7 Degrees
Seven Degrees of Separation follows Carter, a teenager who plans to abandon his life on his eighteenth birthday. Before he can leave, he meets Caine, a mysterious doppelgänger who claims to have been created to take his place. As Caine gets to know Carter’s friends and the conflicts that have shaped their relationships, he grows increasingly frustrated by Carter’s selfishness and dishonesty. The play explores identity, friendship, and responsibility through a mix of comedy and fantasy. As the conflict between Carter and Caine escalates, Caine decides to take Carter’s identity for himself. The play ends as Carter’s friends arrive for a surprise birthday party, unaware that the person they are celebrating is no longer Carter.
I worked two plays at the same time during this period, and my script for this one arrived incomplete, with more than half of the pages missing. [One sentence on how you handled it, such as working from the director’s notes or building the set from the pages you had.] Around that, I was also working the class of 2026 graduation and a concert, so I split my time across four events while keeping each one on schedule.
This was my most complicated schedule. The director hadn’t finished writing the script and kept making changes, so I worked from an incomplete script that was missing more than half its pages. Our technical director had returned, but he was still regaining his strength. Because of the large cast, the play was split into two teams, which meant we ran two productions at once. On top of that, I worked a concert, the Class of 2026 graduation ceremony, and the events leading up to it.
We had no references and no complete script, so until tech week we didn’t have a clear picture of how to build the set. I kept the work moving anyway, adjusting to each change as it came in and balancing four overlapping commitments.
The original concept was a 360-degree stage inspired by the Chongqing 1949 Grand Theatre in China. We explored building a rotating set, but the turntable we had was far too small to support the production, so we switched to a traditional semicircular stage. [One sentence on how you adapted the layout, such as where the audience sat or how the scenes were arranged.]
The script was incomplete and kept changing, so I built the set with little guidance while balancing overlapping productions, graduation events, and concerts. Weekdays alone weren’t enough for the schedule, so much of the work took place outside regular hours.