John Patrick Shanley's The Pushover at Chain Theatre
Chain Theatre's production space is small enough that for the photo call for The Pushover, I was moving through the actual set. Shanley's script puts Pearl and Evelyn in close proximity for most of the play, and the staging kept returning to that.
Di Zhu was mid-prep in the kitchen scene, chopping what looked like scallions, a boombox on the counter beside her. I was shooting through the serving window. A natural frame I didn't have to build.
The table scene gave me a sustained two-shot. Zhu and Rebecca De Mornay across from each other, bowls and a Heineken between them. I held the angle and waited for both faces to be readable at once. De Mornay's stillness as Evelyn comes through at that range.
A lot of what I was watching for was how the space between them changed. The moment where Pearl holds her gloved hand flat toward Evelyn's face was one of the clearer ones. I stayed on the two-shot rather than moving in on either of them. Zhu's arm extended, De Mornay's hands held close to her body. Both of them in frame meant you could see the full shape of it.
Christopher Sutton's scenes as the therapist had a different physical setup: seated and reactive while Zhu came at him. I worked an angle that kept her mostly in profile and him full-face, hands up, palms open, somewhere between protest and trying to slow things down.
The violence in the script isn't incidental to what The Pushover is about, and when De Mornay and Christina Toth staged the scene, it was committed. I had to think about where I was standing as they set it up. What I got was De Mornay behind Toth, knife to her throat, Toth's head back and mouth open.
Later on in the same scene, Zhu took charge with a prop gun. I pulled back to get all three of them: Toth on the floor, De Mornay at the table, Zhu across the room with her arm extended.
At the end of the call the cast lined up, hands joined. Zhu was laughing. After an hour of scenes built around control and confrontation, that was worth keeping.
A new Shanley play with a cast that includes Rebecca De Mornay needs solid photo documentation early in the run. Chain Theatre will pull from these for press materials and grant applications well past closing night. Getting usable material across multiple scenes in a compressed photo call window is the whole job.
If you're opening a show and want a photographer who'll work through the material without disrupting it, I'm happy to talk through what coverage looks like for your production. Contact me here.
