I am a camera.(set design for 'Silence, Cunning, Exile')

Derek McLane recently provided a stunning example of text-inspired set design for the play Silence, Cunning, Exile, which recently ran at Off Broadway's New York Shakespeare Festival. Stuart Greenman's drama is based on events in the life of photographer Diane Arbus; it chronicles the career of an Arbus-like character who begins as a happily married fashion photographer who moves within a social circle of carefree bohemians, then abandons that life for a tough, demanding existence obsessed with the demi-monde. The play begins in the 1950s and continues through the 1960s; it ends with her suicide, as the Apollo 15 mission is launched in 1971.

The first act mostly shuttles back and forth between a cottage on Martha's Vineyard and the …