These days, his life is all tied up in it. His next video work is for InFusion’s Intrigue With Faye, written by Kate Robin, writer-producer of HBO’s Six Feet Under. (Merino’s last InFusion contribution was expertly executing Fox News–like clips for The Last Supper.) Exploring voyeurism and the eerie sense of everyday life as a constant reality-TV show, Intrigue With Faye looks at an urban couple with infidelity issues: A documentary filmmaker suggests to his therapist girlfriend that they videotape their lives and then play them back to each other. Merino’s video work is integral to the performance; recorded video mixes with live, on-set feeds to create a truly multimedia, video-enhanced theater experience that tells of a plausible modern story.

Merino’s video-for-theater work began, not surprisingly, with the House. When the company put on Chicago novelist-playwright Joe Meno’s 2006 stage adaptation of his book The Boy Detective Fails —about a genius boy detective who, as an adult, must come to terms with his past—Meno wanted the first 29 pages of his book to be a short video. The playwright came into the collaborative process without many expectations, especially for the film; it’s hard enough meeting the costs of a play, let alone a movie. But the House—and Merino—changed his mind.

SHOOTING RANGE Videographer Merino finds a new frontier in theater.

Photo: Mandy Walls

“If you go through and watch that film a couple of times, you really get a sense of what—on a very small budget, over a couple weeks—the true genius of Lucas’s work is,” Meno says. “There are these great match-on shots. It’s the lead character’s birthday, and then there’s another shot of his sister’s birthday [years later], and it’s almost the same shot. But Lucas changed the colors of the balloons and streamers, so it’s [still] got the exact mood and the feelings that really set up what the play is about.”

Similarly, in the House’s 2007 production of The Magnificents —about an old-timey traveling magician and his family—Merino created short films illustrating various characters’ flashbacks. Seamlessly interwoven and mirroring the play’s worn-but-cared-for aesthetic, Merino’s films incorporated puppets of the play’s characters made with computer-animation software. “Lucas, for being a filmmaker, has such a mind for the theater,” says Molly Brennan, director of The Magnificents. “The sort of texture and liveness that theater provides is really evident in his work.”

“One of the reasons why there’s [now] more video in theater is that it’s more accessible, without a doubt,” Merino says. “But the video, just like anything else, can’t be for spectacle’s sake—it has to tell a story. And that scared the hell out of me. There were important story points to tell in the video, but when the play stops and the video starts, it could be 30 seconds or a minute where people aren’t watching [live actors] before they go, okay, this is still part of the story.”

It isn’t just coincidental, according to Merino, that joining video with the House Theatre’s accessible, down-to-earth, comic book–like aesthetic makes for a happy marriage. “The House’s plays are sort of written like movie scripts,” he says. “We’re not intentionally writing movies—we’re writing plays—but we grew up on TV and movies, so that influences the writing.”

Intrigue With Faye is playing at the Royal George Theatre.