JACKSON BERKLEY

The Lucky Ones focuses on how two friends’ relationship is impacted by a cancer diagnosis. A three-hander with a lot of moving parts, Boomerang’s production of this play in Theaterlab’s intimate white box space involved a lot of clever lighting looks, stylized props, and strong performances from the small cast.

Ant Ma’s scenic design involved a floor treatment split down the middle between pink and green vinyl. After signing on as TD, my main task before load in was to help the team settle on the appropriate vinyl to use for the floor. There were a few important criteria: the vinyl had to be tacky enough to stay down on the floor as wheeled furniture and actors moved across it on a nightly basis, while not so tacky that it would damage the rented marley beneath it upon removal. After some tests, we went with Oracal 631, which proved to be a good fit for our purposes. While the application was time consuming, everything went down smoothly and the team was very happy. While there were other important elements of the design that were also successful — fabricating wooden frames to make square lighting fixtures out of Titan tubes, seaming up rented flats, reinforcing furniture — the vinyl application had us all holding our breath, and brought the biggest payoff.

This was a quick but rewarding project involving some new techniques that I hadn’t tried before. It was also my first time putting on a show in a white box! S/o to the team at Theaterlab — it was a very fun, inviting multi-disciplinary space, and I’d love to go see another show there (or art exhibit, or what-have-you) again soon.