FREAKS Grounplan

The space Upstairs at the White Elephant was a  50 X 50 foot room above the historic White Elephant Saloon in the Old Stockyards District of Fort Worth, Texas. We had been doing a series of winter season shows up there for about 4 years. As this groundplan for FREAKS shows, the audience were seated in folding chairs on makeshift risers; seating about 100 with a performing space roughly 20 feet square. I used to refer to this as "Painfully Intimate Theatre", which for this particular production it most certainly was!

Most of the action of FREAKS occured outside the Circus Tent and in the various Wagons of the principle characters. I am now going to divulge a secret to pulling this off in such a tight space:

I utilized 4 triangular 3-sided revolving flats, one 2' side was curtained, the next a plexiglass mirror and the third a painted panel depicting a circus style poster of one of the 4 main characters in the play.( These last were the expert work of ADRIAN MARTINEZ ). These could be turned quickly to change the locale and mood of the scenes in the show. A trick I learned while working for the Puppet Company in Kansas some years before. There was also a central Shadow Puppet Screen which showed action in silhouette taking place inside the Circus Tent and to which the actors onstage could refer during the scenes. between this and the revolving panels where hung drapes on each side of the stage which simulated the outside of the Circus Tent through which the actors could make their entrances and exits. The chief effect here was a gradual reduction in scale....