PLSN: Can you tell us the story of Goodbar briefly?
Alex Koch, video designer: Goodbar is based on the gruesome murder of Roseann Quinn, a young school teacher by day, club fiend by night who was murdered in NYC in 1973. Judith Rossner retells the story in her 1975 novel Looking for Mr Goodbar. The book’s 1977 film adaptation directed by Richard Brooks affirmed the story’s hold on the public conscious and it was something of a cultural touchstone.Adam Frank, lighting designer: In the show, we see the main character Theresa experiencing life changes through her late 20s and early 30s while facing a lot of emotional challenges and finding acceptance in sexuality. Unable to conquer her femininity, she begins to fall down a dark hole. There is a moment when she realizes her faults and tries to redeem herself. Though, a tragic death cuts short her chance to get back.
Goodbar uses a rock band, Bambi, to tell this intense story. There are only two central actors, a male and a female, who are playing multiple characters and singing all through the show. In this manner, it is hard to say whether Goodbar is a rock ‘n’ roll show, or a play or a rock opera. How do lighting and video contribute to the storytelling within this structure?
Adam Frank: When the whole story is being told through music, like in Goodbar, you need to create other ways to stimulate the audience’s senses and enable them to take a point of view in the story. In this manner, I find video really useful in storytelling to clarify whose point of view the audience is watching. When Theresa’s life is together, the lighting is perfectly tied to the music, hitting the accent at every beat. As she gets to the downfall, the music starts to get atonal and syncopated in very odd ways, the video loses its sense of realism, the images are multiplying, confusing, disorienting in a way that reflects her emotional status. The lighting contrasts with the perfectly-timed lighting at the beginning. The rhythm of the video and lighting don’t stay linear and connected.
How did you create the video content, which, ultimately is the strongest visual aspect and the storyteller of the show?
Alex Koch: This is a strongly director-guided show and, as designers, we were given some really specific requests about how the story and event should be told. What the director and the writers wanted was a video that could play throughout the entire piece, beginning to end, without stopping. The director, Arian Moayed, and I constructed a story board about four months before the first workshop. We created a massive amount of recorded and altered media including animation, staged video on-location and in front of green screens, and textured mashups unique to each song. The result was a bit of a collage, and we eventually discovered the aesthetics by watching the show over and over again. We knew all the things that the show was not going to be. We had specific ideas of what simple vignettes might guide the audience through the story. Applying these ideas in performances, and sometimes realizing that they were completely wrong — that’s how we’ve developed the show.
Goodbar has a 25-foot-wide projection screen, which is in use through almost the entire show. How do you keep the balance between the stage and the screen, performers and the video?
Alex Koch: The screen is so prevalent that video is much more of the storytelling than it would be in almost any other one of my designs. When you take the screen out, this show suddenly becomes a rock concert. Throughout the run, I’ve discovered when the audience absolutely pays attention to the screen and when their eyes fall down to the performers. This is the hardest show that I have ever worked, as far as giving the performers back to the audience. It is important that the screen absolutely spills into the space, and Adam did a great job allowing the video to drive the lights. While video is keeping up with the tempo of the band, lights expand upon the video and transport the audience to the different spaces.
Adam Frank: I see the video screen as a large cyclorama that you might find in a classical theater piece, where it is the main source of light. Many of the performers go straight up against the screen. I cut the lighting off the screen in a way that the actors could float and belong there.
How did you realize these concepts visually?
Alex Koch: For Goodbar, I see myself as a filmmaker creating something that allows an actor on stage to explore being in it when they stand in front of it. I am interested in what is essentially the analog trickery of letting light bring the actors into the film space. There are only a few moments when an actor walks upstage and the content projected is built specifically to integrate them into what is on the screen. For this show, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Who’s Tommy and the entire world of opera were inspiration. I have pulled color choices from our collective experience of the film world by treating photographs and allowing color to tint a look, a form, an emotion, a level of violence and intensity on stage. More of what I have pulled from the projections design world is use of a collage of images, which I often call “the third referential.” These are basically images that are not direct correlations to the song and are an attempt at completing the ideas on stage. We are discovering when there is a chance to be creatively literal, and our challenge is to tell this story as clearly as possible without talking down to our audience, who picks apart all those moments to discover something either about themselves or the characters.
Were you inspired by the movie, Looking for Mr. Goodbar?
Alex Koch: The movie, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, is a cultural icon. It has an incredibly iconic opening and the ending scene — a terrifying murder that lasts for five minutes. It absolutely influenced me for the editing of our murder scene. I did a modern version, which is a journey from the bar that made up her night life, to a sexual encounter in her apartment leading into the murder. We shot the scenes as still pictures, about 5,500 frames to choose from. I guess the result would be called flash editing. Each still starts with a strobe of color, and they fade into each other. The lead actress spent an hour hanging upside down with fake blood pouring from her chin into her nose and over her eyes. We used half a gallon of blood, and lots of paper towels in between shots!
Goodbar has moments that projection and lighting completely unites and creates a whole experience, and some other moments where screen goes to black and lights take over the stage. Can you tell about changing relationship between lights and video throughout the show?
Adam Frank: The moment when she first takes drugs refers to the lyrics as “seeing a kaleidoscope of colors,” and that is one of the first moments that the lighting dominates the space. It is an inner moment for her after the first drug hit; she is full of excitement. Here the lighting appears to emanate from her. This piece leads into “Dogs on the Dance Floor” which is sort of a commentary on men that we find on dance floors who are absolutely aggressive, like dogs. Video takes the audience to a three minute journey with Theresa into a bar, which is full of dancers whose faces would be replaced by frightening dogs, achieved through masks. Video takes dominance back, and the lighting [follows] the projection again. We use black light and green LED lights to create the world in the video on stage and blend the two so that the video opens up to infinity, almost like a window to another world.
As Theresa’s personality and life changes, the video content becomes more aggressive. How is this change, and the emotionally heavy experience, reflected by the lighting?
Adam Frank: The song, “Back Again Blues,” is a perfect example of this. The projection screen goes to black in this part. We watch Theresa as she transitions from her daily life, school teaching, to her night life, getting naked and dressed behind a screen downstage. We use a simple work light and get a perfect silhouette. This screen becomes a symbol of transformation for the rest of her life. Using cooler colors when she is in her school uniform, and cross fading to really powerful feminine colors like red and magenta as she strips before the audience, is a way to show that her character is changing. Also, when she meets her boyfriend Tony, who beats and abuses her and dominates her life, the lighting transforms from subtle pulsing and suddenly becomes aggressively bright. Lighting insults the audience in a way that Tony insults her life and creates a uncomfortable feeling through the cues that don’t make sense to the music. While the background of the video is strobing red and white, atomic strobes are used here in the lighting, matching the timing of the video. Video is filtered into the whole room, and the strobing effect becomes much stronger.
How is the lighting affected by the physical conditions of the space and the lighting equipment that you have in different venues?
Adam Frank: The lighting of the show has changed dramatically because of where we perform. We performed at the East River Park Amphitheater, which is an epic scale venue. We also performed at the Yale Cabaret, which has small, gritty, old, black PAR cans that we utilized to reflect Theresa’s life. In Ideal Glass, we can use LED technology that reflects the light quality in a disco, which seduces Theresa in the first place. My ultimate hope in design is to combine the epic scale of the East River Park Amphitheater, the grittiness of the Yale Cabaret’s PAR cans, and the flashiness of Ideal Glass’ LED fixtures, and make a journey through rock ‘n’ roll lighting. So we see a different type of rock lighting in different stages of Theresa’s life. The top of her life is represented by bright, flashy, high-end lighting, and at the end, when she falls apart, it is the grittiest punk rock, underground lighting.
The biggest challenge about the current venue, Ideal Glass, was the concrete white walls. The question was, how bright can the lighting get before it ruins the projection; and also, how bright we can get the actor without letting the room become too bright. We used a lot of shin busters, which shot through the musicians and actors. The lights placed on top of guitar amps cast amazing crisp shadows that I had never expected. They turned the white walls into another projection screen, allowing the actors to become two dimensional and blend with the video.
Alex Koch: The current iteration of the design is borne of many happy accidents like this, and we have a team that happily accepts discoveries. Goodbar is performed once a month. We’re very lucky for this unusual schedule. You lose any desire to hold on to any one idea, it gives you an opportunity to see and cut all the things that don’t work.
Adam Frank: This makes the Goodbar creative team so strong. We have the chance to go beyond designing once, and to reflect on our choices during the month between two performances. No designer or performer is trying to make their own discipline individually strong; everyone is trying to enhance each other’s art forms with their own specialties.
