Light Cue 23

My my my has it been a busy few days! The Children is gearing up. I have been in rehearsals the last few nights and I sure do like what I am seeing. The show is deceptive in its complexity. On reading it, one certainly gets a sense of the complexity, but it is only when it is on its feet and we work through the scene transitions that the true complexity comes about. There are a lot of elements. There are a lot of locations. The scenery has been designed with the minimum needed to tell the story. A few simple pieces that reconfigure in many different configurations. Still it is quite complex.

The story is taken from a 1980 horror film. The writers have kept the same sense of pacing, with the exception of the addition of the songs, and even there some of them keep that timing. But filmic timing and stage timing are two very different things. It is an interesting conceptual challenge to try and maintain the sense of a video crossfade or a cut followed by a tracking shot on a stage. The two are very different things. Once again proving that lighting and video are two highly distinct mediums, even though they both deal with the manipulation of photons.

It has been an interesting challenge all around to get at the right tone for this piece. Not just in terms of design, but in staging and acting as well. It is very easy for the play to fall into cartoonish caricature. There are times for that, but a balance must be struck with that on the one hand and the humanity of the people on the other. It is quite the group effort to make this work. One must be willing and able to set aside ego and put ones self in service of the text. Not the script, the text.

Design appears to me more and more a service industry. The job of the designer is to serve the text. In no way do I mean to slavishly adhere to every minutia the playwright puts in the script. For they are part of the service industry as well. In fact the script is not the text. It is a text, but not the final text that is placed in front of an audience. The ‘text’ as I mean it is often called ‘the production.’ But that term has economic connotations that I wish to avoid for the moment.

When an audience comes to a theatre they come to read a text. They come to read the text aurally and visually. The text is comprised of sound and word, of form and fabric, of light and shadow. The text is incomplete without the audience for only then can it enter into dialog with experience. The experience of the creators is of course intimately woven into every aspect of the text. But it is experience as terminus. A kind of death in order to allow for rebirth. In the experience of the audience, the text becomes whole and is able to negotiate the world. The text become a point of birth. A beginning. An origin. And so we return and begin again.

The play begins to deconstruct itself almost from the very beginning. It both plays to and against the stereotypes of its genre. It is aware of Scream but sidesteps the trap of excessive irony. It accepts the sincerity of the original film, but allows the absurdity of that sincerity to bleed through.

And it is fun.

The fun is important as I gear up for a Fall comprised of rather dark material. In October I will be lighting Windows a new play written and directed by Sylvia Bofill. Produced by INTAR at The Workshop Theatre the play follows three generations of Puerto Rican women through the mind of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is a powerful meditation on loss, sadness and regret.

In November, I will be lighting a production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone followed by an adaptation of Maurice Blanchot’s Madness of Day.

December will find me lighting Becoming Adele for Gotham Stages the producers of last spring’s Sake with the Haiku Geisha. And then the fun returns with The Nutcracker. If you have young children, I highly recommend this show. New York Theatre Ballet puts on one of the best children’s shows I have seen.

There are a few other things in the works that I will of course keep everyone updated on as the time approaches. So, there is a bit of a preview of what I am up to this Fall. I am excited about all of these projects and looking forward to the rest of this year.