“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” William Faulker said this when accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Playwright Max Wolf Friedlich explores two such hearts in the play Job, which recently made its Broadway debut at The Helen Hayes Theatre after a critically acclaimed off Broadway run.

In the play, Jane, a former high tech company employee, who lost her job after exhibiting bizarre behavior, and Lloyd, her therapist, are figuratively trapped in his office for the entire show. Both carry dark, troubling pasts with them. Confined to a narrow space that seems to grow tighter as the play unfolds, these two conflicted hearts collide, setting off a chain reaction of powerful emotions.

Reflecting the very real human drama that defines Job is a starkly beautiful, emotionally unsettling Mextly Couzin lighting design that encompasses the play’s complex world. “There are two realities this play works in — the therapist’s room and the inside of Jane’s mind, populated with panic attacks and the internet world,” said Couzin. “For me, that means essentially two different approaches to design. On one hand, my intent and goal was to light a room that was lit in the most essential manner. On the other hand, it was to light the world of the internet and panic attacks, we needed to create tension and designed chaos.”

Helping Couzin achieve this vision is a collection of 48 CHAUVET Professional onAir Panel fixtures supplied by PRG.  “I’ve designed this play three times now, at the SoHo Playhouse, The Connelly Theater, and finally at the Hayes,” said Couzin. “At the Hayes, we have the best plot I have ever had a chance to design with — and the Chauvet OnAirs are fundamental to that.”

Couzin has 27 onAir Panel 1 IP fixtures and 21 onAir Panel 2 fixtures in her rig. “Thanks to  Tom Smith and PRG for getting as many as we could get in such a short turn around,” she said. Positioned at different heights on the set’s backdrop, the onAir units helped Couzin convey the remote impersonal nature that often pervades our experience on the  internet.  This was particularly relevant to supporting the drama, since Jane’s former job was as a social media content manager.

“The idea of panels of light — as in rectangular or square as opposed to circular — was essential and integral in the creation of, not just the lighting design, but the visual language of the play,” explained Couzin.  “I wanted the internet world to feel like you, the audience, was engulfed by light. We arranged the onAirs in an IMAX sort of way, so the image as a whole is on a curve. Within that image, I wanted it to feel like a collage of videos, memories and moments. So, the panels needed to seem , but also to be able to work together as whole — solo or singular as multiple compositions.”

Elaborating on the play’s setting, Couzin noted, “For the therapist room, it’s not realism or naturalism, it is just a room suspended in time. There are no windows, so it wasn’t about the sunlight coming through filling the room. Even though we have desk lamps and pendants, it wasn’t about what the lamps did to the room. It is more about how these people interact with each other in relation to the room.”

Couzin artfully used changes (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) in the angle, intensity, and color of light to convey the personalities of her two characters. For example, when the focus is on the therapist, Lloyd, the room loses its warmth and the lighting becomes low and cold.

Darkness itself plays a key role in Couzin’s design.  “It was instrumental to have plenty of negative space between the platform of the therapist’s office and the upstage world of the lighting,” she explained. “We have a curved scrim hiding the structure of the onAir panels so that we could reveal the lighting by design. The general lighting had to be very tight and specific so not to bleed too far off the platform.”

Following her carefully fashioned vision, Couzin and her team associate LD Kirk Fitzgerald; associate LD Aaron Tacy; programmer Manuel Da Silva; and production electrician Mia Roy as well as the IATSE crew, created a finely crafted show that reflected the infinitely complex space inside the human heart.

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Article Sourced from PLSN: Projection, Lights, and Staging News