Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members

By Mara Vélez Meléndez

Directed by Javier Antonio González

Yale Repertory Theater

2025

Set Designer: Patti Panyakaew

Costume Designer: Arthur Wilson

Lighting Designer: Yung-Hung Sung

Sound Designer: Joyce Ciesil

Projection Designer: Doaa Ouf

Hair Designer: Matthew Armentrout

Makeup Designer: Sarah Cimino

Production Dramaturgs: Daria Kerschenbaum and Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Trujillo

Fight and Intimacy Directors: Kelsey Rainwater and Michael Rossmy

Vocal and Dialect Coach: Cynthia Santos Decure

Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis

Original Casting: Stephanie Yankwitt, CSA, tbd casting co.

Stage Manager: Aura Michelle

Assistant Stage Manager: Ellora Venkat

Notes on Killing... sets in today's Wall street office. The play is a drag show about decolonizing places and people. It blurs the lines between freedom, identity, gender, and politics. We approached this as a dream play. Visually, the bland Wall Street office with bright light boxes and a reception counter with no seats already feels uncomfortable and awkward. Imagine a figure in an over-the-top drag costume standing in that setting. The contrast is utterly absurd.

Another core concept of surveillance state connects to Puerto Rico’s independence movement, where activists were watched and their every move documented in FBI files. Those in power dictate what is visible and what remains hidden. With the need of the space to transform into different mind states, came the idea of deconstruction. Once the logic of the world is established, we constantly break it—over and over again. This is a psychological space of concealment and revelation.

New Haven Independent - “González has the Receptionist change costumes on stage, or, more aptly, under it — Patti Panyakaew bifurcates the playing space into a sterile Wall Street waiting room sitting atop a fabulous dressing room. The Receptionist’s shifting gender performance, and the mechanical recognition of that change, evokes the absurdity of gender and possibilities of self-determination in and of itself."

New Haven Review - “Pretty much any time the scenic designer at the Rep—here Patti Panyakaew—uses the space under the stage as part of the set we’re in for a visually stunning event."

Photo Credits: Joan Marcus, Doaa Ouf, Patti Panyakaew

Design Concept Sketches

First Design Model

Final Design Model