A Production of The Kentucky Opera

Enemies: A Love Story

Project Overview

Industry

Theatre & Performing Arts

Client

The Kentucky Opera

Set Designer

Grace Laubacher

Director

Mary Birnbuam

Location

The Brown Theatre

Skills

Carpentry, Set Building, Welding

We worked with Director Mary Birnbaum and the Kentucky Opera to construct a modular set that transforms into four different scenes from the same essential structure and props.

Enemies: a Love Story is an opera in two acts by composer Ben Moore and librettist Nahma Sandrow, based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Kentucky Opera presented a newly revised version of the work. Both comic and tragic, Enemies tells the story of Holocaust survivor Herman Broder. He lives in post-war New York with a new wife and a secret mistress, but when the wife he thought dead returns, love and guilt create unbearable – but farcical – complications.

“Director Mary Birnbaum certainly brought a unique vision for the staging. By incorporating cardboard and corrugated boxes stacked on shelves and scattered around the stage, these props could transform the stage into four different locations simply by moving a box to its side or to the floor or turning it to reveal a picture or advertisement.”
– Review by Annette Skaggs – Arts Louisville