God of Carnage

As the lighting designer for God of Carnage, I was able to work with some really interesting challenges. The production was done in the round, meaning the actors would need to be lit from every angle. The floor was painted white and grey and coated with wax, creating a different amount of bounce than I was used to. There was a twelve inch height difference between the shortest and tallest actor. Additionally the grid is pretty low, making it hard to light all of the actors.

          

The play takes place in a living room and does not call for anything special as far as lighting goes. With this in mind, I pictured warm and inviting homey lights. After reading the script a second time, I thought it would be interesting if the lights were enhancing the way that the couples’ behaviors change throughout the play. I started to think of ways to make the lighting get colder throughout the show and warmer at the end without the audience realizing that it was happening.

           

During tech, I was having trouble lighting all of the actors evenly. After remembering that it said “no realism” in the front of the script, I decided to play with color. Olivia Wise, the costume designer, had mentioned to me earlier that her design was inspired by Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and that one couple would be the red team while the other were the blue team. With this in mind, I started playing with different intensities of red and blue. The palest actor turned whatever color I put on him, so I started trying to find a way to incorporate red without making him look like a lobster. I found that by mixing the red and blue, I got a nice purple that looked nice on his skin. I decided to use a turquoise on the opposite side of the room because it was a nice contrast to the purple while maintaining a different variation of the red and blue team theme.

           

I wrote sixteen cues for this production. The first cue was a very warm and inviting look. Because this was the first thing that the audience saw when they walked into the space, I thought it would be best to make the space look as homey as possible. The second cues was just purple/dark blue light. Because there was a chunk of blocking before the show starts, I wanted to do a Wizard of Oz black and white to color transition. By using the purple/dark blue light, the white stage and chairs were able to glow and be seen, without really exposing the vibrant colors of the accents on the costumes and the bright yellow tulips. The third cue really set the play in motion. It was a one second cue in which the blue light changed to purple and turquoise, and the warm lighting popped up. The next nine cues consisted of the warm lights dimming and the cold light rising in three to five minutes cues. By doing this, the audience was not aware of how the lights were changing. Several people in Lighting Design class came up to me after the show thinking that the changes they were seeing were the purple and turquoise getting more intense. Cue thirteen was noticeable because it was a one minute cue in which the cold light was dimming and the warm light was rising. Cue fourteen was a black out, implying the end of the show. Cue fifteen brought up the purple and turquoise as well as both the warm and cold light, allowing the actors to be lit for curtain call. Cue sixteen was the same as cue one, which allowed people to safely get up and leave.

           

I really enjoyed working on this show. It was a fun way to jump into designing in a low stakes environment. I was able to make major changes to my plan and try a lot of different things to figure out what worked well and what didn’t. I would love to design again.