Projecting the Wonders of Wonderland

The moment you see Hannah Tran’s projection designs on the screen and you hear Shavonne Grandison’s Alice speak about the new video game she created called “Wonderland,” is the moment you realize that Tran could be the real-life model for Alice in Alice’s Wonderland.

Rob Salas, who is directing SCR’s Theatre for Young Audiences and Families production, running through Feb. 25 on the Julianne Argyros Stage, has already completed that equation.

“In this show, Alice is this genius tech wizard who creates this video game. Hannah is our genius tech wizard on the team,” Salas said. “She’s building the video game you see on the screen.”

Tran’s first solo projection design work for SCR—she worked with Yee Eun Nam as an assistant on Clean/Espejos and avaaz—has been a feast for the eyes. She’s incorporated more than 150 projection cues onto three TVs and 15 total screens suspended behind the characters on stage. The projections draw you into the story of Alice’s adventures inside her own video game to the point where audiences feel like they’re also inside the video game.

The genius of Tran's design goes across generations. Kids will love the way the characters bounce from screen to screen, sometimes streaming live from a GoPro camera Alice and the Queen fo Hearts artfully use. They and their parents will appreiate the nod to '80s and '90s video games, which Tran employed in her projections, calling on such old-school legendary video games as Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda and Tecmo Bowl.

“I joke with her that in addition to watching the play, Hannah’s developed a 75-minute short film that runs behind while the play’s going on,” Salas said.

Which makes sense, once you understand Tran’s background. Before she even stepped foot in a theatre program, Tran used to make short films at home, using her siblings as actors. She didn’t discover theatre until the end of high school at International Polytechnic High in Pomona, transferring that new interest into theatre once she arrived at UC Irvine.

“I’ve always been interested in the technical and design aspects, building different worlds around the story and the actors,” she said. “In college, that was mostly scenic and lighting design. I fell into video and projection design because I’ve always been interested in making films and I felt like it was a bridge between two worlds getting into that.”

Tran got into that deeper at Yale School of Drama, where she earned an MFA that dovetailed with her Theatre and Computer Science majors at UCI. At UCI, her first projection design came on Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day. This was where Tran had her Alice moment in believing in herself.

“I had to do everything by myself and learn how to get everything up and running,” she remembered. “I was pretty proud of myself that I was able to do that. It was then that I decided this was interesting and this was a field and a medium that was an interesting way to tell stories. …

“I feel that video can be dismissed sometimes because people use it to solve other problems in a production. You use video to project backgrounds and with that, you can use video design to tell its own story. It’s a useful part of storytelling.”

To do that on Alice’s Wonderland, Tran began by reading the script, marking places where she thought video would come into use, entering cues on an Excel spreadsheet. She then talked to Salas, then hit the library/internet for research on the show’s looks. Discussions with set designer Shaun Motley and lighting designer Jesse Portillo came next. Then, Tran created still-image storyboards of her designs, collaborating with Salas, Motley and Portillo on placement and timing of each projection.

“Her understanding of the heart of the show (shows) that everything you’re seeing is full of the language of the piece, which is about believing in yourself,” Salas said. 

“Hannah is Alice.”

For her part, Tran sees herself in a simpler mode, even as she grows as a designer. She proudly said she’ll “be back” to assist Nam on projection design for Prelude to a Kiss, The Musical, running April 5-May 4. Telling the story of a tech prodigy through video design falls into what Tran is about in more ways than one.

“That’s why I went into theatre and what I always loved about it—storytelling through design and supporting the text and the actors and helping create new worlds," she said. Creating a world brings people into the story. My goal at the end of the day is to help bring the story to whoever is listening, and this is my way of doing it—through design.”