Broadway By Design: Beowulf Boritt and Bradley King Bring FLYING OVER SUNSET from Page to Stage

In Broadway by Design, BroadwayWorld is shining a spotlight on the stellar designs of this Broadway season, show by show. Today, we continue the series with Tony nominees Beowulf Boritt and Bradley King, who acted as scenic and lighting designers for Broadway's LSD trip, Flying Over Sunset.

Set in the 1950's, Flying Over Sunset is a work of fiction inspired by the lives of three extraordinary and accomplished people - writer Aldous Huxley; playwright, diplomat, and congresswoman, Clare Boothe Luce; and film legend Cary Grant - each of whom in real life experimented with the drug LSD. At a crossroads in their lives the three come together, and under the influence of the drug, take a trip and confront the mysteries of their lives and their world.

Boritt's design process began with the brain. "The set for Flying Over Sunset abstractly represents the human brain; what happens to the brain on LSD, but by extension it shows the power of our imaginations," he explained. "It impossibly twists and slides and turns inside out, creating new worlds one after the other. It represents the beauty of our mental agility in the drugstore when it turns into a beautiful, pulsing, colorful wonderland. Then it represents the vast terrifying emptiness of being lost in our own minds when Clare Booth Luce stands in the empty space singing How, and when the men are lost in the massive, endless, surging, ocean."

Lighting designer Bradley King started his process with the material. "I always start with the piece. Not just the script/story, but the music, the orchestrations, the world we think we're going to try and build - that's where I find my inspiration," he explained. "I think I love lighting design so much because it's like visual music composition; I get to 'score' a performance just like a composer would with music, time, dynamics, and instrumentation. So I typically go to the score first. In this case, Tom Kitt's music was so rich and multi-layered that creating a lighting world for the piece flowed quite easily and naturally.

"But there are a million things that inspire me; conversations with James Lapine and Michelle Dorrance and the rest of the team, watching Carmen Cusack in rehearsal, listening to the band rehearse for the first time...all of these things contribute to what appears on stage."

Both designers found similar challenges in phyically conveying a mental state. "How on earth do you convey the psychedelic, mind-blowing trips these characters are having in a way that advances a story, takes the audience on an emotional journey, and still makes coherent visual sense?" said King. "Our team found a silver lining in the shutdown: we were able to watch the archival taping of our final dress rehearsal from March 2020 and sit for three days and discuss, ponder, and decide what was working and what wasn't before returning to the theater in November 2021. That time was enormously valuable in making sure we were all on the same page to ensure every design element was firing together and in concert."

"Representing an abstract idea in physical form is always tricky," added Boritt. "I'm enormously gratified that people have responded well to my attempt to visually represent the the power of human imagination!"

Flying Over Sunset concluded its run at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on January 16, 2022.

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