Edward Albee's The Play about the Baby
As staged at the UEA Studio, 13-19th March.- Director: Jordana Zeldin
- Producer: Charlie Mafham
- Set Design: Corin Depper
- Light Design: Chris Howcroft
- Photographs/Film stills courtesy of Corin Depper,
- 3d renders by Chris Howcroft using Blender
Background:
The play involves four characters, a young couple called 'Boy' and 'Girl' and an older couple called 'Man' and 'Woman'. Boy and Girl apparently have a young baby. The play depicts the arrival of Man and Woman in Boy and Girl's space and their continual intrusion and disturbance which culminates in their convincing Boy and Girl that their baby never existed.
The set design consists of a rough cyclorama made from fabric hung in a semicircle, which creates the perimeter of a defined acting space in the centre of the studio. There are vertical legs of fabric to either side of this arc, and strands of fabric radiating out over the heads of the audience to create something like the feeling of a circus tent.
Basic design concepts:
The colour of the lighting on the cyc alters with the mood of the play. In effect, the space itself becomes a character that reacts to the events taking place.
In the beginning, the acting space is warm and happy. I want to try and minimise the existence of shadows and make the lighting seem reasonably omnidirectional, so that we don't get a sense of light shining into the space from anywhere else. There should be nothing outside the little world of Boy and Girl.
When Boy and Girl leave the space, it goes into a 'sleeping state' whilst it waits dormant for their return. The world of Boy and Girl is extremely limited and solipsistic, so their light will seem to follow them on and off the stage.
The intrusions of Man and Woman seem to puncture this self-contained universe, with more directional, sharper edged, lighting.
As the mental conflict created by the actions of Man and Woman escalates, the colours in the background will become strong reds and purples whilst the acting area will become increasingly cold with stronger shadows in a uniform direction.
When the psychological crisis of Boy and Girl is resolved and Man and Woman leave, this tension between the strong colours of the background and harsh whiteness of the acting space will be resolved by a return to the harmony of the happy state.
Implementation:
Flood battens provided backlight for the cyc. In practice, the lamps in the battens were visible through the fabric, so we had to pull to the battens well away from the cyc into what was in effect the wing space, and stand black masking flats immediately downstage of each one. As a result, the very middle of the cyc received less light than I would have liked (and this is exaggerated by the position of the camera on one side of the auditorium in photos). Individual 1k floods were mounted in the ceiling to produce the angry red colouring for later in the play.
In order to prevent the acting light from bleaching the cyc too much, it had to be kept fairly steep. A soft pink colour in one side of the rig warmed the happy state and brought out the skin tones when Boy and Girl were undressed.
Some lavender backlight complemented the pink and helped create the nightime feel of the sleeping state. The purples in the groundrows gave the cyc a slight purple tinge during the sleep state too.
Because the acting space is divided into four areas, each with a pair of frontlights, we can easily strengthen the light in areas of the sleeping state that Man and Woman have intruded into.
The angry waking state was achieved by removing the pink lights and strengthening the cold lights on the other side, which both cooled the state and gives the lighting a definite direction. A colder fill was added at a shallower angle to prevent the shadows from becoming too severe on the actor's faces.
The shift from waking to sleeping states as boy and girl enter and leave allowed the changes in lighting as the tension increased to be made more surreptitiously. What appeared to be a restoration of a previous state was in fact a shift to a slightly angrier version with stronger colouring of the cyc and greater emphasis of the open frontlights. I didn't want the audience to be consciously aware of the transitions in the emotional tone of the lighting during the body of the play.
