Three time periods collide in a hotel room in this action-packed dark comedy that follows Ana Woods, a young Korean-American woman, who travels to Seoul in 1975 to retrieve her father’s ashes and ends up going on an emotional journey, discovering her parents’ story and her own beginnings. Guided by a mysterious shape-shifting Jesus, Ana is transported into her father’s journal from 1944, and takes on the role of her mother, Number 4, a Korean comfort woman as she meets Luke Woods at the tail end of WWII in Myanmar. Time and space bleed and morph as Jesus slowly shepherds this shattered family back together through SPAM, journals, and many distressing experiences.

This play speaks poignantly about family ties and inherited trauma. Ana did not grow up knowing her parents. She knew her father in the most cursory way, knowing nothing of her mother at all. This play shows her discovery of her parents’ past, and in doing so, it shows a cycle of intergenerational trauma. This cycle is one we see physically in this play (with Ana taking the place of her mother, Number 4, in many scenes), but it is representational of the emotional distress that she inherited from her parents.

As lighting designer for this show, I was tasked with creating an evocative and liminal space where three time periods can exist at once, helping with the challenge of depicting violence onstage by obscuring violent moments without losing the emotional impact of that violence, and largely single-handedly establishing mood and tone throughout this piece without assistance from the actors’ faces (which were doubl-masked with actors sometimes also wearing a molded paper mask).

Inspired greatly by the art of Jeremy Miranda, I aimed to create multiple spaces onstage that felt like different worlds, but could easily blend in and out of each other. Using mainly a low saturate color palette of cool blues and warm ambers as the keystone of my design, I knew I could create spaces that were drastically different from each other that would blend well together, especially if each space could be utilized in isolation. In moments of violence, I sought to minimize visibility by utilizing flickering and strobing in my cuing, and I leaned heavily on saturate color during moments of emotional intensity that are otherwise not present in the plot.

Due to Covid-19, this show was being presented for free for a highly limited in-person audience (about 8 people) in the Barber Theater February 26, 27, 28, and 29. In addition to the in-person audience, the show was be streamed online for free as well. With the incredibly limited in-space audience, the majority of the theater was able to be used for play space in a narrow alley configuration.