Child
Set Designer
University of Victoria’s Phoenix Theatre 2021
Written by: George F. Walker
Directed by: Fran Gebhard
Costume Design: Yi Misty Buxton, Rachel Macadam
Lighting Design: Simon Farrow
Photographer: Olivia Zappone
“Designer Cassie Holmes offers a convincingly depressing motel room with black walls, lime-green shag carpeting, a stained lampshade and an idealized painting of the sort of bourgeois home of which R.J. and Denise can only dream.”
— Adrian Chamberlain
Problem Child is a show about a couple who cannot find a way out of their dire situation. After loosing their baby with no hope of getting them back they find themselves stuck in a hotel room.
It was important to me that their loneliness and inability to see a way out was represented on stage. To emphasize this feeling I decided to remove the walls and have a endless dark void surrounding them.
The furniture of this dingy motel span many time periods to further emphasize the eclectic depressing room.
It was important to me to also have a painting of what their dream home was, a reminder of something the will never achieve and can only long for.