Good Men Wanted

It’s the American Civil War. But it’s also a hip hop music video. In this world premier production, the lighting design brought to life a world where the storytelling vocabulary could shift in an instant from direct address to period drama to modern spectacle. We are following five women on their journey as they, each for their own unique reason, don men’s clothing and enlist to fight in the war. With each major beat-shift in the play, all the design elements undergo major transitions as well. By the time the evening is through, we’ve gone from a clean feminine interior damask floor, to a dirt-covered training camp, to an expansive skyscape, to the grassy hills of Gettysburg, and finally to an overwhelming visual tribute to stiffing patriarchy in the guise of patriotism.

With a huge collage sky drop swooping over the stage for much of the show, sidelight played a major role in this design, rendering the foggy, dappled light of the battlefields and the saturated sculpting light of the anachronistic dance sequences.