Lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski enjoys working with naturalistic sets, as evidenced in productions like No Man’s Land, That Championship Season and Born Yesterday. Even in a more surreal show like Waiting For Godot or a big musical like Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, he prefers some restraint. In Donald Margulies’ new play The Country House, about a group of actors retreating to a Berkshires home to ponder their place in the world and with each other, Kaczorowski gets to play with light in a radiant way.
“It’s really done quite simply,” he tells PLSN, “so it is really about craft, focusing it well, cueing it well. I’m good at that. I’m good at cueing a show well and appropriately, making people look where they’re supposed to look and with the quality of light that should be there for the scene’s content.”
That might be understating things a bit, but therein lies the charm of his work, that natural feeling that invites you into the world onstage.
“Nature is a big deal in this show,” says the LD, referring to the interior house through the windows of which can be seen trees and foliage upstage and off stage left. “Rain mostly, but also times of day. There’s enough of the outside evident in the set to place the house where it needs to be placed, which is the hills and beautiful countryside of the Berkshires. There was enough out there for me to light and indicate times of day, weather and things that helped anchor the vignettes that happen in that show. It’s a linear story, but there are a lot of little scenes, which is especially true during the blackout sequence when the power goes out because of the thunderstorm. There are a few ensemble scenes, but most of it is little two or three people scenes. They all needed their individual look within the timeframe to help reflect what they were talking about and what their issues were.”
In the way that the Country House story represents a homecoming for its different characters — a family matriarch (Blythe Danner), her close actor friend, her two thespian sons, one (David Rasche) recently widowed and bringing a new girlfriend, and the daughter he angers by this — the show was a reunion for Kaczorowski and a few familiar faces, including scenic designer John Lee Beatty (with whom he has done approximately 20 shows), costume designer Rita Ryack, playwright Donald Margulies and director Daniel Sullivan. They all worked on the Broadway production Time Stands Still in 2010, and they also followed the same process — doing a test run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, tweaking script and design changes, then bringing it to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York.
Sculpting With Light
While Beatty’s rustic set looks like it has a high ceiling, Kaczorowski notes that it is actually not the case. “The set is built in perspective and it’s rigged on an angle, and it suggests, when you look at it, that there’s more of a ceiling than there actually is,” he explains. “I’ve worked with much more complicated, more challenging ceilings for lighting than this one. This one was actually rather open. I’ve done other shows with John and other designers where there was really a complete ceiling and you had to work out tiny little slots for lights. “
Beyond the main lighting grid, Kaczorowski placed lights around the interior set to bring in the feel of sunlight, either waxing in the morning, shining in full daylight, or waning in the evening. “There’s a lot of light that comes into the double French doors that leads to the garden,” he says. “There’s light that comes in the upstage three windows. There’s an upstage right door. All of the openings that come from the outside into the house have exterior ideas through those openings that affect the show and affect the people inside the room. Way up stage, in that upper hallway where the staircase is, it is actually open up top. There is no ceiling up there, even though it looks like the ceiling might continue. The lights up in that area came into the hallway and as far down stage as they could possibly get to reinforce the time of day that was coming through the upstage windows already. So I cheated, but it looks like nature. Basically, there are lights pretty much everywhere you can put in a light.”
His main gear included ETC Source Fours (approximately 250-275, including Lekos) and Martin Atomic Strobes. “There were some LED strip lights that I used to streak down the windows to make sure that the rain effect was seen,” he says. “Being an LED, they were color accessible. I could always change their color just by cross fading to help tell the time of day; if it was warm and sunny or cool and moonlight-y. That’s basically it: Lekos, strobes and a few strip lights.”
Those strobes and LED strips came in handy during the thunderstorm and blackout sequence that occurred at the climax of Act I, a moment that led to an unexpected confrontation when the lights came back on. It was the most challenging scene in the play to light.
“That was fun,” he declares. “Strong strobes did the lightning flashes. The real challenge was lighting the multiple vignettes within the flashing, trying to key off of the camp lanterns that they dug out of the attic to light the rest of the evening. You can’t light a scene with just one lantern on. In life, sure, that’s how it would be. But I had to be more specific and layered and still make it seem like it was coming from just those camp lanterns, and it had to be very controlled, because people had to get into place unseen for the very big reveal before the final curtain of Act I.”
Part of the Family
The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre is part of the Manhattan Theater Club family that also includes New York City Center, where Kaczorowski has worked regularly. “I guess I’m a regular at MTC,” he says. “I work at all of their theaters and have a good relationship with them. I’ve done lots at the Friedman and I’ve done plenty in Stage 1 at City Center in the past couple of years. I’ve also done things in their second stage, but they don’t always keep that stage to themselves. Sometimes it’s rented to other companies like the Women’s Project. So yes, I’m on the regulars list at MTC, and I have a Friedman [production] coming up and a Stage 1 coming up, so the beat goes on.”
A strong advantage of working at the Friedman is that the theatre already owns a console and lights. “They have gear, but they take it down at the end of every run,” remarks Kaczorowski. “You put it where you want every time you do a [show with] new equipment. Unlike Love Letters across the street; we walked in there and it was completely empty. Everything in that show had to be brought in. MTC Friedman is a hybrid. Rather than rent a complete rig for every single show and pay for the rental, they decided to buy some things. They own a light board, dimmers and a bunch of Source Fours, and you use as many of those as you can. If you need more, you discuss renting it.” (In this case, they rented the strips, strobes and some barrels.)
With The Country House, the LD certainly made good use of what he had. The show possessed a warm feeling that drew you into its rural interior and the unfolding drama within. “We wanted it to feel warm, not just in terms of the temperature in full summer, but also it was a warm place of mostly fond memories,” says Kaczorowski. “I wanted it to be a welcoming place, a refuge where people go to relax and kick back. I tried to make it a cozy place. Melancholy too.”
Reach Bryan at bryan@plsn.com
