five significant works

Marley

Marley, the musical, focuses on Bob Marley’s life from 1976 to 1978. It begins with his controversial appearance at the 1976 Smile Jamaica concert, just two days after an attempt on his life failed. The story then moves to his time in London, which he traveled to soon after the Smile Jamaica concert, and then a transformational trip to Africa before his return home to Jamaica for the 1978 One Love Peace Concert.

The lighting for Marley employs an intentional mix of period technology. I designed a backlight bank of Par 64 cans to replicate the original lighting rig for the Bob Marley and the Wailers April 28, 1978, outdoor One Love Peace Concert rig. An upper linear array of fluorescent tubes is color-corrected to red, yellow, and green and individually circuited to provide a sense of pop and a muddied grit to exterior Jamaica location scenes, Trench town, and exteriors. They allow drawing focus to a single vertical panel when desired. The fluorescents are an interesting source for those characters playing above the panels on the raised orchestra level. A rig of LED intelligent fixtures hangs above in two truss rings mirroring the vinyl turntables below. Other LED fixtures are seated within the scenic elements and dropped into the floor that up-wash the moving panels and provide an interesting light source for many of the highly choreographed musical numbers. This mix of technology offers the production a quick visual vocabulary to help depict time period, concert mode, dance mode, and book/dialogue mode. The arrangement of the instrumentation allows me to mix color across the large moving wall panels and give tone and texture to the overall visual pictures. The moving heads will enable me to move and travel with the active lead, which is regularly employed in the choreography of the overall piece and provides texture and movement to the stage pictures. The music, location, and historical context inform the color palette. The speed of the LED and intelligent light sources allow me to punctuate sound and movement, create effects, and shift and manipulate color vision and perception.

Jazz

Jazz is a play structured through the abstraction of memory. We move through a single story three times, told from the perspective of three characters, each emphasizing differing moments of this same story and each told in a tempo specific to their character. We witness the interior struggle. We move through generational histories, and we watch as our characters act out, all in a desire to be loved.

The lighting for Jazz demands flexibility in that the story quickly switches from the perspective from which it is told, moves forward and back in time, begins, halts, and then jumps, plays both interior and exterior, and moves through places of metered reality to an unknown, seemingly undefined liminal space. The lighting needed to help tie these quick and varied glimpses together to support this fractured structure and help the audience set the puzzle pieces in place.

Color plays a primary role in character perspective and as a key to identifying scenes that occur in the “real” from those existing in the liminal space. Shape is used in several cases to snap us out of scenes, emphasize a heightened action, and focus on a particular character’s response to a moment. Shape also helps to bisect and reconcile how we understand the playing space. Texture helps to define place. Architectural surfaces are treated to depict light sources or time of day or are treated to draw contrast to and support an emotional moment within a stage picture.

The lighting is structured to provide low, mid, and high LED side lighting that creates a dance-like quality in carving out the physical objects and people on stage. Top light allows for a system of tight pools, which are used for accent moments and allow me to support split scenes on stage. Front and back corner intelligent fixtures provide long diagonal shots, further accenting the three-dimensional bodies and offering dynamic lengthened light paths.

Center Stage’s production of Dance of the Holy Ghost, a play on memory by Marcus Gardley, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah. Photos by Richard Anderson.

Dance of the Holy Ghosts, a play on memory

The lighting for Dance of the Holy Ghosts, a play on memory, filled a sizeable multi-leveled space that simultaneously played interior, exterior, memory, and present time. The scenic wall elements are porous and light, and meaningful objects reminiscent of the place bleed through. On the other side of the walls is a place of transformation. The floors are wood. The lower level plays interior, car, jail visiting room, and hospice. An open staircase leads to a floating second level with a tree. The surround is littered with artifacts of lives lead, some buried deep, and others set upon the surface.

It is a story of passion, expectations, family, reconciliation, remembering joy, and, for some, a search for redemption, forgiveness, and understanding.

The lighting is rich in texture. The wood walls glow, the earth surround is dappled, and the above level of nature, a park, a place in the open air. I chose secondary and tertiary colors for this world, as the emotions are deep, complicated, and tied to music and histories closer to those tones. The stage pictures are often shaped to a specific stage area, but the focus is soft and blends smoothly from the action area to the mid-ground and background. The cueing overlaps, one image slowly bleeding into the next, with colors overlapping, mixing, and finally shifting to the new state.

Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous

“In a funny and hopeful new play by Atlanta-favorite Pearl Cleage, artists from different generations and worldviews must find a way to reconcile their beliefs and make peace with lingering ghosts from the past.” (From Alliance Theatre)

The lighting for Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous is designed to feel like a present-day high-end, lush interior penthouse hotel room with partial ceilings, cool tonal walls, two exterior terrace areas, a full-stage sheer curtain, and a great sky above. Lighting practicals: table lamps, ceiling fixtures, and architectural accent lights are placed within each room as they might be in an actual room of this quality and play as source light for the entry area, dining room, bedrooms, and kitchen.

The lighting is designed to make us feel like we are in such a room, with light from the exterior touching areas inside and reflected on the sky drop above and in the surroundings. Texture is employed with great subtlety. The light is not meant to draw our attention but to provide focus and clarity in composition and move us smoothly from picture to picture, suggesting a forward movement in the time of day.

The color tones are crisp cool whites from the front and high sides, cool pale lavenders from diagonals mid and high and a no color low angle subtle textured front fill, pale wheat toners from left and rich side diagonal angles, and LED high sides and backs. This combination of systems allows me to create a realism-inspired interior space.

Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love is a clever witted, classic romantic comedy with quick transitional movements staged in a space reflective of a composite of The Globe Theatre and The Rose Theatre of Shakespeare’s time. It is 1593 when William Shakespeare discovers his muse who inspires his not-yet-written Romeo and Juliet. The play, Shakespeare in Love exploits all that makes rich a live theatre experience. The stage and staging intentionally play as they might in Shakespeare’s times. We move from town to country to a palace, a ballroom, the Queen’s court, a boat, a bedroom, a performance to the backstage area, and on and on. We experience the mechanisms of the theatre, the power of an ensemble, and of the richness of words. There is sword fighting, there are love scenes and bawdy taverns, and there is much laughter. This play transports the audience through a wide array of emotions.

Dialogue and language are a huge part of the experience of this play so visibility is key. The lighting requires creating romance and conflict and quickly shifting time and location. The stage is a three-quarter thrust with an above and two side “offstage” spaces below, left and right, and two Juliet spaces above, left and right. The space downstage and offstage is used as a viable acting area. The upstage provides an alternate “onstage” space for the play within a play and an area for transitional entrances and exits.

Clarity of focus, color, texture, shape, and the capability for quick transitional movements drove my choice of systems for the production. Front Diagonal and Back Diagonal systems allow me to clearly light faces and provide a sculptural quality to the bodies and figures on stage. Textured and toned front and side systems provide interior and exterior middle layers. Top systems provide color toning from above and can isolate an area when desired. Four intelligent fixtures are located in the front and back corners of the thrust stage to provide additional flexibility for focus, texture, color, and movement. Warm orange-red tonal pools heightened the red of the downstage/offstage carpet. No color-textured mid-level fronts and sides offer additional visibility light for moments in contrast to color-driven romantic scenes. Four Source4 ERS warm led moving heads provide flexible fixtures for active live-focus specials.

The upstage area below is lit with three systems of side light: one led color changing, one Source4 ERS pale lavender with texture, and one mini spot fixture cross-focused in the stage within a staging area. A fourth system of color-changing top light illuminates the area from above. The upper balcony is lit with two front diagonal systems and one direct front system. The upper balcony, the juliets, and the adjoining staircases and walkways are lit with top and diagonal side systems. The surface of the upper and lower stage structure is treated with textured light, indicating diagonal in both warm and cool tones. The practical chandeliers are fitted with slow flickering flame and warm color temperature lamps.

Five Most Significant Works Completed In Rank

Michelle Habeck, MFA, Lighting Design