Telephone/Landscape

Light­ing design for the short play Telephone/Landscape, con­ceived and directed by Will Ful­ton, writ­ten by Drew Dir, with set by Mered­ith Ries and music by Alex Clif­ford. It was part of Tar­get Mar­gin The­ater’s The The­ater of Tomor­row fes­ti­val at the Choco­late Fac­tory.

Start­ing with Gertrude Stein’s short play For the Coun­try Entirely: A Play in Let­ters, and her idea that the­ater should be viewed like a land­scape, we’ve played a game of Tele­phone with the­atri­cal designs. Every designer knew the orig­i­nal text and the work of one other per­son, but no one had the com­plete pic­ture until the end (set –> lights –> music –> text). The end result is a dynamic land­scape of ghosts in the attic, repeat­ing records, and a phone that just won’t stop ring­ing, all com­ing together to tell Stein’s story for the 21st century.

The play was staged in the round, with the audi­ence stand­ing, in the low-ceiling base­ment space, and was lit by 28 glow­ing and puls­ing tubu­lar light bulbs hung in a sloped grid. A curtained-off shaft­way is revealed at the end of the 15-minute play, flooded with bright daylight-colored light com­ing from the upstairs level. There were no cues. The design was for me an exper­i­ment in land­scape, instal­la­tion, inter­ac­tiv­ity, reduced vis­i­bil­ity, and strong visual contrast.

I’m incred­i­bly grate­ful toward Tar­get Mar­gin The­ater and the Choco­late Fac­tory for giv­ing me a play­ground and sup­port­ing my ideas.