DESIGN APPROACH

Quest depicts three quests for love. The main relationship is between the characters in the present (well, the mid-80's actually). Miss Li and Kim Mak-Dong, workers in an insurance agency trying to find out the circumstances surrounding the death of two lovers in the past. They investigate by acting out the lovers' story in a disjointed, invented narrative that traces the love back to an incident in the Korean war and their separation in the hands of the Communists. By finding the story of their love, the Li and Kim come to terms with the limits of their own love.

The third quest is called simply the "couple searching for love." They are mute and their movement serves as a commentary on the other quests. They find each other, fall in love, and end in misery.

I saw ways that the playwright achieved balance in the script (pairings of characters past and present, balances of power in the office between human drives) and began to think of ways to achieve a visual balance.

The playwright was a screenwriter who earned his degree at UCLA, and there was a distinct influence of the detective film genre in this work. I wanted to create a feeling of the old detective agency with a modern vocabulary and indicate that we were in 1980's Seoul. Further I needed to provide pieces for the actors to change the space to play scenes in the past.

This came together in the design. The research showed the trend towards partitioning spaces to make smaller spaces. On a square ground plan, I divided the DS space evenly between the two competitors, Kim and Mr. Ha and placed miss Li (the object of both their affections) in a powerful UC position. In essence, two simple shapes (a triangle inscribed in a square) were created. The Director of the Agency has so little real power that his office isn't even seen.

The office itself is backed by a large international-style window with a view of the buildings across the street. This also served as the projection surface to title each scene. In front of the windows, vertical blinds. The set was dressed with samples of previous eras (40's style chairs, 50's file cabinets, 60's steelcase desk, 70's partitions, 80's colors). The partitions, desks and tables provided the "stuff" to make "sets" for the scenes in the past.

I also wanted to achieve a balance between this main playing space and the theatre itself. The main deck did not completely fill the proscenium frame. I left a perimeter of black around the set and defined the vertical perimeter with hanging fluorescent lights. The perimeter around the deck became the domain of the Couple Searching for Love.

© 2004 by Gion DeFrancesco