Concepts

This rendition of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream deals with mental health. This idea takes creativity of the mind to a new place. The Character’s imaginations get the best of them and they explore their wildest dreams through this story. The entire plot is based off of if this story was a dream or reality. That is how Mental patients see their reality, as a question. I wanted to portray these patients as creatives and story tellers. They are inspired by their surroundings and create the imaginative forest. The walls of the space are warped and turned while the outside world past the proscenium is straight and uniform. The use of 3D projection mapping would be a creative way to make their imaginative forest come alive. In my research for this design I found several images of patients drawing and painting to calm the mind, I would have the characters paint on the walls, their interpretation of the woods and the harsh lines of reality on the floor are traced over with the 3D mapping to grow into the forest of their dreams, something like Max and Where The Wild Things Are. 

• They’re mode of finding sanity in their space comes from the characters using their world in the ward to inspire their story. The nurses would be the fairies who facilitate the whole thing, they progress the story and imagination through care taking.  Warm continuous baths were used to treat patients suffering from Insomnia, those considered to be suicidal and assaultive, and calmed excited and agitated behavior. A patient could expect a continuous bath treatment to last from several hours to several days, or sometimes even over night. It plays as their mode of sleep and calm.
• The characters gather their inspiration for the world from their surroundings, the night sky seen from their window at night and the trees outside along with the potted plants as that natural world. 
• The world  comes alive when puck enters and the forest appears. The use of projections makes that world based on their imagination and it can come and go in a second. The linear aspects of the set acts as their real world and the lines come alive and sprout into a fantastical forest for them to play in. There are twists and turns. The set will spin at the banquet as their stage and act as the spinning of time. 
• The world that they create comes from their imagination and mental playground. Having the fairies come and go and become invisible makes them figments of their imaginations, what these characters can see but others can’t