Shedding Light on Julius Caesar

The II Formers recently completed their production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and I was lucky enough to be chosen to design the lighting for the show. With the performance behind me, I have been reflecting on my lighting design process and wanted to share it with all of you. 

I first read through the play and had an initial conversation with the director: Allan P. Kirby Chair for Performing Arts and Director of Theatre Matthew Campbell. Then, I started to brainstorm ideas that captured our shared vision: black and white photos of the desert, words like “barren” and “wispy,” a photo of an old church with light streaming in through a window, as well as various other points of inspiration.

From there, I began to make a  visual representation of lighting placement in any given scene, known as a lighting diagram. However, I quickly realized that the dimensions of the stage’s shape would make the light placement more complicated than I initially thought. The stage was long and narrow. Since this was an ‘in-the-round’ performance—meaning the audience sat surrounding the stage—I needed to make sure that actors were well lit and visible from all angles. Given the dimensions and audience placement, keeping stray light out of the audience’s eyes would be difficult. I solved this by using more lights than otherwise necessary and keeping the lights at a lower intensity. Then, I divided the stage into seven zones, with each having the same set of lights pointed at it. By doing this, I was able to isolate different parts of the stage and only turn on the lights where the action was happening. Each zone had at least three  warm lights and four  cool lights pointed at it, and blending them, created the feeling of various times of the day. Additionally, each zone had lights that created patterns using stamped metal sheets called gobos, giving dimension to the stage and actors. Taking inspiration from The National Theatre’s production of The Effect, a show about a clinical drug trial, I designed a long, 48 foot stretch of linear lighting above the stage. 

Generally, to ensure that lighting looks consistent between performances, lighting designers store each cue on a computer and play them back during each performance. In order to streamline the technical process, I recorded the cues using a digital simulation to see what they would look like before the physical space was set up. Our production of Julius Caesar had 110 lighting cues that I individually programmed. While most of these cues were activated with a button click during the show, some were pre-programmed to happen at a specific time, which allowed the cues to be in sync with the show’s music.

A key part of the performance was the atmospherics—the use of fog, haze, or smoke to create a specific mood on stage. I used separate machines, each with a different fluid, to create two different layers of fog: an even layer lower to the ground, and a thicker and higher one. This provided the “wispy” look that I wanted.

Working on Julius Caesar was a great learning experience, and I loved working with The Periwig Club and the amazing theater department! I love that theatrical lighting is an incredibly unique intersection between the arts and technology. I hope that after reading this, you share a little bit of that love.