Light­ing design for Pass­ing by Dipika Guha, directed by Char­lotte Brath­waite, part of the Car­lotta Fes­ti­val of New Plays at the Yale School of Drama. The set is by Julia C. Lee, the clothes are by Mark Nagle, the pro­jec­tions are by Sarah Lasley, and the sound is by Michael Skinner. It hap­pened in the Ise­man The­ater in May 2011.

All pho­tos by T Charles Erick­son. All rights reserved.

Pre­sented simul­ta­ne­ously as museum piece, per­for­mance, and live drama, Pass­ing tells the tale of West­ern col­o­niza­tion. The time­less Mathilda is the object of vio­lence, yet she also con­ducts the pro­ceed­ings in the present tense. Guha’s sub­tle yet bit­ing lan­guage blurs the bound­aries between times, places, and peo­ple, pre­sent­ing a dio­rama of his­tory that stays ahead of its audi­ence and is ulti­mately per­sonal and painful.

The light­ing aims to con­tex­tu­al­ize the audience’s expe­ri­ence by defin­ing then shift­ing space and time, as well as con­vey­ing a range of pow­er­ful moods to match the style of the playwright’s work. It also seeks to exter­nal­ize in bold terms the force of nature that is Mathilda and the native island that she embod­ies, through my use of strong color fields and sim­ple graphic ges­tures (a trib­ute in my own way to the work of the vision­ary Robert Wil­son). My aim was to not shy away from the “sucker punches” that the text truly deliv­ered, by match­ing them with great visual contrast.