The Burnt Part Boys

Burnt Part Boys is a show I’d designed over a decade ago. My wife was in that production. She was in this one too, in the same role.

The show follows two groups of characters who travel separately through the same world before converging late. Lighting had to find them in their own moments, isolating each group at different points along their journey, while still anchoring everything in time of day, season, and the natural beauty of the West Virginia mountains. Naturalism was the base, and the vignettes were where the design got to breathe.

When the show goes underground, the stage spends roughly fifteen minutes in total darkness. The only visible light source is a dwindling flashlight in the boys’ hands. Inside that blackout, a song surfaces: their deceased fathers, singing to their children from a fantasy world that occupies the same physical space. That song couldn’t play in true blackout, but the room couldn’t lose its sense of entrapment either.

The solve was bounce light. Light came in at steep angles and bounced off the set and the stage floor, with the majority of face light arriving as bounce rather than direct source. The bounce kept the room dark while still letting the singing fathers register. Light spilled across the floor in visible images while the underlying darkness held. The dark itself was the storytelling tool. The bounce just kept it readable.