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Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare
Seton Hill University
Director: Dr. Kellee van Aken
Technical Director: Caila Yates
Set Design: Karen Glass
Costumes Design: lisa leibering
Sound/Media Design: Ken Clothier
Stage Manager: Maddy Faux
Photos: Caila Yates and Danielle Hegyes
Light Design: Theresa Gygi and Ken Clothier
Research/Paper Work
Bottom Rail Plot w/ Focus Points
Georgia O’Keeffe: Most of the action (if not all) happens as a result of hiding information or mischief. Love happens because of it, but it also tears some of the characters apart. Yet, they all crave connection with one another. All of the warm tones stood out to us in Georgia's work representing connection conflicting with the coolness which emphasizes the isolation. The distortion of perspective, color, and shape in her work is what inspired this direction for the lighting.
Twelfth Night
Set around 1925 in Illyria, based resembling that of Atlantic city NJ, in the summertime, there were a lot of places we looked for inspiration. From the 1929 black and white film The Cocoanuts to the American comedy troupe The Marx Brothers. We landed on focusing on the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, specifically looking at her American Modernism work from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. Her artwork is what gave us both our color palette and direction on how to portray the themes of love, deception, and tomfoolery in the show.
In the “Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose” the shadows emphasize the folds in the backdrop and the skull holes emphasizing the shadows and there is so much more underneath - a perfect representation of Viola.
Throughout all 5 acts, Twelfth Night has many different location changes, both interior and exterior. To isolate each location on the set, we used a couple of different methods the simplest was choosing a specific color for each location for the cyc. For Orsino’s Cabana it was L117 and Olivia’ Terrace was L137. If the location was inside, this color would also be shone on the walls with the art deco styled gobos to resemble wallpaper.
The boardwalk was used to give life to the locations set outside and in various times of the day. Along with illuminating the boardwalk downstage with a wash of warmer colors, there were two clouds placed on stage left and right which we focused two specials on to further give the impression of the outside. When Malvolia is imprisoned, she would be illuminated while everyone else was left in darkness which not only isolated the location, but isolated her from the group of visitors.
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