It’s only a passing mention. But it is nice to see the design team mentioned in a review.
Director Susi Damilano and her design team — Bill English (sets), Lucas Krech (lights), Lorin King (sound) and Bree Hylkema (costumes) — keep the action moving at a crisp pace while allowing the actors plenty of time to establish dimension.
Tonight I have two openings.
The first is Den of Thieves at SF Playhouse. More info, including ticketing, can be found here.
The second is Emax and Zurno’s Amazing Circus Humans a circus show for kids created and directed by my old friend Jaron Hollander. More info, and ticketing, can be found here.
I hope you enjoy!
When I first moved to the Bay Area after leaving New York I kept hearing about SF Playhouse. It seemed that in the time I had been on the East Coast this little company had gone from nothing to making quite a name for itself in San Francisco. Eager to find interesting work, I made a point to see some of their shows and was not disappointed. So, when Artistic Director Bill English asked me to light a play for them I was excited at the opportunity.
I need to confess something to my readers at this point. I don’t like reading plays. I enjoy rehearsals, and techs, and worksheets, and everything that goes into making a play, with one exception. I don’t like reading plays. Thus it was with my usual resignation of “Well, I have to get through this part in order to get to the fun stuff” that I picked up Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Den of Thieves and began reading.
The result? I had not laughed so hard in quite some time. The script is so outrageously funny that I had trouble getting through it, but this time for totally different reasons than a typical script read. I kept laughing so hard I had to put the script down repeatedly. The story revolves around a group of thieves in a kleptomaniacs recovery program. Then someone shows up with the perfect heist. Wackiness ensues.
When I did finish the play I began thinking through how to light it. There is a sharpness to the comedy that demands to be addressed through light. No mushy recessive stuff here. Both colors and angles need to be crisp and distinct.
The first thing I saw clearly was that the air must feel colorful. Much like approaching musical comedy, the farcical nature of the piece demands a feeling of color everywhere. But that color must be carefully chosen to augment the crisp dialogue. I also knew that I wanted a very sharp look in terms of my approach to angle but was not sure how to achieve that.
At the first production meeting Bill, who was designing the scenery, came in with a corner set on a 90 degree angle (the US was the corner of a room with walls at approximately 45 degrees from that point). Upon seeing this I was immediately struck with my solution to the sharp angle. I would hang a two color system of diagonal front Head-Hi’s following the angles of the walls. Once this piece was resolved everything else fell into place.
Backlight would be a cool and a color changing system. Sidelight would be a pair of pipe-ends from each side. A bunch of scenery specials. Both the Act 1 and Act 2 set had windows, so light through the windows would be prominent. The nature of the comedy led me to choose to fill in the shadows with color. As such there would be a medium blue through the windows for the night scenes and a dark blue frontlight system to fill from front of house. A pair of FOH IQs would do any additional specials as needed. The final element would be a lot of practicals in each scene to really bring the world to life.
Lighting systems are as follows:
Below is a look at the lightplot:
I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Inside the Design Idea. Please leave any comments or questions you might have.
More information here. Note, this is a link to a Facebook event page. You may need an account with that service to view it.
I think Charles Mee is one of the most interesting writers alive today. He publishes all of his plays to his website for free download. This speech is by Tyndarius from his Orestes 2.0:
If I would speak to you, how should I speak?
I know one mustn’t use certain expressions these days,
among your generation.
One mustn’t call people barracudas, for example
no matter how they behave.Shall I apologize?
This was your mother, after all,
my daughter,
even if she was a slut.But one mustn’t speak this way, I know.
For this is rude and might offend one’s feelings.(He takes his time)
There are words these days, I know, that cause a certain pain–
like”slut” or “sweetie” or “dear” or “peg leg,” or–”watermelon.”There is some quality of magical thinking in this, a certain
“primitive” turn of mind, if I may use the word, that seems to fly to
the belief that if one disposes of a word, one disposes of all the
dreadful or disagreeable things that have become attached to it.So that if one simply doesn’t use the word “articulate,” in referring
to a certain sort of person who is articulate, as though a certain sort
of person’s competence with language were an exceptional matter, then
the exceptionality of this articulateness will disappear.Or, if one will eschew the word “community,” in speaking of a group of
people, as though that group shared a monolithic culture in which they
all acted and thought in the same way, then one’s language would not
create ghettoes in which these groups are constrained to live. One
should never refer to the black community, for example, or the gay
community. One should refer, rather, to the black residents in a
southside neighborhood.Then, too, one ought not to say “oreo” in reference to black Americans
who have abandoned their culture, or refer in a similar fashion to
Asians as bananas or Mexicans as coconuts.One ought not to say “illegal alien,” when one has available such
vocabulary as undocumented worker or undocumented resident.One ought not to use the expression “qualified minorities,” as though
minorities were in general unqualified.One ought not to use the word “swarthy.”
One ought not to say “blonde and blue-eyed” unless one is prepared to
use the expression “brown-haired and brown-eyed” as an expression of
equal attractiveness.One ought not to say “inscrutable” in speaking of an Asian.
One ought not to say “Dutch treat,” as though to say the Dutch people
are cheap.One ought not to say “fried chicken,” under any circumstances as I
understand it.One ought not to say Jew–or I should say that some people prefer the
expression Jewish person, and in any case that the word should never be
used as a synonym for stingy. And that it should always be used as a
noun, never as a verb.One ought not to say buxom or fragile or feminine or pert or petite or
gorgeous or stunning or statuesque or full-figured or in any other way
refer to the physical attributes of a woman.I can accept all this with equanimity.
And yet, one can commit murder and find the words to justify it.
This is your sort of civilization, then. It speaks nicely and behaves
barbarously.Indeed, it thinks that speaking well, putting a nice face on things,
will transform the very stuff of life on earth.No, no, no.
You’ve come unhinged.
You’ve lost your bearings altogether.
You’ve assaulted the very foundations of your home.
You’ve forgotten who you are, where you come from.You remember nothing: not your parents, nor the values they held dear,
not your country, nor the polity it once held in its grasp, or at the
very least aspired to, not your history, nor your religion, nor even
the most rudimentary tenets of ethics or gentleness.And this is what you ask me to give my blessing to.
No.(To Menelaus)
As for you, Menelaus, I don’t expect some form of civil behavior from a
man who has just returned from rendering an entire civilization into a
smoking ruin, while his own home sinks in rot and violence, husbands
murdered by their wives, mothers murdered by their sons, sleeping
children shot through bedroom doors. I know of a boy who poured
kerosene on a derelict and lit him on fire and burned him to a crisp,
not thinking he, the boy, had done anything wrong. That’s the value
they place on human life in the world that boy comes from. And soon
enough such boys will fill your neighborhood. You flatter yourself that
you are an old-fashioned sort of man, but you’ve no idea what it is you
ought to be old-fashioned about.And I will tell you this:
for the murder of my daughter,
I expect the murderer to suffer the punishment of the state.
No more. No less.
That’s what I mean by a civil society.
I’ll hold you responsible.
Let us begin there to put the world to rights.
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:
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.
I wrote last week about a few projects I am working on that have embraced an aesthetic of minimalism in their productions due to budgetary issues. But how do these ideas arise? More importantly how do they develop into a final product? I have written generically about my design process but I thought it might be fun to explore a single project more in depth to see how these ideas make it to the stage.
I was approached by Aaron Davidman, Artistic Director of The Jewish Theater – San Francisco, to light his production of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig for their 2010 season. I had never read or seen the play so my first read for this production was my first time ever through the play. I had no preconceived notions of what it was about or how it “should” look. So I sat down with the text and began to read the play fresh.
Upon that first read I was struck with how important time is to the play. It takes place over a 36 hour period and all the action occurs in the same location. It is almost Greek in its unity of time, place, and action. As a lighting designer time of day is a central concern when working through the text. While location is important it is not central in the same way that time is. Even when the work is highly abstracted there needs to be some unity of expressing a changing time of day. Because time plays such a central role in the storytelling of Sisters Rosensweig I became instantly curious about how to provide that.
The script calls for a rather elaborate setting inside a well furnished apartment. While the action takes place in this well furnished apartment what is more central to the dramatic storytelling is that everything happens in the same room. I proposed to Aaron that we consider setting the play on a rather minimal set and utilize lighting conventions borrowed from the dance world to approach the piece. He readily welcomed the idea and we set out with our scenic designer to craft this world.
I find that audiences respond quite favorably to naturalistic plays happening on abstracted settings. When abstracted in the right way, such that the core storytelling elements are highlighted, the abstraction makes the reality of the characters resonate strongly. One trouble that can arise in naturalistic settings is that the characters get lost amidst the scenery. While it is a perfect approach for film, strict naturalism can impede an audience’s ability to process natural dialog. Abstract minimalism takes the benefits of abstraction even further and gives the audience a clear focus on the actors. After all the audience pays to see actors not well executed scenery, beautiful costumes, or fancy lighting.
As we developed our setting for Sisters Rosensweig we were very careful to create a space and develop ideas that will always keep our focus on the performer. A white rectangle set against a black floor to bound our room filled with a few simple furniture pieces, a staircase, and a chandelier all backed by a large and expansive sky. The sky, truly a white cyc, will be variously lit to show the passage of day into night and back into day. The performers will be clearly and cleanly lit and set against this shifting sky.
Through a clear focus on the performance we will create a visual space which can ebb and flow along with the emotional moment of the play. Each of the seven scenes take place at a slightly different time of day. In order to show these transformations the cyc will be lit variously from the top and bottom in a range of colors from morning pastels, to cool gray midday clouds, to nothing late at night. A shifting sun will illuminate the cyc variously from the sides as well as low and center on the horizon for an evening sunset.
While the sky will be changing behind us, the performers will be lit in cool shades of gray. Keeping the light on the actors in a tight color range of 3400° K – 5700° K will provide a clean and crisp look appropriate for both the sharp witted comedy as well as the darker moments of the piece. This color palette also evokes the cool light of London wherein the play is set.
Here is a breakdown of the lighting systems:
All the actor lighting is done with frosted Source-4 Lekos. This will allow me to make shutter cuts to the white performance space and keep as clean a look as possible on the stage. The CYC is lit with various FarCycs, Mini-Strips, Fresnels, and PARs.
As of this writing the lighting paperwork is all finished and sent off to the master electrician and production manager. I have seen an early run through of the piece and have some basic cueing ideas although that will get fleshed out in later meetings with the director. We load in the lighting and scenery at the end of December, focus the lights, and then walk away for a few days over the New Year. When we come back in January we will begin lighting rehearsals.
Doing a post like this which goes into the specifics of a design for a show is new for me (I typically stick to theory). How was it for you as a reader? Would you like to see more of this?
Drop me a line in comments and let me know what you think.
I am currently working on two shows that, for budgetary reasons, have pulled back on the design elements and are working within a minimalist framework. It has long surprised me that smaller theater and opera companies will often spend a significant percentage of their budget on scenery (or costumes) and skimp on a lot of the other elements of the show. Dance learned years ago that when working with limited means the first thing to go should be the elaborate scenery, followed by fancy costumes. The whole purpose of live performance is to experience the performers.
Modern dance developed within a rather poor environment even for the arts. Scenery and, to a lesser extent, costumes were largely eliminated in favor of spending money on performers and, by extension, lighting. You can do any show without scenery and without costumes, but you can’t do it in the dark. As the saying goes, “If you can’t see them you can’t hear them.” One quickly begins questioning what exactly that means. Seeing the performer does not necessarily mean a spotlight on their face. If you are working on a noir piece revealing the actor in shadow and half light may be the most effective means of hearing what they are saying in a given moment. Yet the underlying logic is true. If the audience can not see the performance they will fast lose interest.
It is interesting that theater and opera companies will often sacrifice the actual performances in order to have scenery and costumes when, in the end, the audience comes for the performers. Both of the shows I am currently doing in a minimal style have made sacrifices in order to directly improve the performances and thus the audience’s experience of the piece. In one case a rather pricey scenic element was cut to hire a dialect coach. In the other case singers salaries were increased with, what would have been, the scenic budget. In both instances a choice was made in favor of the performance over the packaging. In both these cases the lighting budget is tiny (as it should be) but I will make it work overtime.
Don’t get me wrong. I am incredibly vocal about the utility of good design. I firmly believe in the value that visual storytelling brings to a work. I have seen shows whose success was largely through the design ideas alone. But no slick piece of stagecraft will make up for a poor performance. One of the great things about lighting is that it has the capacity to work scenically as well as a means of illumination. Through the use of standard American theatrical lighting instruments whole worlds can be created with variations of color, texture, shape, and angle. Interiors and exteriors can be created not to mention the more obvious qualities like time of day.
I see a lot of companies cutting back their programming or doing smaller shows in order to make up the funding gaps they are experiencing under the current economy. Sadly this is precisely the wrong direction to go. Audiences come to the theater to see shows. By reducing the programming you are reducing your audience base and risk pushing them away more permanently. Instead the most logical thing to do is revision the way in which performance is seen. Exploring minimalist approaches to design is certainly one way to do this. Cut the scenic, costume, and lighting budgets and do the five actor play you really want. Cut all the fancy drops and hire that amazing singer.
It is common in New York, and with many European companies, to forgo design altogether. No set, rehearsal clothes, and worklights. While this is often too bold a choice for most directors it is a way of producing work that focuses first on the performance.
Before these ideas get tossed to the side as the ravings of a post-modernist, keep in mind that Shakespeare operated in much the same fashion. The scenery for his plays was minimal to non-existent, the lighting was daylight (and perhaps a few effects), while the costumes were a hodge podge of items the company would carry around with it. Roman characters might be wearing Elizabethan clothes and brandishing Greek weaponry and all this in simple daylight on a more or less bare stage. The focus, once again, was on the performance.
Far from cutting back on performance, when times are tough, it is exactly the performance that needs to be focused on. Additional rehearsal times, dialect coaching, higher performer salaries (to both allow them to relax and focus on the work as well as garnering a higher quality performer) are what the money should be spent on. An audience should leave the theater thinking fondly on the performance. If they leave remembering the scenery or lighting, with no resonance to the story, we have done something wrong.
At the rate of economic “recovery” we are experiencing these are issues companies will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. If live performance is not to be totally overwhelmed by mass consumer culture something must be done to keep performance alive and growing.
How will you respond?
One of the things that interests me about Brecht’s theoretical project is his focus on creating work that resonates strongly with contemporary audiences. The world as he knew it was one firmly rooted in “the scientific age” of modernist utopian possibilities. He saw theater as a tool to open up fracture points in contemporary society in order to make possible a transformation in class consciousness.
He writes in A Short Organum for the Theatre:
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
Brecht’s work, to my reading, has always concerned itself with the extremes of society, the revolutionary consciousness and potential on the one hand and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces on the other. But as he says in the above quote we must concern ourselves with the contemporary reality. We must use the system as it is, and through an exploitation of its fracture points, transform it into a more perfect world. He makes this second point more explicitly, a little earlier, when he states that “[t]he theatre has to become geared into reality if it is to be in a position to turn out effective representations of reality, and to be allowed to do so.”
Theatre, for Brecht, was to be an Event, in the Zizekian sense, an authentic experience which fundamentally alters the experience of events not only after its occurrence but alters the experience of the past as well. The theatrical Event was to be of such a magnitude that one’s whole orientation to the social experience would be fundamentally and irrevocably altered.
So what does this have to do with tweeting about Kanye West?
What I was thinking about specifically was the extreme of contemporary hip hop embodied in the radical political critique espoused by groups like Dead Prez or BDP (KRS-One) on the one hand and such acts as Kanye and Fergie on the other. Bling bling capitalism juxtaposed against social revolutionaries mediated through contemporary performative/artistic experience. How does Kanye’s Golddigger intersect with KRS-One’s Love is gonna get cha(Material Love)? But of more interest is the question: how does the technology through which these songs are experienced interact with the audience?
What twitter does, in a similar way to other social media like blogs, facebook, myspace and so forth, is to blur the distinction between life, audience, and performance. When surveillance is total, and everyone is on camera, then everyone is an actor. So then we have the consumption of culture as a performative act. We tweet about the song we are currently listening to and fold the performance of the song into the performance of subjectivity on-line in a way that presents it immediately as commodity and reifies the subjective performance.
This is the world we are in. The “scientific age” has been passed by for the “information age” and we are no longer gears in the machine but statuses in the social group blog. So the audience/actor takes the stage and incorporates cultural commodities into the performative feedback loop. The subjective experience of identity shifts along the audience/actor continuum and becomes complicated as that experience gets mediated through various technologies. Is a retweet performative? Has the subjective experience then become another cultural object to be consumed or does it still contain the potential inherent in performance? Has the subject/object dichotomy been pulled out of the either/or world and brought into the light of both/and?
Brecht makes it clear that “[n]ot everything depends on the actor, even though nothing may be done without taking him into account. The ’story’ is set out, brought forward and shown by the theatre as a whole.” I would argue that this extends to contemporary performative technologies.
While Brecht set out in his day to reconceive Theatre and Opera into a medium appropriate for his contemporary world I could easily imagine him shifting the very stage from the physical world to the digital world. Perhaps his performances would only appear in Second Life or as episodic narrative released via twitter.
Despite all this conjecture, the question still remains: how might these technologies be utilized to exploit fracture points in contemporary culture in order to unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses? Or to look at it a different way: is the very search for those points of fracture, and the desire for social revolution, an idea tied up with the modernist notions of a bygone era? Have the differences been so radically folded into one another that we no longer have such dichotomous existence but rather the uneasy experience of both/and?
I certainly don’t know the answers to those questions but I would love you to retweet this piece if you enjoyed it.
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