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I have an idea that Audrey 2 is a gift from God or Mother Earth's way of taking back the planet because we've disrespected it too much. Our obsession with growth, personified (kinda? cause they are a plant) in Audrey 2 is the main reason for climate change, and many other problems within our civilization. Therefore, I want to make Skid Row as crummy and wasteful as possible. Having plastic waste and things everywhere will make Skid Row show that not only is this a dirty, crusty place but it looks like this because we have created these problems.

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This is written in the script before the characters and I think it sums up the style pretty well!

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The intention during the excerpt we are doing is to illustrate the little "horrors" that people living on Skid Row live with. While still keeping the comedy intact in the show. We DO NOT want to make a joke of Skid Row and the housing crisis.

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By July 1960, the clearance program was said to be 87% complete in the Skid Row area. With increased building codes during the '60s, owners of residential hotels found demolition to be more cost-effective than adhering to repairs. The total number of these units is estimated to have dropped from 15,000 to 7,500 over the following decade. Many residents of the area found themselves homeless with the loss of half of the affordable housing provided by hotels.

This previous exposure to Skid Row attracted numerous returning drugand alcohol-addicted and emotionally scarred Viet Nam veterans to come back to and settle in
Los Angeles. The veterans found Skid Row accommodating because of (1) the presence of
service facilities and providers and (2) the rejection they faced in other communities. It was
after the Viet Nam era that the demographics of the area changed from predominantly elderly,
white and alcohol-dependent to predominantly young, nonwhite and drug-dependent.

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Skidrow Serenade

The population is probably more motley than that in a similar district of any other American city. Jews, Greeks, and Italians in the doorways of pawnshops and secondhand clothing stores vie with one another to lure the unwary passer-by inside. A fat German runs a beer parlor and just across the street a dapper Frenchman ladles up 5-cent bowls of split pea soup. A large, blond woman named Sunshine, born in Egypt, manages one of the cleaner rooming houses. A few Chinese practically monopolize the hand laundry business, and Japanese the cheapest cafes and flophouses. American Indians barter for forbidden whiskey. Chattering Mexicans loiter on the steps leading up to a second-floor hotel. Dapper Negroes, better dressed than any other vagabonds, wander by in riotous groups.

Huston Irvine, Los Angeles Times (March 26, 1939)[14]

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But long hair and beards for men, tight bell-bottom blue jeans and flower crowns for women, and the widespread use of mind-altering drugs were only the most visible, and easily dismissed, signs of this ‘60s “hippie” counterculture.

Far more transformative were the radical social and political movements that many of its adherents embraced, including the civil rights movement, the movement to oppose the Vietnam War and—at the tail end of the 1960s and the outset of the 1970s—the environmental movement.

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Air quality was not something to worry about in the 1960's, leading to many smog events in LA. Maybe many believed this was the world ending?

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looks of people on skid row

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In his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich argued the environmental crises of the past decade could be traced to a single cause: overpopulation. It was a simple “numbers game:” the Earth had too many people and too few resources to support them. Ehrlich warned that attempts to stretch the Earth’s resources to support the population would result in mass starvation, epidemics, and, ultimately, the breakdown of social order.

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I really just looked up the history of Skid Row and how it came to be and let everything inform me from there. I also looked at issues at the time and let that inform me as well. I think I also googled 'fears in the 1960's' and let that inform all of my research. I unfortunately found a lot about modern Skid Row, and it was hard to find a lot of facts and knowledge about Skid Row during the transition. Either way, I learned a lot and have a way to at least maybe answer questions that the cast have. Only time will tell.

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I think that these images will 100% help to inform our performances, we already have a power point using these images and facts in order to get the cast all on the same page and really kickin'. I think that the research is always important for actors and creators even before the work begins.

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This is hopefully what the stage will look like (minus the sauce stains) when Mushnik's is closed.

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This what the stage will hopefully look like when the shop is open and we are having scenes inside it.