Tony Award-winning lighting designer Kenneth Posner has worked on many dramatic productions with realistic, elaborate sets, including The Merchant Of Venice, Other Desert Cities and The Columnist. His most recent Broadway show, Disgraced, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Ayad Ahktar about pride, prejudice and self-deception, has allowed him the opportunity to use lighting to set mood and tone across different seasons in the same space. The changes are often subtle, but over the course of the show, the lighting moves from a warm atmosphere to a harsher vibe as the characters’ lives fall apart.
Lighting and Set Design
Posner’s lighting design for Disgraced stems from the scenic design of fellow Tony winner John Lee Beatty, with whom he has worked with before. Beatty’s design in turn was inspired by the play itself, which takes place entirely in the apartment of young Indian lawyer Amir (Hari Dhillon) and the blonde painter named Emily (Gretchen Mol) whom he married. He has denounced his Muslim faith (while still being questioned about it in our post-9/11 world), which puts him at odds with Emily, who is working on Muslim-inspired art, and his nephew Abe (Danny Ashok), who grapples with his cultural identity. Volatility in the tale is further generated by the presence of a couple they are close to — Jewish museum curator Isaac (Josh Radnor) and his African-American wife Jory (Karen Pittman), a fellow lawyer at Amir’s firm — and a dinner debate with them that transforms into a verbal conflagration about race and religion that wounds their friendship.
Beatty designed the apartment based on a real one located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The living room extends from stage right into the dining area at stage left, behind which is their kitchen. The front door is upstage at stage right, with a hall center stage running back to two unseen rooms. A crucial part of the set is the balcony beyond the French windows of the dining area at stage left. Plenty of light pours through those windows and mirrors the mood of what happens onstage as the story, told in four scenes over three seasons, grows uglier.
Theatrical Naturalism
“This is theatrical naturalism, and the notion of the apartment facing east was a deliberate choice only in the sense that three of the four scenes take place in the morning,” explains Posner. “It took advantage of the idea of sunlight coming over the East River into the apartment. You can shape the personality of the room, and it really helps with the tone and the mood of the scene [and] obviously the time of day storytelling. The seasonal component of it [is also important] because the play does take place starting in late summer of one year and going into the spring of the following year.”
In terms of contemplating the concept of seasonal lighting as employed in Disgraced, Posner says that it mostly has to do with color but somewhat with angle as well. He notes the intense bright quality of warm sunlight in summertime and how that can become softened in wintertime as the sun sits lower in the sky. “All of those things came into play,” says the LD. “The third scene is autumn, and it really starts out at dusk and goes into evening. With the dusk color, I’m cheating a little bit with the autumnal quality. It’s reminiscent of amber leaves or foliage. I’m not trying to be literal; I’m just giving a taste of something. It’s more evocative than it is a literal gesture.”
Posner’s lighting is nuanced throughout the set as there are different nooks and crannies to reveal. “You really get a sense of architecture in the apartment,” he says. “You can actually see into the upstage bedroom window through the downstage windows if you’re sitting center towards house right/stage left. You can get a sense that John Lee has created these layers and depth to this apartment, and being true to the architecture. Even if you look at the arc of the play when we first meet these two characters, their relationship seems very solid — they’re in love, they’re both at the pinnacle of their careers, everything is good and economically secure. As the arc of the play continues and the play unravels and the layers start to peel off, you start to see the characters come to life and reveal their true colors and circumstances. The lighting shifts in mood, texture, and tempo to reveal those crumbling layers until we get to the final scene of the play, where his [Amir’s] life is completely devastated, their marriage is completely destroyed, and his career is basically over. He has to rebuild from scratch, and in that final scene, they find themselves in a harsh, cold, late winter/early spring light as opposed to the first scene, which is kind of warming, glorious and inviting in quality. The lighting in each scene is specific to the playwright’s text and observation of what’s happening in the arc of the play.”
Light through the Ceiling
This is far from the first time that Posner has worked with an elaborately design set with a ceiling, and he notes that each one he has worked on has presented challenges in a different way. “In this particular instance, the ceiling was cut back a little bit, which definitely helps dig into the corners of the set and the space a little bit,” he says. “There is a hidden socket that John Lee created in the main playing area just downstage of the upstage wall that is built into the coffered ceiling that he created.” The ceiling onstage is about 12 feet high, which gives it realistic proportions and matches the actual ceiling height of the apartment that served as model for the set.
To light Disgraced, Posner says he used “typical theatrical lighting,” which here is predominately ETC Source Fours, “incandescent sources that I basically used to shape and carve out the space. There were a couple of moving lights [Martin MAC 2000 Washes and ETC Source Four Revolutions] that helped with transitions to give a sense of the passage of time and the sun rising, setting, or moving throughout the day. But otherwise the craft was very straightforward in its theatricality for a box set with a ceiling.”
A lighting rig off stage left is devoted to the French windows and “really drives the design,” he says. “The entire design is centered around light coming through those windows.” During the crucial dinner scene, time of day moves along rapidly. “The dinner scene is a long scene that begins at dusk. The time elapse on the scene is sped up. It’s probably two or three hours of time that is compressed into about a 35 or 40-minute scene.”
Warm to Harsh
The lighting over the course of the show gradually changes and represents the shift in the emotional landscape of the characters. “It starts out with a warmer, more inviting atmosphere, then slowly throughout the play, it breaks apart and fractures, the angles become more severe, and it’s really about the harsher late winter/early spring light coming through the windows.”
Disgraced is considered by many to be the best show of the past season and the best play of the last year. It is confrontational, discomforting and thought-provoking, recalling another Pulitzer Prize-winning show about race, Clybourne Park, which ran on Broadway in 2012. Posner was certainly moved when he first read Disgraced. “I thought it was one of the most provocative and topical plays I’ve read in my career,” he declares. “I was immediately taken by it and signed on [right away].”
When asked to compare the set of Disgraced with something similar in nature like Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Posner notes that the latter was only different in the use of transitions, moving back and forth between two Presidential candidates’ hotel rooms and the press corps assemblage in the ballroom. “That was slightly different just in the way the storytelling happened,” he clarifies. “The storytelling in Disgraced is one location, five characters, and just very direct, smart writing in the storytelling, so the approach is slightly different. The conceptual part isn’t, but the craft part is.”
