HEWES AWARD NOMINATION

Written by Marielle Heller

Produced by Aaron Mooney in association with New Georges and The Essentials

Directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde and Rachel Eckerling

Costumes by Emily DeAngelis

Lights by Laura Mroczkowski

Projections by C. Andrew Bauer

3LD Arts and Technology Center

"...aided by sterling technical contributions:  Lauren Helpern's sets and Emily DeAngelis's costumes artfully conjure the period, while C. Andrew Bauer's video designs cleverly incorporate Ms. Gloeckner's drawings."

-- New York Times

"The setting for Minnie's bildungsroman, as designed by Lauren Helpern (set), C. Andrew Bauer (video), and Laura Mroczkowski (lights), is a 360-degree sensorium.  Audiences encircle Minnie's bed, which serves alternately as her refuge and her prison.  The theater is brightly lit, light brown with bright stars on the walls and neon-green pillows on the chairs.  The overall effect is of the strong, blunt colors of a manga cartoon, the paradigmatic aesthetic of teenage girls learning to discern shades of grey."

-- Backstage

"'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' (adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel by Marielle Heller, who also plays the lead) uncannily brings you back to that place - the piece's consciousness and viewpoint, not to mention the physical environment crafted by set design Lauren Helpern and video designer C. Andrew Bauer, take you completely inside the mind of its teenage heroine - but at the same time both Heller and directors Sarah Cameron Sunde and Rachel Eckerling create enough distance from her experience to allow us to understand what's happening to Minnie in ways that she cannot quite yet."

NYtheatre

"The set for the production is a 70s style 'conversation pit' with Minnie's bedroom in the middle.  The design is Sensurround in the best possible sense, with a totally immersive video and audio environment where characters and scenes take place all around and in the audience.  The production level is really great - it makes you feel the dazed and confused slightly out of control boundary dissolving sensibility that was the 70s."

-- Culturebot