SpeakEasy Stage Company
Multi-season art direction for one of Boston's preeminent theatre companies
SpeakEasy is the resident theatre company at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion in Boston's South End. They stage premieres — the Boston debut of plays already making noise in New York and London. Each season is six to seven productions, each one wildly different in tone, period, and audience.
The work was the seasonal art direction for the company. The fixed brand stayed locked. The yellow-and-blue SpeakEasy lockup, the corner box, the staging-Boston-premieres tagline, the run dates and ticket footer template. Inside that frame, every show got its own poster, its own postcard, its own lobby screen. The brand had to be elastic enough to hold a Tony-winning drama and a pop-rock satire about Andrew Jackson without sounding like the same person made both.
The fundraising work — galas, raffles, save-the-dates — got a sub-brand of its own. The SpeakEasy Roar.
The show posters
One frame. Six tones.
Each show poster is a different room with the same nameplate above the door. The corner block, the tag, and the footer never move. The middle of the sheet is the play. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson goes pop-art. Other Desert Cities goes atmospheric portrait. Clybourne Park goes graphic illustration. Tribes goes documentary photography of a single gesture. The bookend brand never has to do the heavy lifting because the show is allowed to.
The season teaser
Four shows, four palettes, one sheet.
The season teaser is the announcement piece. Every show in the upcoming season set vertically across the page, each one in its own assigned hue, oversized so the postcard reads as pure typography from across a lobby. The 2013–2014 season ran CARRIE in red, THE COLOR PURPLE in violet, TRIBES in cobalt, 4000 MILES in orange. Subscribers know the season before they know the synopses.
The SpeakEasy Roar
The fundraising sub-brand.
Annual fundraising galas need their own room. The Roar is the parallel identity for the company's biggest donor event — a 1920s-themed gala that asks for money in costume. The mark is a deep navy rosette ringed in pink and cyan ribbons. The voice is theatrical, conspiratorial, and a little camp. "All the best parties are kept secret." "Discover a place where flappers are dancing the Charleston." Same audience as the season subscribers, different register entirely.
The lobby screens
Concert events. Big portraits. Weather-of-the-week energy.
The Calderwood lobby has digital screens that loop in front of every audience that walks in for any production. The screens carry both upcoming-season teases and one-off concert events, like the All About Eve / Election special — a four-up portrait of the company's grand-dame leads cut out and placed on a worn election-poster ground, with CONCERT EVENT running vertically down a red-and-white-stars sidebar. Same brand vocabulary as the show posters, looser composition.
A theatre brand is six different brands a year. The fixed parts of the system — the lockup, the corner block, the run-date footer — exist so the variable parts can be loud. SpeakEasy ran loud, on six different frequencies a season, and still sounded unmistakably like itself walking into the lobby.
Closing
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