Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 3): Lighting and Scenes

November 10, 2024
2 mins read

A few weeks ago, we showed off the production photos for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s excellent, Jeff-Recommended The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. Since the date of that post, The Tempest has received excellent reviews, the aforementioned Jeff Recommendation, and it has become the best selling show in the Idle Muse Theatre Company’s history. These past weeks since the show closed, we’ve looked at Distant Era’s archival photography for The Tempest, each post featuring a different aspect of the production.

In part 1 of our coverage of Idle Muse’s archival photos, we examined scenic painter Breezy Snyder’s beautiful work, as well as the portraits of each character as embodied by the actors.
In part 2, we looked at at costume designer (and Caliban actor) Jennifer Mohr’s costumes.

This is the last of our posts on archival photography for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of The Tempest. This last post details the lighting and the scenes of The Tempest, focusing especially on the work of lighting designer Laura Wiley.

Lighting and Scenes

I could go on and on about Laura’s skill and vision, about her wonderful projects in past shows, about the time she loaned me a projector to photograph a preproduction image for The Artistic Home, about the bold and interesting ways that she uses light. Instead, I’ll show this small gallery of images from The Tempest worth at least a thousand of my poor and paltry words. Laura’s work speaks for itself, and I’m lucky to get to play in it.

With this gallery, we wrap up coverage of Idle Muse’s most successful production to date. I am honored to have witnessed it and grateful to Idle Muse for making space for these images to be created. Special thanks to artistic director Evan Jackson, the show’s director Tristan Brandon, and to Kati Lechner for arranging schedules to make this happen. Thank you also to Becky Warner for running all the cues during these extra sessions. Finally, thank you to the entire cast and crew for making the time and for putting on an exceptional show that unexpectedly brought me to tears both times I saw it.

I appreciate Idle Muse’s work and the authenticity of the people in their community; I’m grateful to Idle Muse for giving me a chance to build and grow with them these past years. I’m proud of them, and I wish them the best.

Cast and Creative

I’ll conclude once again with a full list of the cast and crew for The Tempest, as listed on Idle Muse Theatre Company’s website:

CAST: Elizabeth MacDougald (Prospero), Caty Gordon (Miranda), Jennifer Mohr (Caliban), Boomer Lusink (Ferdinand), Mara Kovacevic (Ariel 1), Gary Henderson (Ariel 2), Connar Brown (Ariel 3), Emely Cuestas (Ariel 4), Jacque Bischoff (Ariel 5), Emily Pfriem (Ariel 6), Michael Dalberg (Stephano), Joel Thompson (Trinculo), Jack Sharkey (Alonso), Eric Duhon (Sebastian), Orion Lay-Sleeper (Antonio), Xavier Lagunas (Gonzalo), with understudies Riley Doerner, Ethan Carlson, Makenna Van Raalte, Brian Healy and Andre Colin

CREATIVE: Tristan Brandon (director), Shellie DiSalvo (production manager), Maureen Yasko (intimacy designer), Laura Wiley (lighting & projection designer), L.J. Luthringer (sound designer), Jennifer Mohr (costume designer), Becky Warner (stage manager), Lindsey Chidester (associate stage manager), Libby Beyreis (assistant director and violence design), Kati Lechner (music director), Evan Jackson (artistic director), and Breezy Snyder (scenic painter).

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

  1. Practicing Patience with Personal Projects
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The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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