This play is a twisted retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream following the player troupe The Rude Mechanicals as they rehearse the their play “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby” in Lincoln Park Chicago. There are two major parts of the play, the rehearsal days spanning midday to sunset, in which only Bottom talks to and can see the audience, and the performance, in which all mechanicals can see the audience and perform the play directly to them. My charge was to seperate the space and time and heighten the comedy throughout the play.

I accomplished this task by utilizing a realistic style for the rehearsal process imitating daylight and the movement of the sun into sunset by shifting the weight of the lights and the color of the lights at the last moments. The PWIAP (Play Within A Play) was seperated with the only direction from Molly Livesay being “as if the Mechanicals designed the lights themselves, a shitty stage play.” Thus the PWIAP was designed with as many colours as possible to represent every character and every interaction. The lights were a character of their own interacting with the players making the players wait for scene changes in a awkward humor, lights would flash mid conversation, and the end was a dance party with shifting rainbow lights. Although I had time to design, I only had two day to program due to a board breaking and not being replaced until the last two rehearsals!

You can watch the recordings of the performances on Molly Livesay’s youtube channel by clicking the buttons below! Please note it was recorded on phones and the automatic focus of the phone camera messes with the actual look of the lights in the theatre. The production photos below are better representations of the design.

Another fun play presenting a metaphor of the relationship between humanity and religion. “The Universal Struggle of Good versus Evil.” Four major “locations” appeared through the story: Earth in limbo, Hell, Heaven, and Humanity. The play works in Judeo-Christian understanding of religion, with God and Azazel as personified forces interacting with a singuarly personified Humanity.

This project presented three short plays: “Malcolm,” “Guns in Dragonland,” and “Mrs. Martin’s Malaise.” The director, Katie Nowak, organized them in such an order to go from more abstract action to end with realistic work and asked that my design reflected that direction.

“Malcolm” is a documentary style retelling of a man’s death by those with varying degrees of closeness to him. I designed it to look and sound like a blue screened VCR, beginning with the insertion of a VHS tape and ending with the tape ejecting.

“Guns in Dragonland” is a fantastical perspective of a child who dies to the “mechanical dragon” or, as the audience will understand, to gun violence in schools. It is a devastating story. My design began with the portrayal of the playground in fun purples greens and blues, bright as a child would see the world. The lights flicker when the mechanical dragon roars closer to real lighting. The child goes inside the school to investigate. At this point, the play had written specific stage directions calling for darkness and a spotlight on the child before it suddenly goes out with one last roar of the Dragon. She then reunites with her imaginary friend, growing wings of her own.

“Mrs. Martin’s Malaise” follows a school teacher who has anxiety around school shootings and catches a student who has accidentally brought a gun to school. This design was meant to be the most realistic, emmulating school classrooms and cafeterias. The most unrealistic part of the play is the set of fates who stand around Mrs. Martin acting as her inner dialogue. The Fates were set apart in a small, moving field of red that disappears when Mrs. Martin finally lets go of her anxiety.

As my first foray in lighting design, I spent a lot of time experimenting and ended up learning a lot. I was especially fortunate to have also been the sound designer and stage manager of the project so that I spent quite a bit of time in the space in addition to being in the room with the actors and director which gave me the benefit of better understanding the direction and performance of the project than if I just came in for the designer run.