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Lighting design is in fact equal parts art and science and involves a lot more than just turning the lights on and off. What is this space? What is this environment that this story is unfolding within? is very architectural-based in some ways.” So that is what I’m thinking about a lot as a designer. She explained, “The core of the story was about two people suffering a lot of grief and trying to make a connection with each other in a very unusual and sterilized space. Photo by Hunter Canningįor a recent project, for example, Yew had to imagine the world of a cemetery waiting room. But with lighting design, it’s sort of like, ‘Oh well, aren’t you just turning lights on?’” That’s what they’re wearing.’ Or if I said that I made the set, people get it. “If I said that I make costumes, they’d go, ‘Oh, I get it.
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She observed that part of the difficulty in understanding what she does is that the work isn’t tangible. they’ll say, ‘Oh, are you an actor? Are you a director? Are you a playwright?’ And then they kind of stop there.” “I’ve been to many different gatherings with people who are not necessarily in the theater. This is no surprise to veteran lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew who’s long made her peace with the fact that audiences rarely have an idea of what her work entails-or even that her job exists. While most people get excited for the moment that the house lights dim and the stage lights start to shimmer, very few can articulate how the overall lighting design affected their experience of the show. What you probably won’t hear them talk about is the production’s lighting design. Listen to a theater audience leaving a performance of, say, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton or Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt and you’ll hear them talk about a lot of things: the story itself, how much they liked (or didn’t like) the costumes, whether the music was as good live as it is on the official cast album, or how they wish they owned some piece of furniture from the set. Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew served as production designer for this multilingual, multimedia play, which presented the challenge of transforming one room into three distinct settings.