The Misanthrope

Light­ing design for Anna Brenner’s con­tem­po­rary stag­ing of Molière’s Mis­an­thrope in the Tony Har­ri­son trans­la­tion, pre­sented by the under­groundzero fes­ti­val at Per­for­mance Space 122, July 16 – 19. Set by Nico­las Benac­er­raf, clothes by Ásta Hostetter.

This pro­duc­tion is an ensemble-created con­tem­po­rary explo­sion of Moliere’s clas­sic social com­edy inspired in equal part by Ing­mar Bergman, indie rock, and the New York rental mar­ket, it explores the nature of desire in our gen­er­a­tion. The world is both famil­iar and strange — set in present day New York among a group of artists and intel­lec­tu­als, The Mis­an­thrope looks at how we form and destroy our social com­mu­ni­ties. Feel­ings of love, desire, jeal­ously and inse­cu­rity are masked and unmasked through­out the play in comedic and dra­matic fash­ion with music, move­ment, and verse.

The light­ing sup­ports the dead­pan real­ism of the inti­mate scenes between lovers and friends by evok­ing a cin­e­matic bed­room, only to inter­rupt these attempts at com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the more col­or­ful and low-angle fluorescent-lit world of a house­warm­ing party dur­ing the pub­lic scenes. Celimène, moved into the empty the­ater at the begin­ning (lit by a sin­gle bright work light), finds her­self there alone at the end, as her peers move out their stuff. Six shaded bed­room lamps evoke both the inti­mate set­tings of the bed­room, and the hope­ful attempts at community-building, only to be left extin­guished in the end.