Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artist Kate Hamill, center, performs as Artemisia Gentileschi during a dress rehearsal for the world premiere of her work The Light and The Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi) Friday in Bratton Theater.
As the cream-colored curtain rises at the beginning of Chautauqua Theater Company’s world-premiere production of Kate Hamill’s The Light and The Dark, a set resembling an art studio in 1600s Rome is revealed.
With walls slightly textured like a blank canvas, the space is decorated with objects like art easels, paint brushes and small Roman columns. Here, the complex world of the famous Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, played by Hamill herself, comes alive.
CTC’s production, a finishing commission that first debuted at Chautauqua as a public reading in 2023 and will travel to Primary Stages in the winter, continues previews at 2:30 p.m. today and 7:30 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater.
Inspired by the Baroque and Renaissance period of Rome, scenic designer Brittany Vasta said researching both historical and contemporary art studios, and reflecting on her own experiences as a drawer and painter, helped establish “groundness” and “realism” for the play’s design.
“I’m dealing with real space, physics and the laws of the universe and, at the same time, trying to tell metaphysical stories and ideas,” she said. “The combination of those — the weaving together of the poetic and the practical — is inspiring and exciting to me.”
A Brooklyn-based scenic designer for live performance, Vasta holds a graduate degree from New York University and is a member of the United Scenic Artists union 829.
Growing up, she always had a passion for drawing, and began taking art classes and joined the acting club in school. As she double-majored in theater and psychology in college, everything she loved seemed to come together while taking a design class.
“All of my interests really came together: theater, storytelling, psychology, drawing and painting,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is me in an industry and in a profession,’ and I never looked back.”
The scenic designer for all of the 2024 mainstage productions at Chautauqua, she has worked on projects with Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll, who leads this play as director, over the last decade.
When she first read the script of The Light and The Dark, the story of Gentileschi’s artistic journey resonated with her, and Vasta found her determination inspiring.
“This is a story of a woman who is trying to find her own creative voice, among other things, and the challenges she has to do that, the determination that she has to find to make her place in the world and her passion for what she wants to create,” she said. “I think all of the artists that are working on the show can relate to that; that’s what we encounter every day.”
Referring to the play as both a period piece and a “memory play” because of the way Gentileschi guides the audience through her life, Vasta said she found connections between historical art studio designs in Rome and Bratton’s architecture when creating the show’s concept.
“Chautauqua’s theater is very specific,” she said. “It’s a very beautiful theater with the wood gables, and it’s like you’re inside of a barn or a ship. I found relationships between the architecture that I was seeing in these studios and the shape of the theater itself, so I tried to incorporate that into the composition and weaving in all of those aspects.”
When creating the design of a production, she works in sketch-model form, which uses low-cost materials to create physical 3D models of set designs, and scales by using sculpture and working with different shapes to create the framework for the design. In collaboration with Carroll, she was able to “storyboard” the set by using model figures to find flow.
The scenery has mostly cream and brown tones to resemble a studio, which Vasta said allows the color palette and fabrics of the costumes to bring the vibrancy of color to the play’s paintings and art.
“The studio space that we’re in ends up being much more like the canvas that the story unfolds on, so we’ve drawn color out of the space as much as it felt necessary so the audience’s eyes go to the characters,” she said.
Throughout the story, paintings of Gentileschi; her father, Orazio Gentileschi; and the works of artists such as Caravaggio and Bernini are projected onto the set to help tell the story, led by projections designer S. Katy Tucker. Vasta said she hasn’t worked on many productions that incorporate projections as heavily as this one does, so she had to consider the surface that the projections are displayed on, the texture of the set’s walls and the space in which the projections are displayed, which she said was a tedious element of the play.
When the scenic design was complete, City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh — CTC’s partner theater that built the mainstage season sets — built the design off-site. When the pieces arrived shortly after Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation closed Aug. 4, the production team had a little less than two days to install the set for Hamill’s play. Vasta said the team handled the challenging process with a great amount of patience and teamwork.
The colliding of creativity and the power of art were essential for the play’s design to come to life, and Vasta said she hopes Chautauquans are able to reflect on how art has impacted their lives and recognize the legacy of Gentileschi, the female artists before her and those that came after.
“I think it’s a highly emotional story, but it’s also inspirational,” she said. “Yes, it’s Artemisia’s story, but by the end, you really feel like she’s telling a story of many.”
