The theme for Riverfront Theater Company’s 2024 season programming was meant to explore choice, free will, and the many paths our lives can take. It was largely inspired by letter from Tiny Beautiful Things called "The Ghost Ship that Didn't Carry Us," reading:
"If I could go back in time I’d make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn’t know what I couldn’t know until I became a mom, and so I’m certain there are things I don’t know because I can’t know because I did. [...] I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore."
With that in mind, I wanted the key art to be a cohesive series, as thoroughly thought-out as the programmatic choices. I designed 3 show posters all existing with the same typography and color palette, but differing in their imagery. Inspired by the idea of a “shadow life” from the passage above, you will find key objects from each production, with their “shadow” existing beneath them.