Nobody said another word to him, which was all right with him — he just focussed on the television behind the bar, some news channel, and tried to interpret the words the people were saying there while the backdrop shifted from warplanes and explosions to some sort of pageant with models on a runway, looking raccoon-eyed and haughty and not half as good as Rosa Hinojosa.
As the narrator swings from branch to branch through three generations of her family tree, the backdrop shifts between Viennese coffee houses and Burmese battlefields, conjuring a cast of chancers, footballers and poker addicts.
Yet this tendency to consensus stands in contrast with another result: Consensus occurs amid a backdrop of shifting alliances.
Some of the changes even happen onstage, as an outfit is reversed or shed to keep up with the video backdrop's shifting hues.
In her novel, Min tries to depict the historical backdrop through shifting narration that maneuvers between Jiang's perspective and a more all-knowing narrator.
Dramatic oratorio, musical drama, opera vérité or some new synthesis, performed against a stark backdrop of shifting photo portraits, the collaboration by the award-winning composer Christopher Theofanidis and the librettist Leah Lax, a Houston writer, drew standing ovations and bravos at its two performances on Saturday.
In "Cold In July" the pair meld the paranoid revenge thriller with father-son psychodrama against a backdrop of shifting allegiances in which enemies become allies.
The sets are spare, almost abstract, with just minimal, playfully designed props — tables, umbrellas, trees and such — seen against distant flat backdrops of shifting colors and expansive vistas.
When the production was first presented in March 1998, critics and audiences were divided about the abstract scenic designs: against backdrops of shifting blues and grays, eerily illuminated white bars protruded from all sides of the stage.
But the intensity of the arguments and the political backdrop have shifted back and forth over time.
