As this was one of the few times that I actually headed all design departments, I had free reign to mold the entire concept. My concept of the piece was that everything actually took place in Hoffman's mind, with his mind being represented by a giant spider web which would also be a full stage projection screen. His ideas, remembrances and hallucinations appear as projections "caught" in that web. In addition, I wanted to identify all the "evil ones" (Doctors Copelius, Miracle, and Dappertutto) with a single image---the evil eye---so that anytime evil was present onstage, the eye would also be present. Using a then adventurous mixture of lighting patterns (in 1975 you had to cut them out of pie pans), KodakCarousel projectors souped up by Buhl

Labs, plus a (then) "state of the art" paper punch tape computer, I set up a series of overlapping visual fields. One field covered the entire stage and projected the textural backgrounds---water, Hoffman's hallucinations (actually, quartz crystal magnified thousands of times), the bricks of Luther's Cellar. A third batch of projectors covered the perimeter of the web and could be used individually as specials for the "evil eyes" and the like. Finally, there were two super-hot projectors providing the images at center stage where there would be the most interference from stage lighting. Using the mixture of cross, down, high front and back light that I developed for the projections on Broadway's "The Me Nobody Knows" in 1970, singers were able to work as close as three feet away from the screens without being in the dark.