Light Cue 23

I find Charles Mee to be one of the most interesting playwrights alive today. His texts, often contemporary reworkings of the Greeks, are deeply profound insights into the contemporary American experience. Orestes 2.0 is no different.

Upon my first read of this play I was hit with a strong visual sense of the world. The first thing I was struck by was how bleak the world is. A desolate landscape where words like “possibility” or “hope” come across as cruel jokes at best. While that is the background of the play, there is a deep and almost perverse comedy element as well. The lighting had a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand we have this desolate place. On the other hand we have this big, broad, and perverse comedy. Exploring that tension is where the visual world gets interesting very quickly.

When I brought my ideas to director Jessica Heidt she was a bit wary of the bleakness and very eager to explore the comedy. Her concern, and rightly so, is that if the production focuses too strongly on that one aspect of the text, the delicate balance Mee has constructed will be lost. And it is in that balance that the play finds resonance with our contemporary experience.

Our research focused on post-invasion Iraq. Demolished palaces and military occupation. We looked at images of once grand palaces turned lounges for soldiers with fluorescent tubes bolted randomly to the walls and broken chandeliers hanging sadly unlit.

The space is a three-quarter round thrust stage. The set consists of a broken marble floor backed by a half demolished wall with three crumbling arches. Upstage of the arches is a CYC which might be a sky or perhaps a lake in the distance. This left the lighting unobstructed and gave me a large canvass to work with.

Solving the desolate landscape came first. It is the foundation upon which the action occurs. How would I approach this? Gray came first to mind, a sad and lonely gray. But there must also be a harshness. Something unforgiving as well. This led me to consider exploring soft diffuse sources contrasted with hard sharp ideas. The frontlight would be addressed with bounce light. I hung 9 Source-4′s with bounce cards to ring the stage, three per audience side, to give us facelight. Contrasting against that is a 3×3 grid of hard edged boxes that will allow us to delineate areas on the stage floor that we want to highlight. The facelight would be in a dominant daylight color and the boxes would be in a pale cyan.

This gave us our base for the landscape. Now on to the comedy.

Jessica was interested in my idea of heavy and saturated color invading the space. As such, I placed a system of color changing backlights using Source-4s with Seachangers. This would give me the ability to transform the space into any color needed for the many scenes. Further, several of the monologues have been converted into rock songs along with a dance number to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance so having color change options is necessary. Upstage, the CYC is being lit with a three color RGB striplights. This allows us to get a lot of color out on stage in any hue we might desire.

Two sidelight systems and some cool PAR bakclights fill out our full stage ideas. We then have several ideas of light scraping across the scenery to pull out the textured walls as well as help lend a degree of realism to the painted scenery. People upstage of the arches are lit by booms with a Head Hi and a Shin.

The research image of the fluorescent bolted onto the wall really stuck with me. As such I asked to add two T-8 fixtures to the walls. In addition we will have a pipe added 3′ below our, already low, grid to hang three large scoops pointed out at the audience just downstage of the wall. Add a small handfull of worklights and we have a good array of practicals to play with contrasts between realism and theatricality.

And contrast is the name of the game here. Contrasts in color, quality, and angle of light; as well as contrasting reality with theatricality.

The system breakdown looks like this:

• Bounce Fronts in L201

• Top Boxes in R4315
• Clear Cross in R302+R119
• Cool Cross in L161+R119
• Front Spots in R3208+R132
• Color Backs in C-M-Y-G
• CYC in R68, LHT139, and L106
• Cool Backs in L281
• Scoops and Worklights in CLR

The grid, as mentioned before, is very low at 13′-9″. All lights will be overhung to give a clean grid line with the exception of the bounce lights (which have to underhang to work properly) and the low pipe with scoops. The intention there is to allow the lights that we are meant to see be very visible while those just lighting the show are more or less out of the visual field.

Here is a look at the lightplot:

I hope you have enjoyed this installment of Inside the Design Idea. I would love to hear your thoughts or ideas in comments below. Thank you for reading.