Back in May, I received an email from Jen Rowe, the director of The Theater Company here in Portland, asking me if I’d like to shoot some promotional imagery for a new play called “California” by Trish Harnetiaux.  Jen had a few ideas for the hero shot but also wanted to capture some creative portraits of our cast, so I asked her to send along the script so I could get a sense of what the play was about and start brainstorming some ideas.

I was hooked by the end of page 1.

If you haven’t heard of “California”, I highly recommend it. The play follows a family of 5 on a surreal road trip from eastern Washington to southern California in the 1980s. It’s a fabulous blend of humor, nostalgia, and quantum theory that tackles BIG questions in the most familiar and yet bizarre way.(I’d try to explain it further but it’s honestly best to just go see it yourself, I promise you won’t be disappointed).

I arrived to our shoot on what happened to be the first day of rehearsal. Five chairs sat on the floor, arranged like seats in a car. As the actors shuffled through wardrobe options, I snapped some portraits of them in their prescribed “car seats” as they ad libbed scenes from the shoot. One by one they filled in the seats and photo shoot and rehearsal morphed into one as I captured a plethora of group shots while Jen and company began to choreograph the performance.

The bulk of the work came next in post-production. For our hero shot, I wanted to convey a more literal sense of the road trip. I swapped the stage chairs for a plate of the red Volvo station wagon they’re meant to betraveling in, and transported them into the ominous forest in which the climax of the story takes place.

For the individual portraits, I wanted to create that sense of juxtaposition that is such a prevalent theme in the play.  I decided to keep them in their chairs but create surreal backgrounds that speak to the individual characters. For Tucker for example, a 14 year old morbidly obsessed with the Oregon Trail, I set them against the backdrop of a sepia canyon road, located in eastern Oregon. For mom Betty—an aspiring tour guide of the now defunct Hanford Site in eastern Washington—I set her against an ironic billboard (“Where Safety Comes First”) welcoming us to the largest nuclear waste site in the US.

A big thanks to The Theater Company for your trust and for allowing me some creative freedom on this project!