I haven't done the show, but I would probably use my bag of artificial snowflakes.  This stuff was apparently made by grinding up plastic bags...so most of the flakes are about the size of Corn Flakes cereal...only white and very lightweight. 

But I think the key to making this stuff appear to be falling ash from a nuclear Winter would be to have flakes fall individually over a wide area of the stage throughout the entire one-act.  This would be very tricky to get it to look like "ash" not "snow".

And of course, this technique would depend on whether you are in a stage or black box that had a grid accessible to crew or not.  Because it seems like the only way to release the flakes extremely slowly and intermittently would be to have a half-dozen hidden stagehands do it manually. 



Thanks for the intriguing question.  That would be a cool scenario to design one day....

-Dana


Edited by Mr. Lowell - 9/21/10 at 10:20pm

Yes, I might use my hazer for a show like this too.  However in my theatre and black box there are very sensitive smoke alarms that will go off when I use a hazer or smoke machine.  Maybe Tristan's theatre doesn't have that problem. 

By the way, there was a crappy volcano movie with Tommy Lee Jones where they used wind machines to blow tons of powdered mashed potato flakes all over the town to mimic volcano ash.  You could try this...but to paraphrase Gremlins..."Don't get it wet!"

Tristan, please let us know what you ultimately come up with....