THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, WMU, 2024
Director: Mark Liermann | Scenic Designer: Andrea Imsland | Lighting Designer: Evan Carlson | Sound Designer: Joshua Reid Technical Director: Patrick Niemi | Costume Designer: Kathryn Wagner | Props Master: Perris Stachlewitz
Audiences enter the space through a door that they have never entered before. Passageways and turns cause unease in the audience from the moment they first arrive. The house is alive and character itself. It is all encompassing, enveloping and consuming everything that we see, and everything past that as well. The use of verticality in the space created a looming feeling above the heads of everyone present. The house evokes fear. Everyone who sees this production should be afraid. To amplify that fear, the play is produced in the round, so that audience members can see fear on the faces of everyone around them.
Research
I researched houses of the time period as well as ghostly elements that could be hidden in plain sight throughout the space. Maybe an audience member would notice them, maybe they will go unseen…
Concept Sketches
Since we knew we wanted to put on this production in the round, I spent a lot of time playing with different layouts of our seating units with different shapes of platforms in the center.
Paint Elevations
Drafting
Production Photos
“The production uses Andrea Imsland’s striking set design for some memorable revelatory moments and tells the story in a fluid manner”
“To enter the D. Terry Williams Theatre for this performance, I walked down a long, narrow, dimly lighted passage, lined with toys and dolls from long ago. Somewhere a music box was playing a plaintive counterpoint to my surroundings: “Happy Days Are Here Again.”… When I arrived in the darkened playing area for this immersive, in-the-round production I heard indistinguishable whispers and eerie humming sounds that seemed to disturb the air around me. Four heavy cornices, suggesting a 19th Century mansion, were suspended overhead. A large, rectangular, white canvas box loomed inexplicably above the stage.”
-Gordon Bolar, "Theater review: Haunting of Hill House", WMUK News, October 30, 2024, https://www.wmuk.org/wmuk-news/2024-10-30/theater-review-haunting-of-hill-house-at-wmu-theatre