After a decade of productions at US regional theatres, in the UK, and Off-Broadway, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' play, Appropriate, opened on Broadway in December 2023. Lighting designer Jane Cox won her first Tony as well as her first Drama Desk Award for her work on this family drama set in 2011. The Broadway run features scenic design by dots, costume design by Dede Ayite, and sound design by Will Pickens and Bray Poor. Winner of this year's Tony for Outstanding Revival Of A Play moved from the Helen Hayes to the Belasco during its Broadway run.
Live Design chats with Cox about her award-winning work:
Live Design: How do you research a revival of a play like Appropriate?
Jane Cox: Although Appropriate is technically a revival, the play is only twelve years old and it's set in 2011. There were two important aspects to the design research that really involve lighting. We started, as a group of designers and our fearless leader Lila Neugabauer, with thinking about how we manifest the third act of the play — the act in which the house falls apart over days and then decades in front of our eyes. And then we had to think about what the house should feel like inside. The feeling of the house is connected both to historical details of a decrepit plantation house and also to tones and shapes and composition of the space, and the scale of the human body within it. It seemed important to all of us that it's hard for light to get into this space, both literally and metaphorically — we wanted to get a sense of claustrophobia and darkness inside (in contrast to the heat and light outside) — even in the brighter scenes, the house should feel like it's hiding something.
LD: How do you approach choosing gear for a Broadway show and deciding on what/where/how many?
JC: With any show, I start by thinking about what I hope it will look like — reading the script or listening to the music several times, talking to the director and other designers, and imagining the key lights and big ideas for each scene or light cue. That's always the starting place for choosing my tools. In this case it was clear that we would need a lot of light through the windows at different angles to make all the different times of day and moods happen, and especially for the third act where we change days hundreds of times in quick succession. I knew that we needed to light faces meticulously while keeping excess light off the pale walls and the cluttered set - meaning that we would need to carve out small areas with plenty of diagonal front and sidelight; I also knew that we needed to deal with a show that takes place half in darkness.
And then while I'm thinking about these things, I always keep a sense of the budget and scale of a project in my mind, so that I'm not creating something completely outside of the realm of possibility.
I'm also always thinking about lighting positions at the same time -— both because I am fascinated by where the light is coming from and the architecture of that, and because the positions we can squeeze in will dictate what we can actually do. I'm trying to be realistic about the kind of lighting positions we can create that will be possible to maintain over several months of performance. On this project, we only had room for about ten lights actually over the stage, so it was clear that those had to be moving lights that could do a lot of different things - the over-stage movers were cued to within an inch of their lives! Those ten lights are the backlight, the scenery light, the sidelight and downlight specials, the wall treatments — they basically light the show.
LD: How did you collaborate with the set design folx at dots on what looks like a rather busy set?
JC: Collaborating with dots is a joy — they are so creative, flexible and generous. We talked together from early on, looking at research and talking about what the set needs to do, in addition to the challenging third act where the set actually has to fall apart, it also has to start out as a hoarders' space and be completely organized and ready for an estate sale in between acts. In spite of all the challenges that the set designers had to manage, they were always thoughtful about lighting; we sat together for hours with a physical model peering into the space figuring out where we could get lighting positions, and moving walls and ceilings and flying scenery around to accommodate lighting positions.
LD: How does the lighting support the storytelling and emotional arc of the play?
JC: For me, lighting is about emotion, creating the right feeling in the space — and about attention — how do we get, keep and shift an audience's attention. I'm primarily fascinated with how much light and shadow can be used to reveal and hide a human being onstage. I think that the audience's relationship to their own imaginations shifts as stage information is hidden and revealed. Can we, as an audience member, see everything that actor is feeling, or are we asked to do some of that emotional work, because we can't quite see their face? When you hide too much from an audience, they check out, and when you show too much, they don't invest their imagination in the same way. All of this also affects how well the audience listens, which is essential to a lengthy play. This play requires a real fine tuning of how much the audience can see and not see at any given time (which is actually a great metaphor for what is happening in the play when characters see and don't see their family history). Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, our playwright, has really written light as a character in the play, and the house is certainly a character (if not the main character) in the play too.
I think Branden would say that the nighttime scenes are the emotional heart of this play. From the opening moments, when Franz climbs into a dark room with his cell phone flashlight, we are discovering the space along with him and River. How much can they (and we) see? How long can we wait to fully reveal the room? Then we get some bright morning scenes which help us to get to know the family and the environment, and to relax into the comedy of the play. The second act (and the heart) of the play takes place entirely at night, and involves long emotional speeches and conversations. We had to ask how much darkness and shifting candlelight creates the right atmosphere, and how much just closes us off from the performers? We spent a lot of time working on that over the course of previews. Branden, who is a theatrical genius all round, also gave me a great clue when he said in an early meeting that Act 2 is a door ballet - the light comes into the space from different apertures, which changes the shape of the room, shadows on faces and objects, and the feeling every time.
One idea in the lighting that became very important was tying the whole play to the ending — it became important not to create a totally realistic drama so that the ending made sense within the context of the whole evening. The idea of the kind of extremely bright surreal photo finishes to each scene came later in the tech process, as a way of punctuating the scenes, honoring the playwrights' request for blackouts, which are always hard to pull off, and also reminding the audience that this isn't an entirely naturalistic event.
LD: Did you intentionally pick an all-female lighting team?
JC: I was lucky in that Mia Roy, who is extraordinary, is the Second Stage lighting Supervisor and head electrician. So Mia was a given, which was very lucky for us — she's incredible at her job, and a lovely human as well. It's a delight, honestly, as someone who started out as an electrician, consistently working on all male crews and experiencing a fair amount of direct sexism in that context, to work with a majority female crew - and Mia's crew was the first majority female crew that I've worked on on Broadway. I wish there were more female head electricians (with no shade to the wonderful men that I work with and have worked with, but simply in the interests of a more gender balanced environment that is welcoming to all).
I have worked pretty hard over the last couple of decades to focus on supporting and hiring associates, assistants and moving light programmers who are people of color or women (or both of course). I started doing this because early on in my career I had assistants of both genders and I saw over the course of a few years how the men moved forward as designers and the women mostly didn't. And I saw a significant absence of people of color, especially in the technical roles. So I decided I would focus on helping to improve the workplace for women, and especially women of color. I like to work in a really diverse environment - it's one of the main reasons that I moved to the US from Ireland originally. It's more fun, it's more interesting, and the work is better. So yes, it's very intentional for me to hire women and people of color in the roles that I have direct control over. The playwright and I also have a long relationship supporting designers of color together and exploring how race intersects with design (we co-hosted the symposium The Future of Race in Design at the Park Avenue Armory last year)
I also work with a regular associate, Tess James, and she has been a big part of supporting the young women I've worked with over the last decade. She is really invested in the transformation of the workforce in the theater, and is heavily involved in a variety of workplace development programs, including a new one she is starting at Princeton for local high school grads.
I'm delighted to say that things have really changed over the course of my career, and I hope I've had a little bit to do with that. I'm very proud of some of the brilliant associates I've worked with who have amazing careers of their own - Isabella Byrd, Stacey Derosier, Itohan Edoloyi are three brilliant women I've had the pleasure of working with. Watch out world for Amara McNeil, the latest addition to our lighting family and our assistant on Teeth the musical, moving to New World Stages this fall! I don't have a preference for women over men, but I like to work in a balanced workplace, and I found for many years that I needed to bring the women and people of color with me to make that possible. Delightfully, it is now more and more common for me to be on a design team that is so much more balanced by gender and race, and it's really a delight to work in that environment. We're working on the technical roles to get to the same kind of balance.
LD: Did the lighting change when the show moved from one theatre to another?
JC: A bit — we had some challenges with the jump cuts in and out of scenes and especially in the last sequence at the Hayes, because we didn't have access to enough LED equipment to get the sharp blackouts and lights up that we wanted. At the Belasco, we were able to replace all the tungsten equipment lighting the drops and through the windows with LED fixtures, which made the timing we wanted fully possible. Brian Messina, our head electrician at the Belasco, worked with the theater to do a beautiful job of reinventing the box booms from the Hayes, which are unusual and essential to the show, on the Belasco proscenium.
LD: What is the most successful thing about the design for you?
JC: I am very pleased with the balance of light and shadow, which was possible because of the director, Lila Neugaubauer, who is as invested in the question of attention and how light plays into that as I am. She is a very brave and very meticulous director. It was my first time working with her, and that was a very special experience. I'm also happy that we were able to pull off some painterly light cues given the challenges of the space - almost all the light is frontlight and I was worried that the show would be very flat. Above all, I'm honored to have lit Branden Jacobs-Jenkins first Broadway play. I believe that he is one of the great artists of our time, and I'm happy to have been a part of this production.