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RED
by John Logan
Sackerson and Lil Poppet Productions
Westminster University, April 2026
Directed by Morag shepherd
Stage Managed by Brynn Duncan
Starring Tyson Baker and Amona Faatau
Pictures and Video by Jesse Nepivoda
Produced by Stephanie Stroud, Jesse Nepivoda, Matthew Ivan Bennett, Brynn Duncan, and Morag Shepherd
Special thanks to Westminster Art Department
With a keen eye for spatial tension, Morag Shepherd (Director) has found a setting that renders John Logan’s (Playwright) Red as a living, breathing autopsy of the creative soul. Shepherd creates a production that thrives on the friction between its environment and its inhabitants. By moving the drama into a “found” art studio, Shepherd bypasses the traditional artifice of the theatre and thus invites the audience into a space where the scent of turpentine and the grit of pigment are as much a part of the script as Logan’s staccato dialogue. Her staging narrows the distance between watching and working. Shepherd eliminates the buffer between performer and audience, leaving no space to disengage.
Red, as staged by Sackerson Co & Lil Poppet, reminds us that modern art and modern theatre require attention, curiosity, and presence. Red works because it gets people to ask questions together and invites them in, rather than putting them in an outsider position. To attend is not just to watch a play; it’s to join a conversation that has been going on in this room for generations and feel, even for a moment, the power of making sense of art together. What this production ultimately suggests is that the act of making sense – halting, uncertain, unfinished – is itself the work.
Staying with the Work: Sackerson Co & Lil Poppet’s Red Viscerally Collapses the Distance Between Making and Watching Art (Front Row Reviewers)
With incredibly sensitive performances that elucidate the finer philosophical and intellectual points of the script, Tyson Baker as Rothko and Amona Faatau as his assistant deliver on Red’s rigorous demands in a new collaboration of Sackerson and Lil Poppet Productions. Directed by Morag Shepherd, the production’s brilliance comes through in its staging in an art studio located in Westminster University’s Converse Hall.
For one of the most intellectually challenging and engaging independent theatrical productions of the year, this rendering of Red by Sackerson and Lil Poppet Productions is highly recommended. Torment in finding the ‘threshold of the divine’: Exceptional collaboration by Sackerson, Lil Poppet Productions of John Logan’s Red (The Utah Review)
Director Morag Shepherd crafts an immersive and intimate experience through thoughtful staging. Known for her site-specific work, Shepherd utilizes the loft-like space at Westminster University to mirror an art studio—controlled, contained, and quietly oppressive. The small audience size enhances this effect, placing viewers directly inside the tension of the room. The production does not simply present Rothko’s world—it invites the audience to inhabit it.
RED Review: Control, Color, and the Cost of Creation (Rhetorical Review)
One of the many things Shepherd consistently gets right, is found space—and Shepherd found the perfect space for RED. The show is performed in a vaulted, sky-lighted art studio/classroom on the top floor of the iconic Converse Hall at Westminster University. Rothko used religious imagery and terminology to describe his art. In RED, Rothko says of his work “I will make it a temple”. The performance space in Converse Hall becomes a Cathedral under Shepherd’s capable hand, complete with smaller, transept alcoves at left and right, where key moments of the play are staged. The stage right alcove features small windows with what appears to be stencils that allow the fading light to enter the space at the beginning of the production, much like stained glass in a cathedral, but gradually disappear as the sun sets during the show. Shepherd uses this space to great effect as Baker’s Rothko describes the placement of a Caravaggio painting within the transept of a cathedral. The room is clearly an actual art space—with a paint-spattered floor, canvases, paints, supplies and equipment stacked and stored everywhere. Two working clean up sinks in another alcove upstage left are utilized throughout. However the rudimentary space is made holy through sacred nature of performance and because art itself is an apotheosis.
Attention to detail in the setting, props, costume, music and meagre lighting is captivating. There are several producers listed in the program, but no distinct credit to lighting, music or costume design. It seems, as is the case for much of Shepherd’s works, that these technical elements grew organically out of Shepherd’s vision and the ensemble’s rehearsal process. From the precise mixing of color (and egg) into paints, to the many minor adjustments of the portable work lights, and even the overhead fluorescents that alternatively wash the space, no detail is spared. Dissonant sounds play before the production begins and music is intentionally and effectively used at pivotal moments during the show. Worn workwear and footwear splattered with red paint only adds to the realism of the experience.
Lil’ Poppet & Sackerson’s RED Pulses With Life (Utah Theatre Arts Journal)
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