Life begins again with summer, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps that is why everything seems possible during this season of long nights and sunny days, especially to the young. Memories of those summer dreams continue to burn brightly in our hearts even after they have been dimmed by time, as they were for the Mundy sisters of the fictional Ballybeg, Ireland, in Brian Friel’s Tony Award winning 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa. Told through the eyes of the sisters’ brother, Michael, as he looks back at a time in August 1936 when they shared a country cottage, the play recounts the often-bitter events that have defined the family’s life since that long ago summer.
Providing an evocative and deeply emotional visual backdrop for this saga of hardship, poverty and lost love at a recent production of the play at Rutgers’ Mason Gross Performing Arts was a richly textured lighting design by Maya Strauss that drew on the color rendering prowess of the COLORado Solo Bar 4 from CHAUVET Professional.
Working with Director William Carden, Scenic Designer Louis Meagher-DiEllo, and Assistant Lighting Designer Kai Williams, Strauss created a beautifully balanced mix of color, shadows, dark space and light angles to evoke a sense of mid-century rural Ireland, while accenting a wide range of moods from hope to despair.
“The production centered around a family navigating life in rural Ireland, so the cyc became an essential part of the scenic design as a presence of the beautiful Irish sky,” explained Strauss. “However, the piece is also a memory play, so the cyc served a crucial role as key emotional storytelling, making the space feel abstract and endless.
“Given how important the cyc was to the atmosphere and energy of the production, the show truly could not have been accomplished without the COLORado Solo Bars,” she continued. “The fixtures were incredibly bright and punchy- when they turned on, the space felt vibrant and alive in a way that some other fixtures couldn’t deliver. The diffusion was wonderful as well– with the half cyc diffusion filter in, the Solo Bars covered the entire height of the cyc with minimal drop-off. I was very impressed by the color rendering as well. The Solo Bars allowed for incredibly vivid oranges and reds while still delivering bold blues with little drop-off in intensity, giving wonderful range to deliver a dynamic and bold representation of the light of Ireland.”
There were many gripping moments in this production of Dancing At Lughnasa. Among those that stood out for Strauss occurred as the play concluded when the family comes together for one final time before the lives unravel. “It is a beautiful and heartbreaking moment, all gathered together as the narrator watches wistfully, unable to change the past,” said Strauss. “They are silhouetted in a gorgeous golden light, bathed in the light of the last sunset of summer.”
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