Playwright: David Grimm
Director: Braden Abraham
Scenic & Costume Designer: G. W. (Skip) Mercier
Lighting Designer: L. B. Morse
Sound Designer & Soundscape Creator: Sharath Patel
Stage Manager: Stina Lotti

Original Performance Dates

February 2 - March 4 2018

(c) Seattle Repertory Theatre 2018. *Original Music by The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, Dan Haugaard, Jon Faukstad, Hans W. Brimi & Mary Barthelemy, Folkstow, Inger Nielsen.

2018 Outstanding Sound/Music Design Nominee

The Gregory Awards (Seattle, Washington)

Ibsen in Chicago - Seattle Repertory Theatre

“Ibsen in Chicago” was world premier production focused on the first American performance of the Henrik Ibsen play “Ghosts”.  The challenge of this production was creating the aural atmosphere of 1882 Chicago though a naturalistic soundscape, giving the audience an impression of the world surrounding Aurora Turner Hall.  I used vintage and original recordings of tower bells, horses on cobblestones, and turn of the century wagons as the base of the soundscape.  To create deeper sonic textures, I traded with other sound designers to acquire samples of period factory machinery and executed intimate field recordings of pigeons to emulate the fowl that would have lived in the rafters of the hall.  The real fun came when I recorded myself as the barker selling Chicago Tribune Newspapers and morphed my director’s voice into a barking dog!  Much to my excitement, I had the pleasure to collaborate with a musician to record a concertina version of the song “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”.  The recorded song was part of a drunken singing and dancing moment onstage.  Since the actor holding the concertina didn’t know how to play it, the recording needed to be as intimate as possible to trick the audience into believing the actor was generating the sound live on-stage.