Quit Bitchin'

The Design

Throughout the play, the scenes shift between everyday locations such as a liquor store, a laundromat, and a fellowship hall. Each is grounded in a recognizable reality but charged with emotional intensity. In the liquor store, a radio plays in the background, cycling through a blend of contemporary Americana and rock. The music feels rooted and familiar, underscoring Chrys's day-to-day routine while hinting at deeper undercurrents of longing, resistance, and unrest.

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The laundromat was a space of constant motion and noise, with machines humming, churning, and clicking. That ambience underscored the dialogue, adding a layer of tension and momentum as characters navigate their personal struggles. The idea was for the laundromat to grow in intensity in moments of rising stress, allowing the environment to reflect the characters' emotional state.

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In this scene, we come up on the laundromat. We meet our character Maddy, who's a newly mom to twins, just moved to town, and trying to get some laundry done. She initially tries to tap her card to pay for a load, but the machines only take quarters. She's directed to an ATM machine to take out cash, we hear this happening as she is behind the SL wall. She then walks over behind the SR wall to a coin machine that spits out $10 dollars in quarters as she franticly swims on the floor trying to collect them all. We didn't have the physical machines, so I recorded foley for each of these sound cues. In this scene is also our character Jules, who's extremely busy and is constantly getting phone calls from her boss.

Photos by Jeanine Hill

Throughout the play, we found moments where heightened, hyper-realistic, and surreal elements emerged within the grounded, present-day lives of the women, connecting them to their Greek roots and the liminal, ethereal space of the interludes. These shifts often appeared as stylized tableaux paired with lighting and vocal reverb to evoked the feeling of ancient ritual and connection.

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In this scene, chaos slowly erupts in the laundromat as the lives of these women begin to unravel. Tension rises when Tig accuses Maddie of meddling in her relationship, sparking an argument in which they hurl painful truths at each other. As their confrontation intensifies, the ambient sounds of the laundromat begin to swell and distort, mirroring the emotional intensity. Finally, as each woman delivers her final word, the machines explode into a cacophony of buzzers and washing machine jingles, to mirror the release in tension.

System Design & Technology

For this production, the audience was seated on the apron of the proscenium stage, facing upstage. With space behind, beside, and above the audience, I built a surround system that operates like a hemisphere, allowing sound to move fluidly around the full spatial field. This layout gave me the flexibility to shape the audience’s experience from multiple angles, using overhead and rear speakers to enhance depth and atmosphere.

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My goals for the system were to include non-localized vocal reinforcement, designed to support vocal effects like delay and reverb for dialogue during the heavy movement and music pieces. These vocal effects helped highlight moments when the text shifted from realism into something more stylized or surreal.

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I also worked closely with the composer, who created a score that featured a recorded chorus of female voices. As the music grows more layered and lush, the spacial system become a great tool. I used the system to enhance that complexity of the music and live vocals through the space to create a sense of growth. Some specific practical speakers, for a radio, telephone rings, and hidden around the laundry machines were localized to the stage itself to maintain a connection between the music and the physical spaces.

Paperwork