JACKSON BERKLEY

All of Me is a beautiful, poignant and contemporary comedy that follows a blossoming romance between two disabled people from vastly different class backgrounds. Lucy (Madison Ferris) lives in a low income Schenectady household with her family, and received a muscular dystrophy a few years before the start of the play; Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez) is a well-to-do data scientist who has been disabled since infancy. The play and its design intends to highlight disparities between social realities in America: between disabled and non-disabled people, between upper and lower class, between older and younger generations, and even between those disabled mid-life and those born with disabilities.

My work as Props Supervisor covered a wide range of elements: along with a large package of hand props, set dressing, consumables and furniture, I worked intimately with the mobility aids used by our disabled cast members. Since both of our leads utilize text-to-speech (TTS) technology for their dialogue — controlled by diegetic iPads mounted on their wheelchairs, another unique design component of this play — a major element of my role during the rehearsal and tech process involved finding appropriate, comfortable rigs for both Madison and Danny, as well as designing TTS iPad interfaces they could convincingly act and interact with. Madison and Danny are both wheelchair users on and off the stage, and for this production, we used Madison’s personal scooter and a motorized wheelchair on loan from the mobility company WHILL; when preparing these rigs and providing maintenance throughout our process, I had to be extra mindful of my methods not causing any kind of cosmetic damage to these devices.

This was a sprawling, challenging, sometimes messy, and extremely rewarding project for the whole creative team and run crew.

Fun props projects included: fabricating a life-size, functional picnic table; designing and fabricating multiple versions of a “SharpNow” logo (a fictional MLM knife company); crafting a vegan/GF mac n’ cheese “recipe”; fabricating a pair of rolling topiary boxes; designing and fabricating a piece of reversible artwork that could be flipped onto and off of a cleat in <3 seconds; designing and fabricating a small floral bouquet that could be quickly dressed onto a wheelchair’s steering column on a nightly basis.