From Monochrome to Color
Posted by Aaron Weissman on 2/03/2010
(Aaron is the Lighting Designer of The Twins Would Like to Say, part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)
In designing the lights for The Twins Would Like to Say, the co-directors and I focused on the two worlds where the play takes place. The voluntarily mute twin girls, June and Jennifer Gibbons, grew up in Wales, in the 1960s and ‘70s, isolated from everyone but each other. But they were also prolific writers, creating vast stories and novels set in an idealized United States. From the twins’ perspective, Wales was sleepy and drab, it’s always fall, always chilly, always boring. Contrast this with their vivid imagination, vibrant and colorful, their dreams of a California life full of energy and excitement.
For the first half of the play, we remain almost exclusively in Wales, and the color palette of the lights reflects this. With stark greys and bleached out blues, I want the audience to see Wales the way the twins see it, to feel the suffocation that sparked them to start writing.
In the latter half of the play, we see that writing come to life. In June’s Pepsi Cola Addict, we see Malibu in all its idealized glamour. Golden sunlight during the day, a deep blue sky at night. The twins dream in such vivid color, later epitomized by the climactic cacophony of Jennifer’s Discomania. With a vast array of colors coming from every angle, the violent hectic disco hall will come to life inside the garage.