Romero — University of Missouri - Columbia

Design Notes

When I first read Xiomara Cornejo’s Romero, I knew the design had to hold more than history—it had to hold ghosts. Set in the final hours of Archbishop Óscar Romero’s life, the play bends time and invites the dead to speak. It is not realism. It is a ritual.

The scenic world emerged from this tension between sacredness and rupture. At the center stood a cruciform arch—part cathedral, part memory portal. Below it, a fractured platform and a textured black floor marked with five-point stars anchored the action in both earth and spirit. The design became a container for mourning, transformation, and resistance.

Created in Vectorworks and refined in Photoshop, the set was engineered for fluidity. The play’s nonlinear structure demanded a space that could shift between a beach, a church, a war zone, and the afterlife without literal transitions. Projection surfaces echoed the altar at Hospital de la Divina Providencia, while lighting and media traced the line between past and present.

Puppeteer Lil Lamberta’s masks and oversized figures punctured realism, while Cherie Sampson’s layered projections grounded each moment in living memory. The entire design was built to support rupture—to allow sudden shifts in tone, time, and identity while still holding the audience.

This was not a play about one man. It was about a nation in spiritual reckoning. Designing Romero meant listening, holding space, and letting the silence speak.