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(Named Best Scenic Design 2006 by Independent Weekly)
" Marion Williams' set is a vertiginous pileup of slanting walls, lopsided doors, rickety banisters. It resembles something Tim Burton might film -- comical to behold, perilous to inhabit."
- Chapel Hill News and Observer
"We fell in love with the crazy angles of Marion Williams' mulit-level fun house of a set."
- Independent Weekly
Fragile Stasis
"Fragile Stasis opens with two emboldened visions: Marion Williams' immense spiral of [metal] sheeting that propels shards of light through Whitney Hall, giving way to clusters of dancers who climb on stage from an opening in the pit below. Lying in a row motionless on their backs, they make clear that something wonderous and weird is about to be revealed...
... the men bare chested, the women in sleek leotards, offered the sensation of a ceremony turned on its head, a peculiar kind of formality cloaked in Hougland's methotical eagerness to probe and disturb."
- The Courier-Journal Louisville
The Cherry Orchard
"Marion Williams's exquisite set ... features scrims embedded with cherry blossoms, seen through and around the slatted doors of the family dacha."
- The New York Times
"... Marion Williams's astonishingly gorgeous set ... absolutely dominated by the cherry orchard itself. Whereas other productions might visually suggest a stand of cherry trees, here the orchard is treated like a seperate character. Ethereal, ivory blossoms are everywhere, choking, invading, overwhelming - possessing - the house and everyone in it ... both splendid and terrible, it will not be ignored."
- Home News Tribune
"High praise must also go to set designer Marion Williams, who neatly answers the call for three very different environments in the four hilarious, aching acts. It's her evocation of the eponymous cherry orchard, however, that she's truly triumphant. In many treatments of this play, the orchard isn't even seen - but here there are a number of trees in full bloom. Set before them are three telescoping, hollow false proscenia into which Williams has poured cherry blossoms and branches. In an inspired use of visual metaphor, Williams has made it appear that the cherry orchard is hugging the characters while stifling them. You can practically hear Chekhov applauding the set ... from his too early grave."
- Theatre Mania
Made to be Broken
"Marion Williams, Hougland's favorite design collaborator, declares her method with a long staircase - broken into pieces near the bottom - suspended above the Whitney stage. Her costumes are austere: leotards for the women, flowing waist to floor garments for the men - reinforcing that it is the body, not the covering, that belongs in the foreground. Yet the effect gained by her simplicity of fabric, partictularly in setting off the elemental stregnth of the men's torsos gainst the lagato sweep of their legs, is hardly peripheral."
- The Courier-Journal Louisville
Tartuffe
"Marion Williams' spare, white open set, the production has an engaging modern sensibility."
- Sacramento Bee
Stones in His Pockets
"Marion Williams' spare set design winks at Hollywood fakery and leaves ample space for physical antics."
- The News and Observer Chapel Hill, NC
Of Mice and Men
"... the setting for 'Of Mice and Men', its bunkhouse, stable buck's room and great barn evoked with the rough-hewn patina of a Wyeth painting by the set designer Marion Williams."
- The New York Times
"These marvelous actors perform on a terrific set designed by Marion Williams. The clearing even boasts a stream at the rear of the stage!"
- Essex Journal
"Marion Williams stark set design ... lend[s] a poignancy to the sense of isolation, the brutal conditions that itinerant workers must have faced in those times."
- The Independent Press
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
"Marion Williams' sumptuous set design of boudoirs and drawing rooms is elegantly dressed with billowing drapery, crystal chandeliers, elegant period furniture and spacious beds designed for pleasurable encounters."
- Variety
"the period-perfect extravagantly draped sets by Marion Williams ... offer such continual visual pleasure..."
- The New York Times
"Credit Marion Williams for designing seemingly simple yet elegant settings that often glitter from the use of gold in the drapes, furniture, and framing, including the proscenium with its intriguing keyhole at the top."
- The Madison Eagle