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Project Name: The Royale
Type Of Project: Theatre Production
A professional regional theatre production of The Royale, produced by PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The client was PlayMakers Repertory Company, and the production was directed by Vivienne Benesch. This submission focuses on the production’s lighting design.
Design Criteria
The creative team’s brief was to create a visually unified world that honored the period boxing arena while matching the play’s highly stylized, percussive storytelling. Director Vivienne Benesch’s central goal was for the fights to be experienced not only as physical contests, but also as expressions of Jay’s ambition, isolation, racial struggle, and the personal cost of becoming a public spectacle.
The lighting concept, “Illuminate the Struggle,” treated the ring as both an arena and a psychological space. Tight, sculptural beams isolated Jay and emphasized his discipline and determination, while the harsh white glare of the ring and press contrasted with warmer, more intimate backstage and family moments. Muted, sepia-toned color rooted the production in its historical world, while increasingly expressionistic shifts allowed lighting to reveal heat, sweat, pressure, and emotional transformation. During the championship fight, the lighting became an active dramatic force, driving the rhythm and escalating the tension alongside the actors’ movement and sound.
Project Description
Inspired by the life of historic Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the production used a highly theatrical, rhythm-driven performance language to examine ambition, racial barriers, public scrutiny, family, and the personal cost of becoming a national symbol.
Tao Wang’s lighting design transformed the boxing ring from a recognizable athletic arena into an evolving psychological and emotional landscape. A restrained sepia-toned palette established the historical world, while sculptural side light revealed the actors’ physical intensity, movement, heat, and sweat. Stark isolated light expressed Jay’s determination and solitude; explosive backlight recreated the pressure of photographers and public attention; and increasingly dynamic transitions drove the climactic championship fight. Working in close dialogue with the performers, choreography, scenery, costumes, and sound, the lighting shifted between realism and expressionism, becoming an active storytelling partner that shaped the rhythm, tension, and emotional trajectory of the production.
Challenges and Solutions
The primary challenge was to make the boxing sequences feel immediate, dangerous, and emotionally consequential without depending on literal physical contact. The production used choreographed movement, rhythmic dialogue, body percussion, slow motion, and freeze-frame moments in place of conventional realistic fight staging. Lighting therefore had to complete the audience’s perception of each impact while maintaining the clarity and propulsive rhythm of the performance.
I approached the lighting cue structure as a visual score rather than a conventional sequence of scene changes. Searchlight-style beams announced the spectacle of the “main event,” shifting geometric areas continually redefined the boxing ring, and stark isolated light exposed Jay’s private determination and growing loneliness. Sharp backlight and flashbulb like bursts transformed the press, spectators, and public scrutiny into an unseen visual opponent. By coordinating changes in intensity, direction, geometry, and timing with the movement and sound, the fights could feel simultaneously physically real and psychologically surreal.
A second challenge was moving fluidly among the public boxing arena, training sequences, neutral locations, and intimate family confrontations within a spare scenic environment. A restrained, sepia-toned palette established the early twentieth century world, while sculptural side and backlight revealed the actors’ bodies, movement, heat, and sweat. Quieter, warmer states reduced the scale for private encounters; harder contrast and increasingly dynamic transitions expanded the ring into an arena of ambition, pressure, and public spectacle. The same physical space could therefore function as a boxing ring, a memory, a pressure chamber, and an emotional landscape without adding visual clutter or interrupting the production’s momentum.
The production also required particular sensitivity because its athletic spectacle is inseparable from the systemic racism, racialized threats, and social consequences surrounding Jay’s achievement. The lighting could not simply celebrate violence or victory; every spectacular image also needed to reveal its cost. The central innovation was making light an active dramatic participant at times an arena, a crowd, a camera flash, or an opponent whose rhythm and intensity tracked Jay’s rise and increasing isolation. This integration of lighting, movement, body percussion, and sound allowed the lighting to become another character, driving the energy of the championship fight while preserving the human and historical stakes of the story.
Equipment
The lighting system combined integrated scenic LEDs, linear LED fixtures, moving washes, and precision profile units so that the boxing ring could transform continuously between an athletic arena, a public spectacle, and Jay’s psychological landscape.
LED tubes integrated into the ring architecture allowed the ring itself to emit light and change character. Rather than functioning only as scenery, it became an active visual instrument: warm amber and sepia tones supported the historical world, stark white emphasized exposure and public scrutiny, and deeper saturated colors intensified moments of conflict, ambition, and emotional pressure. Linear fixtures—including GlowUp Strip 100s, COLORado Batten 72 Tours, and Mega Bar RGBA units—extended this language across the background. These units created broad fields of color, silhouettes, rhythmic pulses, and shifting layers of intensity without adding unnecessary scenic elements.
LED Beam+Wash 19x15W RGBW Zoom fixtures and MAC 301 Wash units provided flexible overhead, side, and backlight. Their zoom and color-mixing capabilities made it possible to move quickly from sculptural illumination of the actors’ bodies to narrow, aggressive beams that reinforced the rhythm of the boxing choreography. COLORado 2 Solo and Miro Cube 4C fixtures supplied compact color accents and fill from positions where larger instruments would have been difficult to place.
MAC Viper Performance, Satura Spot LED Pro, and VL1100 ERS AS fixtures were selected for controlled, high-impact specials and precisely shaped areas. They isolated Jay during private moments, defined the geometry of the ring, created press-flash and searchlight imagery, and focused attention without illuminating the entire stage.
The combination of RGBW and RGBA LED technology provided rapid color transitions and subtle control of muted historical tones, while the profile and moving-light systems supplied the intensity and optical precision required for the championship sequences. This hybrid rig supported the production’s central goal: allowing light to shift fluidly between realism and expressionism and to function as an active partner in the movement, sound, and dramatic rhythm.
Major Lighting Manufacturers Represented in the Rig:
Creative Team
Marco Ramirez, Playwright; Vivienne Benesch, Director; Jayden Alexander Peszko, Assistant Director; Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma, Scenic Designer; Sabrina Guillaume-Bradshaw, Costume Designer; Tao Wang, Lighting Designer; Daniel Baker, Sound Designer; Christopher Windom, Movement Director; Gwendolyn Schwinke, Vocal Coach; and Jacqueline E. Lawton, Dramaturg.
Stage Management and Production
Sarah Smiley, Stage Manager; Aspen Blake Jackson, Assistant Stage Manager; Michael Rolleri, Production Manager; Laura Pates, Production Technical Director; Rachel Van Namen, Assistant Technical Director; Benjamin Bosch, Electrics Supervisor; Nick Rodgers, Production Swing for Lighting and Sound and Audio Engineer; David Bost, Sound Supervisor and Audio Engineer; Brandon “Bruce” Hearrell, Scenic Shop Supervisor; Diane Zimmerman, Scenic Charge Artist; Lauren Reinhartsen, Properties Supervisor; Triffin Morris, Costume Director; and Jocelyn Chatman, Costume Shop Manager.
Additional Production Crew
Bailey Mae Doran, Crafts Lead; Jillian Gregory and Jessica Land, Drapers; Mackenzie Privett and Francis Werth, First Hands/Stitchers; and Kris Kingsolver, Costume Management Assistant.
Casting and Production Support
Pat McCorkle, CSA, and Rebecca Weiss, CSA, McCorkle Casting, New York Casting. Production and fabrication support were provided by PlayMakers Repertory Company and the production departments of UNC–Chapel Hill’s Department of Dramatic Art.