When a play opens called The Light Years, it may not come as too much of a shock if the lighting designer is the first singled out for praise. So, much praise to lighting designer Russell H. Champa for his work festooning the Playwrights Horizons stage, including the proscenium, with lights meant to conjure the universe and, in particular, Arcturus, which is 40 lights years from Earth and a distance repeatedly referred to throughout the Debate Society work.
There’s also reason to suspect that set designer Laura Jellinek has something to do with other aspects of the production, such as a sizable moon-like ball studded with bulbs (neon lights?) that rests upstage for much of the action.
Furthermore, Noah Mease, credited for special props, along with The Lighting Syndicate, had a hand in the various effects that are the distinguished elements of a script attributed to Debate Society co-artistic directors Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and directed by Debate Society artistic director Oliver Butler. Add sound designer Lee Kinney to that list.
The lights blinking, sometimes fizzing, are first seen after Steele MacKaye (Rocco Sisto)—btw, a real person—introduces the intermissionless 140-mnuter and makes it known that he’s behind the 1893 World’s Fair project for which the spectacular lights are an integral part.
Instantly, head technician Hillary (Erik Lochtefeld) appears, working with assistant Hong Sling (Brian Lee Huynh) and a few others on preparing cumbersome gadgets to wow awestruck crowds.
So far, it’s an exciting and promising lead-in to an opus that doesn’t fulfill that promise. Little time goes by before Hillary is trading lines in the Fair workshop and at home with wife Adeline (Aya Cash). Then, not much more time goes—40 light years, as a matter of mentioned fact, until it’s 1933 and the follow-up Chicago World’s fair has rolled around.
Now, jingle writer Lou (Ken Barnett), wife Ruth (Cash again, having shed some of the costume Michael Krass has wrought for Adeline) and thoughtful son Charlie (Graydon Peter Yosowitz) are inhabiting the home Hillary—still collecting rent in a bucket dropped from the attic) and Adeline lived.
From then on, with occasional returns to the 1893 light show prospects, Bos and Thureen follow the intimacies of the two families as they try to make something successful of their daily lives, but their commitments to finding happiness aren’t entirely successful.
As they’re sketchily filled in, it’s more like the opposite. For instance, the moon object is a testament to Hillary’s, uh, dropping the ball where the ball is concerned, while Lou’s commercial career exactly doesn’t catch on. (Barnett, it needs be said, plays a top-notch jazz piano.)
The impression rapidly sinks in—or slowly, depending you your rate of pick-up—that the Debate Society team wants to make this point: Although all kinds of razzmatazz things are going on as the cosmic light show flashes on and on, families still have to deal with frequently daunting quotidian life. They certainly must during periods of economic setback, which 1893 and 1933 have in common.
Not a bad message, of course, but somehow Hillary’s family unit and Lou’s family unit are not mesmerizing focal family units. Before not too many of those 140 minutes have elapsed the strivers have lost audience attention. On the other hand, the ubiquitous lights continue literally lighting up the proceedings.