meet me in the pouring rain

The one homage to the movie is the heart-shaped portals. You barely saw them in the movie, but they made a strong impression on me. There are three of them in the show. They’re made out of lacy, Victorian ironwork that’s painted gold to look like gold leaf. Because there are three con­centric heart shapes that are similar but not exactly the same, the shapes morph a bit as they go upstage. Each one is dense but also transparent. You’re looking through this ironwork to the next shape, and it’s visually confusing. People were con­stantly surprised to find out that there were only three of them. They thought there were three times that number. That was a happy trick created by the density and transparency of the pat­terns. The layering of patterns was important to me. The por­tals have hundreds of light bulbs built into them and tubes of neon, so there was a lot of opportunity to light them. -DEREK MCLANE