Week 5: My first DCP

This week my focus has been almost entirely on getting my first DCP, Heights, up and running. It is so important to me that in my time here, I immediately jumped into the deep end and started directing a show right out of the gates. It has been a huge learning curve in terms of learning how everything operates here and what rehearsals feel like and how the actors, designers, and stage managers here all operate. It’s been great to get this chance right away, to help inform the rest of my time here. Caitlin Hemming was my lighting designer, and so we had to work together to find solutions for how to tell this story in the confines of the Nixon Theater, with limited tech time. It was important to me to really make it feel like night in a busy city. That we are on a roof top, with a dark sky, but that there is a buzz of light emanating from below. And of course, feeling the cool night colors while also being able to see these characters go on their journeys, and find ways to both heighten the emotions throughout of love, isolation, memory, reflection, etc. With only a handful of down lights and a handful of front lights, it was a tall order, but we did our best. This is my favorite look in the play, it’s the very last moment, where each of the three characters are at their most isolated. After several conversations of going back and forth, not knowing who is going to side with who, with betrayal and anger and hope and control… we finally get to this moment. I wanted to have each character in their own isolated pool of light, but still stay in the realistic world that we are living in for the play. This cue did just that for me. The whole stage still feels like the same vocabulary of nighttime colors, but the warms/no colors are only up on each of the characters, leaving the rest of the cool night separate them. Lighting does so much to help tell a story. In all my work, I have learned to really love that, and see the magic that good lighting can bring to a process, both in literal and in evocative, with colors and intensity and mood. While our plot was limited, we still found some really nice moments. And I look forward to my next show, and continuing to develop my work with Lighting Designers.