Andrew Keck

Glass Menagerie

The What

I had the amazing opportunity to design my sixth theatrical production at John Brown University, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. The script had very minimal notes about lighting, all calling for impactful moments with little detail. I wanted to support scenic and costume design by increasing the complexity of lighting on the set.

The How

One of the first elements that I was able to incorporate was LED strips into frames that had “glass bricks” in them. Josiah Wallace, the director for JBU’s Glass Menagerie came up with the idea to use these bricks and gave me the opportunity to have three locations on the set to light these bricks. Each section of glass bricks had at least one RGB LED strip as well as a Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330 as a backlight.

Glass Menagerie also calls for a dining room with a chandelier. I wanted to try something different for the bulbs, so the Audio Visual Lighting (AVL) department at JBU was willing to invest in 8 Astera NYX Bulb LED wireless DMX light bulbs for this chandelier. Because of this, I was able to tint particular scenes to be more green or magenta depending on what the emotion of the scene was. At other points, I would break the wall of reality of a lightbulb and change them to more support the mood by saturating them more and changing their color to be less of a white such as going green or red.

On top of using NYX Bulbs, I wanted to experiment with the dynamic use of JBU’s Chroma-Q Color Force 12 mk1 fixtures. The rig had 12 total Color Force 12’s used for lighting the cyclorama far upstage, mood up/face light for the fire escape, foot light for the main stage, and wash light for the proscenium of the space. I was able to create many supported many practicals without any lighting fixtures being obtrusive to the production.

One of the biggest mysteries was how to light the set when the power goes out in the house. My solution was to cut all conventional fixtures and use all LED fixtures. This was made possible by using 4 of JBUs newest fixtures- Elation Professional Fuze Max Profiles. Their color temperature functions were what helped me achieve the goal of lighting the set in an invisible way by making it seem like the two candles were lighting the whole set!

The Gear

  • 13x ETC Source 4 26deg
  • 12x ETC Source 4 26deg
  • 4x ETC Source 4 26deg
  • 32x ETC PARNel
  • 8x Astera NYX Bulbs w/ Astera Box wireless DMX
  • 4x DMX LED Strips
  • 1x Elation ELAR-DRIVER-8-12V
  • 4x Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330
  • 4x Elation Fuze Max Profile
  • 12x Chroma-Q Color Force 12 RGBA mk1

The Crew

  • Director – Josiah Wallace (Not shown)
  • Assistant Director – Tanner Zank
  • Technical Director – Peter Redford (Not shown)
  • Stage Manager – Sherlyn Manning
  • Assistant Stage Manager – Mackenzie Wood
  • A1 – Anna Burns
  • A2- Cooper Shaw
  • Lighting Designer – Andrew Keck
  • Lighting Associate – Andrew Isaac (Not shown)
  • Lighting Assistant – Lauren Van Andel
  • Lighting Board Operator – Heath Stark
  • Sound Designer – Seth Malone (Not shown)
  • QLab Operator – Kip Ammons
  • Projections Designer – Mary Bonds
  • Projections Designer – Volen Stoyanov