By Caridad Svich
Lighting Design
Desdemona's Child tells a story of destruction, hate, love, and finding yourself--all while commenting on how small-town America reckons with racism and bigotry buried deep in the community.
Such intensity in the narrative necessitated an equally intense lighting design. Our team sought to trace and reflect not only the greater racial tensions in the community, but also the interpersonal tensions of our characters, through light. The light was to be sharp, angular, and intense, driven by ideas of naturalism but pushed to the edge of total abstraction. Sunlight would be piercing, harsh, and inhospitable. Moonlight could conceal a town's secrets and reveal its fears.
Matching these impactful, geometric gestures of light was a cueing technique that created a light which "breathed" with the myriad of loaded silences and pauses in each scene. I sought to make moments of silence feel like tense hours had passed, and to elevate instants of anger or outburst to extreme levels of emotional brutality.
Above, you'll find the Lighting Designer's research images defining the lighting concepts for the Town space (before and after the flood), and spaces like the Diner, the Police Station, and Bitter I's home.
Lighting Designer: Mitchell Jakubka. MitchellJakubka.com
SCENIC DESIGN
This play's text strikes a delicate balance between lyrical poetry and the brute reality of it's subject matter. The main goal of this design was to ground it in something relatable and tangible, while still honoring the poetic nature of the play's storytelling.
We are set in a town similar to that of the small steel towns surrounding the Pittsburgh region. Here we find Wiley's Bend, a town of people trying desperately to physically and psychologically barricade themselves from the painful truths that haunt their past (and present). This town is built on and of the wreckage from the "City by the Sea" which flooded many years ago. Though most scenes take place in isolated interiors, each space plays to the backdrop of the aging flood wall this town has erected to keep themselves safe.
The Police Station is poorly organized, and put together with reclaimed office supplies. The diner where the three townspeople congregate is small but homey; a kind of multipurpose community gathering space. Lastly, the home belonging to the old one named Bitter I sits firmly anchored in the town's barricade, serving as the main obstacle dividing the past and present. The ghost of Beautiful D, whose presence can be seen in the persistent growth of weeds and dandelions throughout the town, eventually breaks through to release the wreckage, storms, and waves of protest that the people of this town can no longer ignore.
Scenic Designer: Antonio Troy Ferron. antoniotroyferron.com