David Polonsky is no stranger to politics in his art: He previously worked as the art director and lead artist for Waltz With Bashir, the Academy Award-nominated Israeli film about the Lebanon War. Polonsky is also the designer of Theater J’s whole season of posters. For Something You Did, in which a jailed member of a radical 60s group goes head-to-head with a tea party proselytizer, he explores some classic American iconography. His poster features the characters of the play behind the stripes of an American flag, which also represents prison bars.

“By interweaving the portraits of the characters with the stripes in the flag a visual metaphor is created, making an analogy between the flag and jail bars, invoking both Alison's condition and the patriotic rhetoric of another central figure in the play — Gene, a Fox-news-pundit kind of type, who was a part of Alison's group in the 60's,” says Polonsky in an e-mail.

Polonsky’s first draft of the poster, for which he consulted with artistic director Ari Roth, encompassed the liberal and conservative politics of the play, but not the racial tension. The addition of one character — the daughter of the African American cop that Alison’s bomb killed 30 years before — balanced out the poster.

“I created a rough sketch that suggested the concept of the stripes in the flag as some sort of jail bars, with portraits of two of the leading characters - Alison and Gene,” says Polonsky. “This concept was accepted by Ari, but he felt that the hierarchy between the characters had to be changed (Gene to be made less dominant), and it was decided to add Lenora's character, as she is an important figure in the play.”

You’ll notice that, while Alison is the only character in the play behind bars, everyone in the poster is trapped behind the stripes of the flag.

“The characters are entangled in the complications of radical politics, changing ideologies and circumstances,” says Polonsky. “I wanted to express this entanglement and confusion by playing with the arrangement of the background and foreground planes.”