“I try to have some stylistic theme that runs through the series,” explains Plunkert, who has designed Theatre Project’s posters since 2002. Each year’s theme is meant as “an attempted experimental departure” commensurate with the venue’s own highly creative bent, a tactic Plunkert achieves by “boiling the productions down to a single symbol” and then distressing it. The Mistero Buffo poster, for instance, distills the picaresque play’s iconoclastic characters (all played by a single actor) into a flat, bowler-hatted bottle careening precariously across the page. To “get something a little gritty,” says Plunkert, “I drew the original and then kicked out individual separations and distressed those separations from my printer,” producing an image both easy to print and iconic. “I try to get a feeling of spontaneity that will strike the viewer on an emotional level if not an intellectual level.” by Taylor Lowe