Making Theatre Pop
When brainstorming concepts for a bold new campaign to launch the 17th season at Amphibian Stage Productions (ASP) in Fort Worth, Texas, we kept our eye on their mission: to produce innovative and engaging theater that inspires new ideas, opens new doors, and increases our understanding of the vast world around us. It reminded us of something Andy Warhol once said about Pop Art:
Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again.
And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
That transformation of one’s way of seeing, a goal shared by ASP, was the big idea we wanted to express at the heart of the campaign.
What better vehicle to express it, than by riffing on the aesthetics of Pop Art itself? Its simple, everyday images infused with irony and wit, its bold colors and kitschy textures, and its “defamiliarizing” shifts in context all seemed perfectly suited to capture the spirit and values of ASP and the themes and ironies of the 8 plays of Season 17. Pop Art also seemed to be the right choice for exceeding the high creative bar set by the clients: they wanted posters as fresh, original, and breakthrough as the plays themselves.
As a coherent set of posters that borrows Pop Art’s power of composition, perception, and storytelling, the Season 17 campaign successfully translates the drama, conflicts, and tensions of the 8 plays into expressive visual forms. In the Isaac’s Eye poster, for example, an absurd portrait of Newton—his face reduced to a giant eye—symbolizes the blurred line between hypothesis and fact, between what’s imagined and what’s real. The poster for I’ll Eat You Last, a play about a Hollywood agent and showbiz gossip, features an open mouth and wagging tongue to announce this comic exposé of the grime beneath the glamour in Tinseltown. And for Crossing the Line, a play about which way to go when living with arbitrary borders and ridiculous policies, our poster deploys 3 directional fingers that point only to confusion in a vicious circle of blame.
