Behind the Design: Suspect!

Behind every awesome theatre performer is a thoughtfully and intentionally realized scenic design. (No, literally—it’s right behind them.) And some of our favorite past Good Night shows feature some subtle design choices that you may not have noticed at first glance. To give you a peek behind the curtain (yep, we’re in pun territory…) we wanted to give you a glimpse at some of the behind-the-scenes details from shows past in our new blog series, Behind the Design. First up? It’s our January 2022 production of Suspect!

WARNING: This post contains spoilers about the plot of Suspect! Read at your own peril!

Even the office of podcast host Maureen Charles is made up of the same slats, offering you a subtle hint to her connection to the crimes.

The Lakefront Cabin

To embody the eerie, lived-in quality of a long-untouched crime scene, our scenic designer and artistic director Bob Wendland got to work developing a concept for how we might pull off a multi-story space that brought to life the former home of victims Millicent and David Brentwood. A hallmark of this particular design is its non-literal and asymmetrical composition that gives you an almost visual personification of the creaky floorboards and unsettling dis-ease that occupy the story.

One detail of note is the unstained lumber that make up the walls, floors and doors of the cabin. Mimicking the look and feel of untreated pine boards, it’s meant to elicit the old idiom of being “put in a pine box,” considering the cabin is the Brentwoods’ final resting place, so to speak. Not to mention, the gaps between all the slats that comprise the cabin vary in width, giving you slivers of peeks into the darkness behind them. Considering the story’s deep roots in what goes on behind closed doors, this feature is meant to play tricks on your eyes, straining to see what isn’t there.

Other details that pointed toward a teenage resident included the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sheets on Delia’s bed.

The cast performs “Catch a Killer” under the guise of internet anonymity.

The Set Dressing

Beyond the killer themself, there were other Easter eggs pointing toward some of the Act 2 reveals from the moment our actors entered the Lakefront Cabin. The east bedroom, for instance, including some noticeably different décor, such as posters a teenager who grew up in the 2000s might’ve sported on their wall. The worn wall hangings were meant to give you a hint that there was a teen living with the Brentwoods, a detail that paid off after Trent was revealed to be Marcus Boone at the Twinkie dinner party in Act 2.

Speaking of décor, everything, from the crooked “gone fishin’” wall art to the eclectic and askew dining room chair designs, was meant to give you the feeling of a couple that lived a modest existence, with the disheveled and damaged nature of the surroundings meant to indicate that perhaps the crime scene had been vandalized a time or two in the past 12 years.

In addition, the shadow play used at the top of the show allowed our online-only personas to mask their true selves, depicting the anonymity of internet culture, where someone like “Fancy Nancy” could masquerade as (perhaps even unintentionally) “Stitches4Snitches.” This detail even played into the ways in which the actors inflected their characters’ lines in the Suspect podcast chatroom, KillerChat, where characters like Fancy Nancy, Beth (a.k.a., “FutureCatLady”) and Trent (a.k.a., “BarbackMtn”) affected their voices to be exaggerated versions of how the other users (or audience members) might hear their voices in their heads, operating on assumption and generalizations due to their screen-names.

Not to mention, our lighting designer Matt Cook baked in a little bit of a deep-cut computer technology reference in the colorization, where the hues adopted the RGB style often found in displays and monitors!

Marcus, Beau and Beth review the footage of the “killer” poisoning Gerald’s dinner.

The Costuming

Beyond the set itself, we even baked a few nuggets of information into the costuming. Beau’s hopelessly generic “disguise” of simply a shirt emblazoned with “SPORTS” was a cue to the audience that he was very unlikely an actual gym teacher and former national champion crew team rower.

And if identifying the “lady in black” depicted in the kitchen poisoning footage proved difficult, that was on purpose! A stand-in actor was used in the footage to clear the way for any of our remaining female characters to be the culprit—as long as they had a dagger tattoo on their forearm, of course…

We hope you enjoyed this quick glimpse into what made Suspect! tick — stay tuned for more “Behind the Design” right here on the Good Night blog!