Starring Friends favourite Matthew Perry (Chandler Bing), British actress Minnie Driver and Hank Azaria, best known for providing a variety of voices for The Simpsons, Sexual Perversity in Chicago is about four young people looking for love in the 1970s. The one-act play written by David Mamet and directed by Lindsay Posner, tells the story of Danny (Perry) and his friend Bernie (Azaria), two red-blooded males playing the mating and dating game.
The play consists of 32 scenes and before each one, images of 1970s Chicago are projected onto a screen to indicate the time and place. Production manager John Dalston explains: "The designer Jeremy Herbert wanted to be able to close the front of the set to indicate scene changes, so we designed a screen that opens and closes vertically, using a series of sliders which act as a kind of camera aperture. For this key feature we chose equipment from Triple E."
Supplied to Simon York of Miraculous Engineering, the framework for the screen is formed by vertical Triple E Unibeam track, with Unitrack runners, each side of the stage. Fabric is stretched between the runners to form the screens and a pantograph mechanism folds each screen, concertina fashion, neatly into the top and bottom of the stage, like an eyelid. Sexual Perversity in Chicago runs until the start of August.
(Ruth Rossington)
