From September 2013 to February 2014 I had the pleasure of helping launch the world premiere of the play Lasso of Truth by Carson Kreitzer. The script includes descriptions of comic-book panels to be projected above the actors on stage in several scenes, and I was hired to create these, which numbered about 100.

Since then, Lasso of Truth has traveled to Atlanta, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. In Minneapolis, the play was produced by the Workhaus Collective, of which the playwright Kreitzer was a member, and for whom I have done many posters. Lasso was their final production after ten years of existence. Here I finally got to make the poster for the play, as the previous companies had their own poster designers:

Lasso of Truth - The Characters

All my drawings of the play's characters are based on the actors in the premiere production at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, California.

The central character in Lasso of Truth is The Inventor (played by Nick Rose), based on the historical figure William Moulton Marston, inventor of the polygraph lie detector and creator of the comic-book superheroine Wonder Woman.

Were that not intriguing enough, Marston - a psychologist with a PhD from Harvard - based his theories of personality on the domination/submission duality, and enjoyed the practice of bedroom bondage, with...

...his wife and mistress (played by Jessa Brie Moreno and Liz Sklar), who all lived together. Each woman gave birth to two children by Marston, and they continued to raise the children together after Marston's early death by skin cancer in 1947.

Other scenes in the play take place in the 1990s, with The Girl and The Guy (Lauren English and John Riedlinger) discussing Marston, Wonder Woman, comic books, and feminism.

Lasso of Truth - The Scenes

The following scenes take place in the 1920s to 1940s. The original drawings are ink on paper, and colored digitally to resemble early romance comics, with shades of 1970s superhero comics thrown in to resonate with viewers weaned on Lynda Carter's TV portrayal of Wonder Woman in that decade. These are just a few selections.

The comic panels in the 1990s scenes were drawn in black and white to mimic the indie comics of the era.

Click on the following production photos to view larger.

See more photos from Lasso of Truth on the Marin Theatre Company's Flickr page: Photo Set 1 and Set 2.

Read the reviews in the San Francisco Bay Area and national theater press.