Samantha Gribben
Scenic Designer — HARVEST
SAMANTHA is a freelance scenic artist and scenic designer. Her design credits include Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Ghostlight Ensemble), Curious George (Northbrook Theatre), and An Ideal Husband (Ghostlight Ensemble). She’s currently the charge artist for the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre and has previously charged for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, the Tibbits Opera House, and the Little Theatre on the Square. She attended Sewanee: The University of the South for her BA in Theatre Arts.
Samantha is originally from Plano, TX, received her MFA from Illinois State University and is now based in Milwaukee, WI.
HARVEST was directed by David Weber for Illinois State University in April 2017.
With HARVEST, we hoped to articulate that even though the play takes place in the future, it is a future that we are actively creating. We strove to create a world that was both claustrophobic and daunting, that helped the audience to sympathize with the central family’s story while considering their own contributions to the future in the play. We sought to impart a feeling of desperation and a sense of being overwhelmed by one’s circumstances. This served to reinforce the family’s stark poverty. Surrounding the apartment was a “trash canopy” made of trusses, grids, and discarded communication technology. The trash piles provided a visual history of our world and told the audience that the world in this science fiction was a vision of their own future. While designing the set, I was particularly interested in movement through the space – the suffocating smallness of the living quarters, the sharp, angled paths through the hallway, and the repetitive wear of climbing to a walk-up apartment.
