Debuting Artist: Laurel Ladzinski

I randomly picked Lighting Design after committing to attend CSU for my Bachelor’s degree. I thought I was going to work in Music Education, and then decided that I wanted something that was a little more diverse. My advisory counselor said that he had majored in Lighting Design, so I told him to just sign me up. Best risk I ever took!

I actually served Sydney at the Moot House, where I work as a server and bartender in town, and she gave me her number. I’ve been crossing circles with her ever since, including my nail tech being one of her stagehands, so we finally connected to work on this show together.

My specific role is the Lighting Designer, which means my job is to immerse the audience in the show and give it some energy to support the story. I am in charge of atmospherics, color, brightness, and shadows, which are all important elements to set the scene and translate emotions to the audience. I am really excited to make my debut and meet other professional theatre performers and tech folk locally and make my mark on OpenStage!

Most Lighting Designers hate using the color green — it makes the performer’s skin look sickly, it’s hard to create a color palette, and most fixtures don’t have the capability of mixing good hues of green. Because the show is about marijuana, I’m excited to explore this “taboo” color in my Lighting Design and challenge myself by using color to foreshadow and amplify.

I love Kenny’s vision to bring the show to the audience, and lighting the house aisles was probably the most difficult part of this production! There are limited hanging areas in the house, which means we had to get creative and mount some of the fixtures on the actual infrastructure of the building in order to get the angle we needed.

Reefer Madness is a show about misinformation, creating a villain out of something because it’s not widely understood. I feel that especially in our political and social climate, it’s easy to fall into jumping on the bandwagon without doing your own proper research. I hope this show will encourage people to look into statistics and remove fear from the things they don’t understand.

Can you share an interesting behind-the-scenes story or a memorable moment that has occurred during this production?

Honestly, it’s hard to pick just one memorable moment, but I will say that there was a lot of laughter among the cast and crew. I enjoyed getting to know everyone during tech week. Putting on a show can be stressful, but enjoying those moments of laughter made it much easier!