Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artist Kate Hamill, as Artemisia Gentileschi, and Guest Artist Joey Parsons, as Mother Superior, perform during a dress rehearsal of The Light and The Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi) in Bratton Theater.
As audiences experience Chautauqua Theater Company’s final mainstage production of the season, Kate Hamill’s world-premiere play The Light and The Dark, music allows them to travel back in time to 17th-century Italy.
The play began at CTC last summer as a sold-out public reading that led to a private reading in partnership with the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center last December in New York City. Now, as a finishing commission directed by Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll, it will mount a production off-Broadway at Primary Stages in the winter.
Leading the cast is Hamill herself starring as the renowned Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi; the story journeys through her life as she confronts stereotypes, overcomes traumas and amplifies women’s voices through art that continues to resonate with modern audiences.
The Light and The Dark continues its CTC run at 2:30 p.m. today and 7:30 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater with remaining performances throughout the week. It closes Friday.
Serving as the play’s sound designer, Fan Zhang created and composed original music that serves as the soundtrack of the story.
A New York City-based sound designer and composer, she has experience working in theater, dance, film, commercial radio and installation. Her work has been featured off-Broadway at theaters such as Lincoln Center and Atlantic Theater Company and at leading regional theaters such as Shakespeare Theatre Company and American Repertory Theatre.
Originally from Beijing, Zhang grew up playing and studying piano starting at the age of 4, and dreamed of becoming a pianist. As she got older and began playing more advanced pieces, she realized she was having trouble reaching all the keys.
“When I reached maybe 13 or 14 years old, my hands stopped growing,” she said. “It’s a really sad and funny thing.”
Continuing her passion for music, she began composing for a rock-pop band in high school and wrote songs about teenage love. It was then that she became fascinated with composition work.
“Back then,” she said, “I thought, ‘This is the career path I want to pursue. Even though I can’t play the piano, I can write pieces that other pianists can play.’ ”
As an undergraduate at Beijing Film Academy, she studied film scoring and continued following her dreams as a composer. While in college, she got the opportunity to work as a sound designer for a French experimental theater company, which was her first time working in theater.
There, she found herself mesmerized by the creation process of theater, compared to film or television.
“Everyone is locked inside the dark theater and all working together to make a magical moment happen,” she said. “The shared creation time is really different from all other art forms, and I think that was the moment I really fell in love with theater.”
After moving to the United States, Zhang studied at the Yale School of Drama and moved to New York after graduating. In her career as a sound designer and composer, her eagerness to create keeps leading her to new projects.
When Carroll asked her to join the creative team of The Light and The Dark, they had already worked on productions together twice, both time with Caroll directing — in 2018 on The Revolutionist at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh and in 2022 on New Golden Age at Primary Stages.
On a flight back to New York after working on a show in Los Angeles, Zhang read the script of Hamill’s play and her eyes filled with tears. Though she had seen Gentileschi’s notable paintings, she said she never associated them with a female artist, nor did she know the artist’s full story.
“This whole story occupies such a wide emotional spectrum,” Zhang said. “Her experience has so many intensities, and there are so many things that happened to her. Still, her inner world has so many subtle nuances.”
As the play’s sound designer, she said she tried to recreate Artemisia’s life and artistic journey filled with moments of “light” and “darkness.”
Drawing inspiration from the Renaissance period, she created compositions that put a “modern twist” on period music and mixed instruments such as the cello and flute with percussion sounds to add to the production’s intensity.
As someone who plays the cello, Zhang recorded most of the music herself, and used music software and synthesizers to manipulate a sound that echoed the “resilience and power of Artemisia.”
While she didn’t want the play’s music to overpower the story or characters, she still wanted to accompany Gentileschi’s intense moments by adding electronic distortion to cello sounds and manipulating percussion sounds to mimic a heartbeat and stomping — deepening the music’s texture.
Collaborating with Carroll and the design team to bring the show’s vision to life and build Hamill’s complex tale energizes Zhang; the way the cast and crew can “create concurrency or we can create contrast and create different effects (is) way more beautiful than just giving one piece of sound or one single light, so we can collaborate and find the best way to amplify the show.”
While she hopes audiences are entranced by the sights and sounds of The Light and The Dark, Zhang said she also hopes they leave inspired by Artemisia’s story of strength and resilience.
“When they watch the show, I hope the one thing that’s in their mind is not just one single light or piece of sound — it’s Artemisia and her journey,” she said. “That’s the magic of being part of the creative team and the
collaborative process.”
