The Meeting Tree

Lobby Gallery Design

As the Connectivity Manager at Company One Theatre I led the design of the theatre gallery space for the production of The Meeting Tree by B. Elle Borders at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester. In this play, Sofia Langton is on a mission to succeed where her grandmother failed and regain the rights to the Alabama farm where her family was once enslaved. But there is something rotten in the land, and it sits smack dab in the middle of a fractured family tree. Can Sofia mend the wound that has divided her family for six generations? A story of kinship and healing, B. Elle Borders’ The Meeting Tree empowers us to break cycles of trauma and discover  just how deep and tangled our roots really are.

 

This play is an invitation to dive into ones own family and community history, and so the gallery aided with this invitation by providing a number of interactive installations created both by myself and team, as well as local organizations and artists who we partnered with on the production. Each of the installations built off the plays themes. For example, we partnered with American Ancestors to have a few different stations in the gallery for people to start learning about their own family history through worksheets and online resources. We also displayed replica family tree's from American Ancestors collection. Our partner the Repair America Collective displayed an enlarged version of their zine WHERE IS OUR 40 ACRES AND A MULE on the gallery walls, with post it notes for audience members to respond to the prompts on the pages. Lastly, our partners with the Department of Public Imagination had their "Mapping Imagination Work in Boston" interactive map and archive, connecting both to the plays theme of understanding the history of place and connecting the play to the city we produced it in. 

 

In addition to these installations created by our partners, the focal point of the gallery was the audience response tree installation "Rooted in Memory, Seeding the Future". I created a human size tree sculpture, with rolled book pages spiraling out from beneath the tree bark. I used fallen tree limbs to create the trees branches which hung photos and stories. The book pages alluded to the revelation in the play in which the deed to the land Sofia is searching for is found inside of an old pecan tree on the property, having been placed there by an ancestor generations before. I asked the cast and creative team to share a photo of themselves and an ancestor, along with a memory of that ancestor or reflection about what kind of ancestor they hope to become. These stories populated the tree's limbs, and audience members were invited to read these stories of the cast members and participate themselves. Using leaf post-it notes they could write a memory of an ancestor, or about the seeds they were planting now for future generations to harvest, and then place them on the wall around the trees limbs. Throughout the run the tree was a beautiful collection of memories and hope. ​

Role / 

Gallery Designer, Response Installation Artist, Connectivity Manager

 

Location / 

The Strand Theatre, Dorchester, MA

​

Date / 

July - August, 2025