Show 1 - L'Imbecile broke all the barriers. Re-introducing the city of Chicago to Neo-Commedia, the director WM Bullion created a world of sound, color, movement, and presentation that is anything but 'natural' or 'realistic'.
Show 2 - Miracle on South Division Street is a family 'dramedy' with a realistic kitchen/dining room set inhabited by a nuclear family that most Americans this day and age can easily recognize.
The sizes of the shows and their venues also couldn't be more different; L'Imbecile had a cast of 7 + 1 musician partially on-stage, and an acting space the size of your average living room (the audience seats just under 50 people). The world created in the play included 3 locations (a palace, a Fool's home, and an assassin's Inn). Miracle on South Division Street has a cast of 4 and the acting space is a pseudo-thrust with more stage space than I've been on in a while (audience holds 300) and the whole show takes place in the kitchen.
Mr. Pullinsi, the director of Miracle on South Division Street, has the advantage of being the Artistic Director of Theatre At The Center where he has a team of designers who have worked in the space before - knowing the space & its quirks is always a step in the right direction. (Being an itinerant company, BWBTC often discovers these quirks during tech of a show!) The challenge I think was most evident (at least from watching rehearsals) was how to create intimacy on stage in a way that everyone in the audience could still see & hear what was happening. Directing the audience's focus to the person or action that is going to be most helpful in their understanding, while still trying to maintain the "this is how families interact" vibe was interesting to see him navigate. I know in my family the kitchen is the hot spot, no matter what's happening. There are counters to sit on and people bumping into each other and hovering over the person working the stove, and talking over each other as well. This amount of realism can work fairly well in TV or movie-dialogue, but with a play, you have to ensure the audience caught the point before you move on with the next point. Overlapping dialogue is just harder to do on-stage and have it make sense to the audience - despite it being the most natural way we communicate (finishing each others' sentences is a big key for 'naturalistic speech' - try to count how many times you do that in one day!). So while it might make sense for Jimmy & Ruth (the sibling characters) to stand fairly close while sharing a secret they don't want Clara (Mom) to overhear, if they do so without being 'shoulder to shoulder' and about 2 feet apart, they'll be blocking half the audience from seeing what's happening on either actor's face. No one tells a secret that way for real, but on stage, it works!
Bill Pullinsi spent much of tech wandering around the house making sure that the blocking he had in place still worked from various seats in the audience. The actors make sure that they don't stand still too long because invariably, you are blocking someone in the audience from seeing something. They all did a great job of ensuring that the amount of time anyone is being blocked from view was short, and if someone is being blocked from view, they are not meant to be the main focus anyway.