Scenic, Lighting, Projections, and Costume Design by Leigh Henderson

San José City College Theatre Arts (San José, CA), April 2015

By José Rivera

Directed by Dennis Sloan

José Rivera’s Sonnets for an Old Century is a series of monologues, spoken by characters newly deceased – final attempts to communicate ideas, stories, and lives that have never been fully heard. They find themselves in a place of waiting that is, at the same time, a place of transition and transportation, as well as of communication.

The scenery and lighting is informed by liminal spaces like hospital waiting rooms, highway underpasses, warehouses, train stations, tent cities, and, of course, theaters.

In the twenty first century, a question of communication is necessarily a question of technology. Recorded or live, audio or video, face-to-face or mediated, life-sized or amplified, literal or abstract, how do technological manipulations amplify or diminish these messages shouted out from death to life? The television and video screens embedded in the scenery flatten as they enlarge, simplify as they multiply, echo as they contradict the live actors, converting live theatrical communication into a dispersed yet immersive experience.