The Lacy Project
All Campus Theatre
2019
- Lighting Designer: Collin Hall
- Director: Keegan Tucker
- Scenic Designer: Casey Hall
- Costume Designer: Courtney Tipps
- Sound Designer: Andrew Shipman
- Composer: David M. Greenberg
- Props Master: Kathryn Nabors
- Stage Manager: Kelli Cool
- Photo Credit: Kenton Yeager
Alena Smith’s play is a bold, unusual story about an eclectic set of characters, oppressive gender roles, and a disparity of wealth, but it is ultimately a coming-of-age story. The characters attempt to cope with their complete inability to navigate the world by conforming to gender roles and mimicking feminine behavior. The lighting design recreates the world from the perspective of the girls as they learn, which helps the audience relate to the characters. The play starts in a realistic atmosphere, setting the girls’ version of normal. As they discover an adult world that is different from the one they know, the lighting becomes more and more abstract.
At the beginning of the play, the apartment is brightly and evenly lit with pale colors in order to set a base level of normality for the girls’ world. As the characters become more aware of the real world, the environment becomes more abstract, reflecting the increase in the intensity of chaos and disorder. The temperature of the stage cools, the colors become more saturate, and the shadows become more pronounced.
For the scenes with the dolls, I chose to create a completely unrealistic and playful atmosphere, with intensely saturate pinks, ambers, and blues that seem to swallow the stage. The dolls are in their own little world until the end of the play, when they recognize the tragedies of the real world. At this moment, the doll light shifts to the world of the human girls, representing a shift into adulthood tinged with trauma. Similar to the doll light, the music video lighting is as unrealistic as Giselle’s drug-induced hallucinations. The stage is washed in a very saturate blue top light, creating grotesque shadows on the actors’ faces, and is finished with a small army of moving lights that dance in time with the music.