Design Statement #1

I’m double dipping a little with this blog post and going back to the idea of what our villain should look like. Each of us has been asked to create a design statement for the show, and for mine, I’d like to focus on the honchos and minions of Big Sweetie’s Super Fried Sugar Burgers with extra Lard Balls (tm).

A design professor of mine used to have us start any design project by thinking about the element in question in terms of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.) In terms of the Big Sweetie company, I think it would...

Look like a lot of fun! A Big Sweetie associate always has a smile on their face (even if that smile is slightly evocative of the cat who got the canary...) and each Big Sweetie store is flashy and bold, to catch your attention as you pass it on the highway.

Sound like the music of an ice cream truck, or carnival music... on the surface, it seems innocent and wholesome enough, but after a while becomes sinister and creepy.

Feel greasy. I made myself a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches over the break, and when I was done I noticed that my face, which had been bent over the stove, felt like it hadn’t been washed in days. My hands felt this way, too. Big Sweetie’s would feel like the inside of a bag of microwave popcorn... gross, but not so much that it stops you from reaching for more.

Smell delicious... for a while. When you first walk in the store, you would smell things like fresh baked breads and pies, savory meats and sweet, sugary drinks. After a while, however, that sweet smell would take on a sickly quality... like a baby’s spit-up. From spending all day in this environment, a Big Sweetie’s associate would reek of that too-sweet-sick smell.

Taste delicious... the Big Sweetie’s Super Fried Sugar Burger is just the right balance of sugary sweetness and savory meatiness. After a while, however, the thought of taking even one more bite is sickening.

The five-senses work through helps me come up with images true to the world of the play and the world of the character. The representatives of Big Sweetie’s, then, whether present on stage or represented in commercials, should have the innocent, clean-cut look of a 1950s soda jerk - paper triangle hat, pink striped shirt, bow tie and a white apron. The evil “tell” would be evident in the makeup design - the hair should be greasy and dirty under the hat, the skin an unhealthy yellow-green color, perhaps even acne-like patches of rotting skin on the face, and sunken, dull, corpse-like eyes. The Boss’s costume design could incorporate some of those same wholesome 1950s-style elements, just bumped up the social ladder: keeping the pink striped shirt and bowtie, but put on a suit jacket instead of an apron. The makeup design would be essentially the same, but I would like to see the eyes of the Boss even more drastically sunken and hollow, rimmed in reds, with puffy purple-green bags underneath. I also am fond of the image of the Boss smoking a cigar or a pipe, but in keeping with that faux-innocence, it could be a bubblegum cigar or a bubble pipe.

- Lauren