UF theatre design students reflect on award-winning works at SETC
Thousands of theatre professionals and academics, including designers, technicians and performers, converge annually at the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) to present their work.
At the SETC’s Design/Tech competition this spring, University of Florida School of Theatre and Dance graduate students Jonathan Leatherman, Abigail Larsen, Amber Law and Michael James were recognized for their exceptional work in lighting, costume and scenic design in two SOTD 2025-2026 season productions, F. Punk Junkies and Harvest.
In the Loop sat down with the award-winning designers to discuss their craft.
Illuminating the Orishas: Jonathan Leatherman, 1st place in Lighting Design (F. Punk Junkies)
How would you describe F. Punk Junkies?
“The play follows this group of Orishas, who are basically Yoruban and Caribbean deities. It follows them sharing, with each other and to the audience, their very human and relatable stories. Between their storytelling, the play mixes in dance numbers that are centered around Black punk and funk music. Think: Parliament Funkadelic.”
How did the cultural themes of F. Punk Junkies influence your lighting palette?
“The named Orishas each have a very specific color palette associated with them, which heavily influenced my overall color palette for the show.
A lot of my research imagery for the musical numbers, and what I carried as a theme throughout the show, is based on a scene at the beginning of the play called ‘The Crossroads.’ The director, RHT (Ryan Hope Travis), described ‘The Crossroads’ as a space very similar to the Aurora Borealis, so I used that as inspiration. I also referenced a lot of concert imagery that had a 1970s rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic.”
What was the biggest technical challenge you faced?
“For F. Punk, the biggest challenge was that we staged it in the round, which means that the audience is sitting on all sides of the stage. That can impose difficulties because everyone technically gets a slightly different view of the show. This can be especially challenging with lighting because we can only have so many lights in the air.
Although it was a challenge, I really enjoyed our opening sequence. We started the show in work lights, then transitioned into some more theatrical looks — and then, the opening monologue ends and we’re pitched into darkness.
There’s this weird, synth keyboard riffing happening in the background, and then, all of a sudden, there’s a sort of ‘scan’ of the entire stage that happens — both around the sides and across the top of the roof — along lighting bars. It reveals that the entire cast is now standing on stage. We sit in that for a while, until the first song happens — and the party begins.”
Dressing Demigods and Afropunk Aesthetics: Abigail (Abbie) Larsen and Amber Law, 3rd place in Costume Design (F. Punk Junkies)
F. Punk Junkies has only been produced one time prior, in Miami in 2021. What was it like to design costumes for a play that is relatively new, as opposed to a long-running show like Rent?
Abbie Larsen: “Yes, this is the second time it’s ever been produced. One of the original collaborators and choreographers on the project, Augusto Soledade, is a professor in the School of Theatre and Dance. He suggested it for us.
One of the things that was most interesting to me is that, unlike most plays, F. Punk Junkies is not set in a specific time or place — so the sky was basically the limit.
Amber and I didn’t say ‘I’m going to design for these characters and you’ll design for these characters.’ We passed the designs back and forth, and really got to work together on all of them — so nothing is completely my idea and nothing is completely Amber’s idea. I think the collaborative nature of this project really benefitted the outcomes.”
Amber Law: “Right, and we didn’t want to imitate the original costumes, so, during the design process, we actually chose not to look at the original production.
Coming into it, Abbie already had experience in designing for Agbedidi, and I have a lot of interest in the punk subculture — so it was really nice being able to take both of those types of information and mesh it together.
And like Abbie said, conceptually, we knew the sky was the limit. RHT basically told us, ‘just keep throwing stuff at the wall and let’s keep going with it!’ Having that kind of freedom, we started to really focus on things like: what weird shapes can we create with line and form? How different can we make these costumes look?”
Can you talk more about the aesthetic you chose for your designs?
Abbie Larsen: “We did quite a bit of research on the Orishas that the characters were based on, or whose essence they evoked … Tundex (Babatunde Adebisi) was the scenic designer and one of the dramaturgs for the show. The information he shared with us was really helpful — both in confirming our research, as well as providing different viewpoints or perspectives.”
Amber Law: “In a lot of Yoruban cosmology and Santería, which are related, depictions of Orishas are essentially everybody’s own individual representation of them — their own drawings or imaginative creations.
We approached it like, ‘okay, if we took these Orishas, and then put them in this punk universe, what might they look like?’ Because Yoruba is a religion Abbie and I don’t practice, we wanted to do our due diligence in researching what that would mean. We researched Afrofuturism and Afropunk — and historical punk subcultures, in general. The aesthetics of Black music artists informed our designs.
How much did the actors’ own interpretations of the Orishas influence their costumes?
Amber Law: “The designs we created were mostly for the primary cast. Part of our concept was to have everyone wearing combat boots, and to accessorize in ways that rooted everyone in the African diaspora. We gave the actors the option to customize things like the color of their shoelaces and the charms on their bracelets.
For the ensemble, we pulled together a large closet that they had creative liberty to choose whatever they wanted from. During their first fitting, we sat down with them and talked about what their process has been like and what character they’re creating, and then we adapted parts of their costumes to make sure that everyone had an individualized look.”
Designing a Corporate Dystopia: Michael James, Honorable Mention in Scenic Design (Harvest)
Harvest is a futuristic, dystopian sci-fi satirizing the practice of illegal organ harvesting. How did the set reflect the themes of power imbalance and exploitation?
“The story of Harvest centers around a singular family unit that is being basically preyed upon by this multi-billion dollar company by the name of InterPlanta.
The director, Dr. Jashodhara Sen, and I had a lot of conversations about the setting. One thing we agreed on is that we didn’t want to be geographically-specific, so we boiled it down to: ‘no one likes billion-dollar corporations.’ We also didn’t want our audience to feel completely removed, but for them to recognize their own parts in the wider story.
The infrastructure of our black box theatre space is set up in a way where there is a balcony mezzanine space that wraps around the entire theatre. So It’s really good at making a ‘below mezzanine’ line and ‘above mezzanine’ line. Setting-wise, the story really only takes place within one family’s apartment. So we were able to make that ‘below mezzanine’ into the space where the family lived their lives. And then above the mezzanine was the corporate setting — a skeletal structure that’s sort of holding the world up.
[Assistant Scenic Designer], Jay Wanke, helped me design four or five billboards to go above mezzanine with the InterPlanta logo on them. When the audience first walks in and starts looking around, we wanted it to remind them of the multi-million dollar corporations whose symbols we see everywhere in real life.”
What were some of your inspirations for the visual world of Harvest?
“A lot of the inspiration came from the Blade Runner films … and other futuristic sci-fi dystopia, like The Matrix.
There’s also a series of art books that I really love by the artist, Simon Stålenhag… The main one that I took inspiration from for Harvest was called ‘The Electric State.’ It’s set in an alternate version of the U.S. in the late 1990s, so it’s very nostalgic-looking — but at the same time, it’s very alien in a way that feels indicative of what Harvest was to me.”
What was the biggest technical challenge?
“The biggest challenge was that the story has this thing that is called the ‘contact module’… It’s a sort of sci-fi, futuristic thing that is installed in this family’s home and allows a completely digital character named ‘Ginni’ to speak to this family — but Ginni is basically an avatar of the actual person receiving the organ donation.
We were like, ‘okay, how can we realize this real actor doing a performance digitally? Do we pre-record her and play it [in the family’s apartment]? Is she in the room with the audience? Is she somewhere else doing live responses? Will that get weird because of the delay?’
We were really interested in making the ‘contact module’ be in the air — something that really loomed above this family. And we wanted a solution that kept the actor in the room, but also on camera. Our technical director, Rob Leach, knows the guy who did the winch system for the New Year’s ball drop in Times Square, and he helped us get one.
In the end, it really worked out, but there were a solid two or three months there where Rob and I were sitting in his office being like, ‘I don’t know, man. How are we gonna do this?’”
Credits
F.Punk Junkies by Teo Castellanos; Directed by Ryan Hope Travis; Choreography by Augusto Soledade & Ensemble; Costume Design by Abigail Larsen, Amber Law; Scenic Design by Babatunde Adebisi “Tundex”; Lighting Design by Jonathan Leatherman; Sound Design by Sophia Fuentes; Dramaturgy by Ophilea Abidoye, Babatunde Adebisi “Tundex”; Stage Managed by Sophie Torri.
Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan; Directed by Jashodhara Sen; Costume Design by Madison Hoffmann; Scenic Design by Michael James; Lighting Design by Jack Coody; Sound Design by Erin Mooney; Digital Media Design by Michael Clark; Stage Managed by Lauren Lemieux, Dramaturgy by Charles Johnson; Commercials Directed by Ryan Hope Travis; Commercials Edited and Composed by Darius Brown.