There’s always that eggy moment when you work in theatre, that you have to reach out to friends, family, and colleagues and say things like:

  • Would you be interested in donating to this kickstarter?
  • Would you like to buy a ticket for our fundraiser ($125 but you get a free glass of wine and a mini quiche).
  • Does anyone have a sofa, a bed frame, or a vintage record player circa 1970’s that we can blow up on stage?

For Perfect Blue, the asks have been different.

  • Do you have a 4 bedroom furnished house in central London that you would mind lending us for a month to house an actor, and also where we can live-stream him, live in performance, to the other side of The Atlantic?
  • Does your house look like a rural English cottage would look in 2039?
  • Does it also have several rooms, one of which would be a child’s bedroom, the other would be a rotting work space where (spoiler alert) our hero has to take shelter when the butterflies come (they won’t mess up your home, I promise).
  • Does it have a very fast and very reliable internet connection.
  • Can we use it for 5 weeks?
  • Cheaply?

It’s not just sourcing the UK venue that is challenging. In a few weeks time when we head into rehearsals, we will have to establish the UK set, lights, and sound remotely from our control center here in Philly. We will have to Skype back and forth with our UK crew asking them to ‘move the plant a little to the left’, ‘move the table a little to the right’.

This is a very different approach from the production of The Lamellar Project that we performed in London last year. In that production (produced by Pursued By A Bear) the orientation was reversed and so I established a studio in my basement in Philly, and we projected images and film clips onto the back wall via an ultra short focus projector. In image one you can see the original slide. In image two you can see it projected behind me. In image three you can see what the audience in the UK saw.

It worked incredibly well, but for our US production of Perfect Blue, we need to allow our US actor greater freedom to walk around the space and give our US audiences, more of a sense of the world that the character Michael is inhabiting.

Hence the need for a realistic set, and the search for a 4 bedroomed house in London with a fantastic internet connection…

So if I could ask you to spread the word….Put on facebook, twitter, ask your Mum. There’s a free mini quiche and a ticket to the show if you can help.

Love Emma