Look Homeward, Angel photos
I'd forgotten the bewildering complexity of the set we built for this show. Shannon's brother designed it, but we had to make a lot of adjustments as we went along. The sign at the top of the photo identifies the locale as the Dixieland Boarding House in Asheville; the audience saw two interior rooms, two exterior spaces, and Old Man Gant's monument yard (way at the left in the photo, beyond the picket fence). For the front porch scenes in Act 1, Brian Nummer's big sash window defined the wall. At intermission we turned it around to show its interior side and reinstalled it Up Left to make part of the boarding house into an upstairs bedroom. You can see it there in the other photo. When we struck the wretched thing, I had to crawl under the set with a wrench, remove some hardware, then emerge the way I went in. There was no room to turn around down there, and in damp weather I can still feel the horrible cramps in my legs.
It was Fran who suggested the porch swing after the entire set was built. That's something else I can still feel. The monument yard was fun, though: Every intermission I took a drugstore jar of USP talcum powder and a spoon and blew a cloud of stone dust over the area.
Eliza had to pitch a fit every night and start breaking flowerpots. I found to my dismay that clay flowerpots won't break if you just throw them against a set made of lumber. You have to work with them ahead of time, using a mason's chisel to cut little grooves on the inside. Then they break just fine. We assembled part of the porch rail with velcro so she could actually begin dismantling the front of the house, too.
This may be a faulty memory, but I believe there was a stuffed raccoon trapped behind the lattice in the right foreground. The large photograph on the wall in the center of the picture was Darrell's grandfather; Shannon worked him into one or two of her later projects.
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