lady in the red dress

Above: Early Stage Concept for "Lady in the Red Dress"

 

2018

Set Design  for "Lady in the Red Dress" at George Ignatieff Theatre, Toronto

Written by David Yee

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Plot Summary

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Lady in the Red Dress is a Canadian play that shines light upon the struggles of thousands of Chinese immigrants and their descendants under the Head Tax of 1885. The play revolves around, Max Lochran, a lawyer at the Department of Justice, Toronto, who is working on a settlement case dealing with the victims of the Head Tax. His life turns upside down when a mysterious Chinese woman named Sylvia takes it upon herself to make him consider the case from the standpoint of the ones who had suffered, by endangering Max and his son Danny's lives.

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Design Rationale

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The play embodies an eerie, nightmarish quality, as it makes one question the reality of all those afore-played out occurrences, as Max seemingly wakes up from a dream in the last scene. Keeping the surreal nature in mind, along with the nation-wide cry for support that it calls for, and with the fact that the playwright himself alludes to the film noir genre in the foreword,  I stepped away from thinking of Lady in the Red Dress as a Torontonian play, but rather a play about the Chinese immigrant experience in all of Canada. The play's final design, with looming brick buildings in a monochrome colour palette around the central irregular pentagonal space comes from an extensive research of German Experssionist set designs and Film Noir production designs, a study of Canadian “Chinatowns”, and Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), in order to give the play a nightmarish quality.

 

Apart from the reference to film noir, another thing that was really important to me was the theme of intercultural relationships as represented by Danny Lochran’s hybridity, and that of the Brothers Chan. In order to incorporate this theme into the design, I decided to use sets that could stand in place for multiple scenes with minimal prop changes.

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The following scale elevations and model for the final set design.