The Sparrow is a fairly straightforward play about a high school girl returning to the town where she was born. But this odd girl is a reminder of a bleak past - ten years earlier, Emily was the only survivor of a horrible bus accident which killed all the children in her grade. Throughout the play, flashbacks of the time leading up to the crash are displayed as multimedia collage on the back wall of the stage. Looking like something out of a family scrapbook if Tim Burton and Baz Luhrmann were related, the still photographs flicker and move surreally to recreate the memories of Emily, the parents of the children in the bus, and the other kids at school. The young Emily always appears in black and white (matching the costuming of the actress playing her), while the town and the bus are in vividly painted colors.

The collages work very effectively to slowly reveal the truth about Emily’s supernatural powers and her role in the bus crash. Even once all was revealed, I was convinced that the modern Emily was not entirely conscious of what she had done until late in the play. And the visual design of the projections works as a metaphor for memory - some things receding to the background, some barely in sight, and those things which we most wish to forget rendered in bright, crisp detail. It also hints at the magical realism of the play early on, well before we’re aware that Emily is anything more than an awkward geek, playing an important part in telling this story that, if told in reverse, might seem more like Carrie and less like the complex examination of our relationship to tragedy and hope that it is.