A Play: A Southern Victory
Tuesday I had the opportunity to shoot some promotional photos for a play a friend of mine is producing. The play, A Southern Victory (asouthernvictory.wordpress.com), is a trilogy: Part I: Borders and Nations, Part II: Entering the Whirlwind, and Part III: The Day of Jubilee. The first of the plays premiers tonight at the Boston Playwrights Theatre.
This was a fun shoot for me, it was something new, that I had never done before. I didn't have to create a character or get to know an individual. I didn't have to set the scene or the lighting. The actors had their marks, were in character, and the lighting designer took care of the lights; it was all a part of the play. My job was to capture the key moments in an interesting composition, to understand what was important in a scene and how to show that in my images. The high key lighting and emotional journey of the characters was fun to capture.
We worked on scenes involving a slave and a confederate soldier, a singer and a flapper, a couple, and a thanksgiving dinner.
More about the play
This series of plays follow it's own timeline in the history of the United States.
1865 The South won the Civil War and the confederate states continue theirs lives as they had. Despite defeat The Union abolishes slavery.
1914 WW1 begins. The Union joins the fight and the Confederacy does not.
1922 escaped slaves mingle with flappers in the northern speakeasies, Confederate and German agents forge an alliance to against the League of Nations, and abolitionists sell bootlegged booze to fund an underground war.
Present some extremists in the abolitionist movement have adopted an extreme counter-slavery measure: young men from the North blow themselves up in balls, streetcars, and picture houses in the South.
*information taken from the plays description since I haven't seen it yet!
