On July 23, 2023, we captured what (we hope!) will be the final preproduction images for Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s The Duchess of Malfi, by Jacobean playwright John Webster. The production runs September 9 through October 21 at the Factory Theater in Chicago.
Webster’s Words
John Webster is often noted for the and bleak and brutal tone of his tragedies. Cinephiles may remember him portrayed as the young boy who enjoys watching the murders in Shakespeare’s plays in the film Shakespeare in Love.
Webster wrote like this:
DUCHESS. Now she pays it.
The misery of us that are born great!
We are forc’d to woo, because none dare woo us;
And as a tyrant doubles with his words,
And fearfully equivocates, so we
Are forc’d to express our violent passions
In riddles and in dreams, and leave the path
Of simple virtue, which was never made
To seem the thing it is not. Go, go brag
You have left me heartless; mine is in your bosom:
I hope ’twill multiply love there. You do tremble:
Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh,
To fear more than to love me. Sir, be confident:
What is ‘t distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir;
‘Tis not the figure cut in alabaster
Kneels at my husband’s tomb. Awake, awake, man!
I do here put off all vain ceremony,
And only do appear to you a young widow
That claims you for her husband, and, like a widow,
I use but half a blush in ‘t.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Productions of Webster’s work are far less common than Shakespeare’s. As a Renaissance enthusiast, it’s cool to see a period verse alternative to Shakespeare in production in Chicago storefront theatre.
Years in the Making
On June 20, 2019, we photographed an image of LaKecia Harris for Babes With Blades’s upcoming season, hinting at the company’s production of The Duchess of Malfi slated for 2020.
On March 9, 2020, we photographed the preproduction images for The Duchess of Malfi. None of us could have guessed how the next weeks would alter our lives as the shadow of the global pandemic lengthened swiftly across the globe.
Finally, on July 23, 2023, four years after our initial images, we completed our quest to make the final preproduction images!
Photography
A lot has changed in four years. I’ve never shared any of the 2019–2020 images, so here are a few glimpses of what those looked like.
Season Promotion 2019
This promotional image of LaKecia Harris comes from the preproduction session we did for The Women of 4G, by Amy Tofte, produced by Babes With Blades in August 2019 and featuring LaKecia. We combined that preproduction session with a mini promo shoot for the 2020 season. Promotional ads for the season were drafted, and plans were made.
In the timeline of Distant Era, we were one month old. I’d just shot our first series, Urban Fantasy, but wouldn’t photograph Portraits from a Distant Era until later that month, and the business paperwork was still in process.
Stock Preproduction Photos (2020)
As preproduction for The Duchess of Malfi ramped up in March 2020, we photographed the images for the show poster in studio, using the small flash units I had at the time. This was a fun and interesting session that began with a few images of the Duchess and Antonio on a white background and evolved into a series of images featuring moving fabric and swirling cloaks. Firing in rapid succession significantly challenged the battery power on those speedlite flashes. Actor Shane Richlen was one of those cloak swirlers, who I would later photograph in Idle Muse Theatre Company’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
And then the long quiet of the pandemic. So the years went by, circumstances changed, roles were recast, I upgraded to studio flash, and here we are.
The 2023 Session
Like the 2020 session, the focus of this 2023 session was to capture evenly lit images of the Duchess and Antonio in the recast roles against a gray background for the graphic designer to composite into the show posters and advertising. To light the subjects evenly, I used a large, deep, diffused umbrella, slightly above the subjects and off center, and I lit them from above with a narrow softbox. I placed white V-flats on either side. (However, I haven’t included any of those here, as the company is in the process of selecting the ones they want to use for the poster.)
When we finished the images that Babes With Blades needed, I asked for a few minutes to get some images for The All Worlds Traveller. I like to do this so that I have something creative to show from the session, which I can also share with the subjects and the company.
For these images, I kept things simple and used that big umbrella to fill shadows and my older MagMod softbox as the main light, camera left.
Sometimes I miss the feel of some of my older portraits, particularly the ones I photographed with that smaller softbox. Shooting these, I wasn’t disappointed with the light. I think I’ve favored larger and larger sources over the years, so now I’m entering a phase where I want to go small again, only with more reliable lights than the tiny, battery-powered ones I used from 2016–2020.
Chicago Theatre Connections
One of my favorite things about theatre in Chicago is the way everyone’s connected—like the way I met Shane Richlen in the initial Malfi session and then again post-pandemic photographing another show. Similarly, when I photographed BWB’s Malfi preproduction images in 2023, I didn’t know either of the subjects. Or so I thought. But as it happens, Carrie Hardin (the Duchess) has been the speech and dialect coach on the past several shows I’ve photographed for Idle Muse Theatre Company, including In the Next Room, Upon This Shore, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Last Queen of Camelot.
I thought Clara Byczkowski (Antonio) looked familiar throughout the session, and I said so, but it turned out we live in the same neighborhood, so we concluded that we must have passed on the street at some point. But no! In truth, I photographed Clara for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s Girl Found in 2018! Perhaps I’d have recollected that better if, at that very session, I hadn’t had a surprise reunion with Katherine Swann, with whom I went through the actor training program at The Artistic Home seventeen years before, in 2001.
It is a big community and a small one at the same time. A small town inside a big city. We connect, drift away, connect again, and the cycle repeats. The reunions make the world seem that much smaller and more familiar. It’s one of my favorite things about shooting Chicago theatre.
Left to Right: Katherine Swann, Clara Byczkowski, and Tricia Rogers.
Once again, Babes With Blades’s The Dutchess of Malfi is directed by Hayley Rice and runs from September 9 through October 21 at the Factory Theater in Chicago.
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