The Process of Design: Realising the World of “Lion in the Streets”

Lion in the Streets (1990), by award-winning Canadian playwright Judith Thompson, is a work that confronts the cruelty of life, death and the human condition, and so requires a stage setting that will communicate those issues to an audience in performance. The play will be presented in a new production by students in the UBC Department of Theatre and Film, at the Chan Centre, opening January 26. What was the process of set design in this case? From conception to completion, Emily Dotson explains the choices made in creating a fictional world to serve brutally real characters.

Emily Dotson is an MFA Theater and Film design student at the University of British Columbia. She has worked as a set designer for equity and non-equity theaters in many cities across the U.S. and recently completed her scenic painting internship with the Seattle Repertory Theater. She is an award-winning painter and drawer and is currently designing Lion in the Streets at UBC.