Missing Stairs
One of the most striking aspects of the show was its set, both in terms of architecture and lighting. A 10-foot-high stage piece that included two adjacent rooms, one with a moving wall to create two distinct living room spaces, the other on a turntable to create two separate kitchens and a dining room, was the focal point for the action. But looming over that area was the frame of an empty billboard and, at stage right, a precarious, three-story high staircase with missing stairs. Both acted as symbols for the drama unfolding below.
“I really wanted there to be a sense of ascension to the space,” explains scenic designer Todd Rosenthal. “The characters continually aspire to rise above their current condition. The billboard and staircase are also meant to be ruins of a once-prosperous area that has decayed and left these people behind. The weight of the looming elements makes the actors feel less empowered, but still accessible to the audience. I like the operatic scale.” He adds that they wanted the set to change like Three-Card Monte, “slick, but still hand-made in a way. It matches the melodic street poetry of Stephen’s words. We also didn’t want to have to wait too long for scenery to change. The time frame for the design was very short and rushed.”
Faster than Spider-Man
Lighting designer Don Holder confirms that work on the show was fast-paced. Holder had just come from working on the beleaguered Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark musical, which finally opened June 14 after several postponements. But he was determined to work on Motherf**ker because he loved the script and had worked with Rosenthal and director Anna D. Shapiro before. While the atmosphere behind-the-scenes was low-key, supportive and calm — and it helped that much of the talent had worked together before — it still presented its own set of challenges to be overcome.
“Most people would be stressed out by the fact that we had to get the show done in less than a week of tech,” admits Holder, “but having been through a process where we didn’t quite get through a show in eight weeks, it was reaffirming to understand that I can do this and I still do know how to get shows lit at a fairly rapid pace. The process of Spider-Man was so different” — he started work on that in 2007, finishing up in May 2011 — “that I began to wonder what it would be like to work on a show that I was more accustomed to. That was interesting, the comparison in terms of scale.”
Holder says that his primary concern was to help tell the Motherf**ker story and give each of the rooms onstage the proper personality and character.
Adding Depth
“Todd did an amazing job of transforming the space through some very simple and clever gestures — the sofa [that flipped up from beneath the stage], a pop-up wall, the turn of a turntable — and Anna and I talked about how we needed to give each room its own personality in terms of the light. It was subtle, but each room or each space had its own kind of vocabulary, and the space itself was very, very shallow and compressed. You had this massive, towering set — a billboard and all kinds of scenery towering above — and then you had this little 10-foot tall set with cornices and nooks and crannies and a palette in terms of scenery that was quite close to flesh tones. So the challenge is, technically, how do you carve out these rooms and give the actors in the room a sense of three dimensions and sculptural quality, and still keep the light off the walls and not make it look like a sitcom?”
The key to giving each space its own personality, but also imbue it with reality, was to avoid a sitcom look. He felt the emotionally-charged work deserved better than that, and he did not want to flatten out the space. “I was worried, because the set was so shallow,” he reveals, “and any light you put into this space was going to be slamming against the walls and making the actors less luminous in the background. The challenge was how to get a three-dimensional, sculptural light into the space and control the light so that you always retain a sense of personality in the room.” Another challenge was that Chris Rock’s complexion was much darker than his co-stars, so Holder needed to make sure everyone’s skin tone matched, especially since the comedian was a focal point of the onstage action.
A third challenge was keeping a sense of motion and transformation to the play while the scene transitions, which involved set changes, were transpiring in darkness. Holder looked at the decaying architecture looming above the set and chose to use it to give a sense of the city beyond as well as created “large gestures” that related to time of day, connecting each specific scene to a specific time of day.
Lighting Transitions
“Typically, when we moved from one space to the next, when we transitioned, you got a sense of time-lapse photography above, that we were moving quickly through time through the use of angle, color, the way the sky was treated and the way the light reflected off and cut through all that steel and architecture,” Holder explains. “I think you get the sense of time passing. Part of that is the sleight of hand. You don’t want to look down while the set is flipping around or somebody is getting in place. Anna always wanted those transitions to be chock-full of events and subtle movements, so we always had something to look at. I was helping to support the whole conceit of the transition, and there are so many of them in that play. In a way, you don’t want the play to stop moving, and I think because of what Todd and Anna did, and hopefully I helped out, you always get a sense of forward momentum, even if we were in a transition, because they were so much fun to watch.”
With so many tight spaces on set, including the rotating kitchen pieces and a tight living room, Holder faced many challenges in getting light into the right spots. To solve this problem, he placed small light boxes in many of the walls. He loaded up the turntable kitchen and dining areas with set electrics. One of the kitchen sets had a functioning window that looked outside into an air shaft, and there were only three inches of space to create a sense of light from the outside world. Another rotating wall also had a window. Given their restrictions, Holder ended up “using Color Kinetics ColorBlasts and doing some color mixing to give the sense of the changing light as time passed.”
Affixed to the Scenery
From years of experience, Holder has learned that whenever he deals with moving parts and scenery in transition, the most effective approach is to utilize sources that move with the turntable or whatever is in motion. “I was really careful to find ways of putting light onto the moving turntable and the moving parts that made sense in terms of telling the story and creating specifics for the space,” he says. “So, for example, in Ralph’s kitchen, there is under-cabinet lighting and a wall-mounted sconce. In Ralph’s dining area and Julio’s dining area, there are recessed fixtures in the cornice that graze the wall as it rotates around. In every transition, there’s a lot of light mounted on scenery that activates the space while it’s in motion, and that was a conscious choice. How do you do that and also do it in a way that actually makes sense in terms of the text? At stage right in the living room in Veronica’s apartment, there’s a wall where she has her boom-box and her Puerto Rican flag, and when that room moves back, all of a sudden you’re in an 8-foot tall living room in Ralph’s apartment with a ceiling. There’s no way to get light in there, so we designed in a teeny lighting position just above that pop-up wall. There’s lighting built into the scenery all over the place to make these spaces full and give them personality and help with the transitions.”
Holder says that looking at the production, one would think it looks simple, seamless and clean, but that was the point. In reality, it was a tricky show technically, particularly with electrics 45 or 50 feet high shooting light down into small crevices. “It was a little scary when I was going through it, but ultimately my objective was to make it totally transparent so you weren’t really aware of the lighting except when you needed to be, which was in the transitions.”
The veteran LD — who used a lot of standard fare on the show like Source Four ellipsoidals and VL1000 arcs — likes the idea of always trying to reinventing himself. Not in terms of career, he stresses, but the creative choices one makes. “In every play and musical that you do, you should be trying different ways of doing things and not falling back on the same rote, mechanical approach,” Holder believes. “I think if you do that your work has more personality and offers more to the piece as a whole. The Motherf**ker With the Hat was tricky, because I really wanted to do that, and there were so many technical obstacles, there was a lot to think about. I feel pretty good about the results.”
The Motherf**ker With the Hat
Gear
7 City Theatrical AutoYoke 10°
2 City Theatrical AutoYoke 19°
4 Barco/High End Systems Studio Color fixtures
3 Vari*Lite VL1000 AS fixtures
1 ETC Source Four 10°
39 ETC Source Four 14°
56 ETC Source Four 19°
39 ETC Source Four 26°
28 ETC Source Four 36°
13 ETC Source Four 50°
24 ETC Source Four PARs (MFL)
4 ETC Source Four PARs (WFL)
19 6’ MR16 Striplights (EYC)
6 Altman Lighting Fresnels
6 GAM Stik-ups
1 Mini-10
5 MR16 Birdies EYF
9 Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12s
24 Wybron Coloram II color changers (4”)
6 Wybron Coloram II color changers (7.5”)
1 Wybron CXI color changer (4”)
7 Wybron CXI color changer (7.5”)
1 Jem fan
1 MDG Atmosphere hazer
