Scenic, Lighting, Projections, and Costume Design by Leigh Henderson
San José City College Theatre Arts (San José, CA), November 2015
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Leyla Modirzadeh
With 57 short scenes and over 100 characters, Love and Information examines our age of information overload, dwindling attention span, and multi-tasking to the point of losing our ability to truly connect with each other.
The script only provides titles and lines of text with no indication of character or setting, so producing Love and Information in a community college theater department allowed students to use their own imaginations to create context for each scene. The process was a true collaboration between Leigh, director Leyla Modirzadeh, and the student cast and crew.
The creative approach to the production embraced the play’s exploration of the shape of information and of obstacles to communication through playful props, multiple media, and bold physical choices. The high-energy comedic performance included belly dancing, tap dancing, conversations between puppets, lines delivered on cartoon speech bubbles by an actor with tape over his mouth, a ping pong match, beach balls, helium balloons, bubble blowing, scenes performed simultaneously, and bright red clown noses.
The performance space has been reoriented, placing the audience on stage. Between the looming ghostly silhouettes, which surround the audience as well as the stage space, the audience can see the empty seats of the theater. Using to the full the possibilities of the space, actors moved between empty theater seats, climbed backstage ladders, packed themselves into set pieces, and zoomed around and between audience sections on a razor scooter.