Getting Immersive For Holiday House: Sets & Lighting

December is always packed with Nutcrackers, Christmas Carols, and family-friendly musicals galore, but this past holiday season, in a small theatre in Manhattan’s East Village, another kind of Christmas story was unfolding. Written and performed by Tracy Weller, Holiday House: Christmas Bends is an immersive tale that was presented by Mason Holdings at the Fourth Street Theatre.

To create the home for this unique drama, innovative company Mason Holdings reached out to collaborators from a previous show: set and prop designers Justin and Christopher Swader. The Swaders had previously designed Jarring for Mason Holdings which, they explained, was set in “the basement kitchen of an abandoned bank in the Lower East Side. The room only held 18 audience members, and there were shelves and shelves of mason jars, 30 of which shattered during each performance.”

Holiday House is another deeply collaborative, immersive production, so it seemed like a perfect match. From their first reading, the Swaders were excited by the stage directions, says Christopher Swader. “‘There is a hole in the ceiling of the room through which we see the night sky…A door to the outside flies open. There is a bright white light. The walls fall into big piles of snow.’ Bold stage directions such as that are usually daunting, but with such a brave design team, we trusted that everyone’s creativity would unite to bring these moments to life.” These kinds of stage directions beg the question, “How can we successfully do that?” and the Swaders were excited to find out.

Photo by Arion Doerr

From the beginning, the Swaders, along with the creative team, including writer/performer Weller, director Kristjan Thor, lighting designer Zach Blane, costume designer Natalie Loveland, and sound designer/composer Philip Carluzzo, were inspired by the architecture of dollhouses and a sense of nostalgia. It is clear in the script that the audience should be in the same room as the protagonist and that the room should be one that shows its history: peeling wallpaper, dust in the edges of the space, chipped paint. The installation quality is also extremely important. Justin Swader remembers that, by coincidence, the creative team “all started looking at images of attic rooms under steep angled roofs, the kinds of spaces that are imposing, claustrophobic, long, and wide.”

These images led directly to the creation of the performance space. The Swaders designed a 28'x14' room for both Weller and the audience. The room itself was constructed offsite in a scene shop by the production’s technical director, Michael Leahy, and a team of carpenters, and then assembled onsite. Each object in the room conveyed a sense of history, and the ground plan evolved and changed once Weller was in the room rehearsing the piece. The audience seating comprised mismatched chairs, a couch, and some cushions on the floor arranged around the perimeter of the space. Christopher Swader explains, “We wanted something that felt cozy and comfortable and within the world. It was important that the audience felt like everything in the space was supposed to be there.”

The Swaders and lighting designer Blane worked closely to create the necessary vocabulary for lighting the space. New to Mason Holdings, Blane joined the team after working with producer Angela Razzano on another project. Justin Swader explains, “At our first design meeting, we shared the idea of creating an actual room onstage with four walls and a full ceiling, which definitely can scare a lighting designer, as it limits almost all ideal positions, but Zach accepted the challenge and embraced the hyper-realistic, cinematic experience that we were all drawn to with the piece. The show became very much about, ‘How can we light the space with as many practical sources as possible?’”

Blane explains that, rather than light the piece, the performance “would be lit by things that could be found in this ‘attic of memories’ within the world of the piece.” Though excited about the possibilities, Blane was concerned about the logistics of following through on these design ideas. “This is incredible and could be very cool, but what happens if we get there, and it’s very dark?” he recalls. “What happens if we get there, and there is no way to isolate her in a very specific way?” He wanted to manage expectations early on but was also up for fully committing to the idea.

It was important that the visible lighting equipment was part of the attic space so there were practicals strategically scattered around the room. While the set designers found and sourced these fixtures, Blane collaborated with them to find the best placement for each one. They were really drawn to vintage nightlights—little ceramic figures like clowns and dolls that glowed—as well as lamps one might find in a nursery. Because of the installation feel, every item’s placement had to be planned in advance to allow for the electrics team to wire the lights through the carpet and hide within the set. Once all of the practicals were placed and dressed, Zach took control of everything and activated the space. “It was a dream collaboration,” he says.

Photo by Arion Doerr

The Swaders provided windows, and the script required a ceiling hole for Blane to light through as well. The windows themselves came from Big Reuse (formerly Build-It-Green), an organization that salvages usable items from demolition and remodel projects, and reintroduces them to the market. There was even a stained glass window to provide justifiably colored light. All of this meant that there wasn’t a traditional lighting plot. There was a layout of the practicals to cable beneath the flooring and the out-of-sight theatrical fixtures, but the real work came once they were in the space and could really build on the design. “It was the small, nuanced things,” says Blane. “All of the things Tracy did came out of being in the room together, rather than being developed in the rehearsal room, so we had this idea that we had to put it on paper to make it come to life, but then we knew once all the rooms were set, we could tweak and twist. It just organically changed as we were in the room.”

Blane and his team programmed the entire show on ETCnomad lighting platform with an lxkey/Eos control surface because, he says, “It is compact and could move around all of the spaces easily. It also did not encroach on the playing space majorly, since there really was not a separate viewer area where a tech table could live. Also, when I was programming the other rooms, I could easily relocate the setup into that room and move back.” This tiny setup also helped during the run of the show, when Liz Nielsen, the production and stage manager, was set up in “a small space behind one of the walls with a two-way mirror for her to look through to call the show from, so smallest setup won.”

Stay tuned for more on audio and costume design!

Natalie Robin is a NY-based lighting designer and the visiting assistant professor of Performance Design and Technology at Alfred University. She is also the associate producer and a founding company member of Polybe + Seats, an associate artist of Target Margin Theater, and a proud member of USA 829.

For more, read the February 2017 issue of Live Design as an interactive PDF.