Danton’s Death
(2025)
Venue:
CalArts Modular Theater
Technical Director:
James Gingold
Director:
Hunter Abal
Ast. Technical Director:
Logan Masters
Tahvo Stephan
"Georges Danton stands as the voice of reason during the bloody flurry of The Terror. In spite of years garnering the admiration of friends and foes alike, The Revolution has finally picked him as its next great enemy. With his fate anchored to the executioner, Danton searches for comfort in the company of his friends, wife, and lovers; but despite his many allies, Danton cannot overcome his horror at France’s insistence to eat itself alive. Though Danton may refuse to fear the guillotine, in the end, he must accept his fear of death."
I came onto this show as an assistant technical director with the bulk of my focus revolving around developing our falling curtain or "Kabuki drop".
The show starts on a wide, shallow stage with a roughly fourty foot long and twenty foot tall curtain as a backdrop. This curtain had a projection screen sewn into it and was to fall at the end of act one, revealing an entirely new set which the audience would move to for act two. This production did not have the budget to rent or build any kind of traditional approach to a Kabuki drop, so I instead utilized stock truss, rigging hardware, and rope to create a system which mechanically released the curtain at the pull of a string when cued by the stage management team.
This was an especially challenging yet rewarding project. Spanning such a large distance meant I needed a lot of material and a lot of weight to account for. Even the slightest bit of deflection in my rig meant that the curtain would not fall evenly and could get caught on its hardware. Through weeks of designing, fabricating, and testing, the rig worked flawlessly and consistently. Every night, this veil would ripple to the ground and reveal a world hidden within a world for an intensely engaging and magical night of theatre.
