Eye contact is vital to the stage conviction of theater performance majors, “As actors, we’re so used to making eye-contact on stage, knowing where the other person is – being connected. Now they’re facing new directions, looking past each other instead of at each other,” Walid Shaya said.
As a second year theater performance major and director of the Shafer Alliance Laboratory Theatre’s newest production, “Black Comedy,” Shaya is facing one of the most difficult challenges in his directing career-how does one act when the lights are out?
The concept is called inverted illumination, and it’s one that lighting and sound designer and lighting and cinema major John Charles Schneider has had both trouble and fun developing.
“When the stage is dim, the characters are in light in their world and vice-versa; while their world is dim, they are all in light to (the audience),” Schneider said.
Think opposites. If the stage is lit up, the characters can’t see their surroundings. Darkness means that the lights in the characters’ world are working fine.
The play starts off in pitch black. You hear a young British couple getting ready for a party. Their names are Brindsley (Jesse Mattes) and Carol (Aliki Pappas) and they’re about to host several important people including a wealthy art collector (Alison Robinson) and Carol’s father (David Alexander Stein), a colonel, in hopes of selling their valuable art work.
Carol reaches for the music player and the stage lights up. A fuse has blown. They begin to scramble for matches, lighters . anything.
“The whole hour and a half show is done in the dark, aka; in the light,” Shaya said.
As if the drama of a fuse being blown during a party were not enough, the audience is soon clued in on a bizarre love triangle happening right under their noses.
“Brinsley is also cheating on his girlfriend with a woman named Clea (Tori Hirsch-Straus). Clea comes in and everyone is talking about her behind her back,” Shaya said. “Brinsley realizes Clea is in the room because he reaches to grab something and grabs her butt and recognizes her. She causes mayhem by turning the party upside down anonymously. It’s entertaining because back stabbing is going on in an upfront and personal way.”
Challenges arose from the very beginning. Three weeks were allotted for preparation of the play, as opposed to the normal six-to-eight for most SALT productions. The script also calls for British and German dialects, a skill that is not taught until the third year of the theater performance track.
“This is hard because almost our entire cast is (in their) second year,” Shaya said. “Before rehearsal even starts, as soon as you enter the space, you have to start speaking in your accent.”
Lighting technology in the Shafer Street Playhouse is also notorious for being “severly out-dated,” according to Schneider.
“Walid (Shaya) was a big help on letting me follow through on my vision,” Schneider said.
He felt that the drama couldn’t be as accurately represented, simply by turning the lights on and off. “So, what I added was this use of texture,” Schneider said. “While the characters are all living their lives, this tension and disharmony is not as noticeable, but toward the end of the show, you get stark shadows and high contrast, which shows the fractured nature of their actual relationships.”
Costume designer Adrian Boyes also found herself with a few limitations, but you know what they say about life giving you lemons.
“Walid wanted each character to be on a certain color palette. He wanted everything to be red, black and white,” Boyes said. “I got to play with different tones-Carol is wearing a candy cane dress and Clea is wearing a very red, sensuous dress. Overall, things fell together pretty well for me.”
Despite some of the challenges, the cast and crew said their time spent together has been terrific. Aliki Pappas, sophomore year theater performance major, playing the part of the prim and proper Carol, said this is her first performance on a VCU stage.
“I’m so extremely nervous but the cast has been extremely supportive,” Pappas said.
Pappas said training outside of the rehearsals has helped her understand her role better. “It’s shocking to see how reliant we are on them,” she said. “It’s also taking time after rehearsal to go home and to know your character and figure out how they would move, think, and respond to others.”
Pappas’ and the rest of the cast’s and crew’s enthusiasm for theater and the performances will surely make for an entertaining experience.
“When you have so much love for the art, it overtakes every fear that you have inside,” Pappas said.
“Black Comedy,” written by Paul Shaffer and directed by Walid Shaya runs Friday at 7:30 p.m. and midnight, Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Shafer Street Playhouse’s Newdick Theater. All performances are free to the public.