Cape Disappointment

Sound design for Cape Disappointment, by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen (developed by Oliver Butler), produced by Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, NC. Directed by Jay O’Berski, with performances by Ishai Buchbinder, Dana Marks, Jeffrey Moore, and Annie Zipper. Set and billboards by Megan Burchett.

The production was staged as an immersive experience in which audience members occupied rolling office chairs on the theater floor, physically moving through and around the performance space as actors drove boxy plywood vehicles through the crowd. The piece rotated between interlocking plotlines set on the highways and backroads of a mid-century American nowhere — part drive-in movie, part road trip, part suspense.

The sound design situated the audience inside the shifting locations of the play — cars, roadside stops, open highway — creating spatial environments for a production in which the conventional separation of stage and seating had been dissolved.