Role:           Set and Lighting Designer/Assistant Director
Where:        New Mercury Theater
Playwright:  Steven Berkoff

Kvetch - wow.  That was SUCH a monster hit for us.  I thought that was the first play we produced for New Mercury..maybe... Oh! I think it was the first play we produced in our space, a 2000 sq. ft space at Pioneer Square - 17 foot ceilings, unobstructed views, no columns, scoop cyclorama in two of the three walls, which means it was a blending from the ceiling to the floor in smooth arcs so that you lose perspective and you can force perspective sets and skylines and stuff like that and it makes set design really easy, and most of all, cheap.

(clip) That [Kvetch] was about a couple who has no social skills... at all and are dying inside and have no sex life at all, and no children, and invite a man who has no friends at all to dinner - and they try SO hard to have a good time and they die inside.  The thing about it is they'll all be having dinner and they're talking together and then suddenly the other two people will freeze and the other goes, (conversationally) "so anyway I told the guy... I'm dying inside, I have to go to the bathroom, I think it's diarrhea, I don't dare...I'm sweating ..."  and then they go back to it and then the other person talks. And it reveals how completely phobic they are, how fearful and it's howlingly funny.  And it almost tore the theater company up because technically it was so hard to do because everybody needs to know not only their lines, but every line, every word of every line of everybody else, because everyone's cueing off specific lines to start and stop moving.  And in order for it to be seamless, it's not just the end of the line because that slows it down. The cast had to start and stop moving three words before the end so that it would be... I don't know how to explain it.  I was the assistant director and I thought that we had to conquer the technical part of it before we could really work on character because it was such a... you had to be able to do that before you could start picking up the ball and playing with the language, for things to start happening organically.  And everybody else wanted to work on character and we had a big fight. But I got my way and we got a hit. But I don't think my wife, who was the director, ever forgave me for that.  JM.com  2007

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"Shifts in the lighting plan (by James Marsters and Brian Turner) help differentiate between surface deception and inner truth. The torment underlying the play's satire is made visible in the setting by Davidson, Marsters and Loryn Spicer. A leering demon face covers the floor and background."  Joe Adcock ·  Seattle Post-Intelligencer ·  April 27, 1993

"The set by Loryn Spicer, James Marsters and director Liane Davidson is minimal but effective, being mostly a black-and-white backdrop of (Frank's?) screaming face, complete with cavernous maw and ominously flaring nostrils. "  A.J. Mell  · Seattle Times  · May 4, 1993