Thematic Constructs

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“Yes, Rabbit Hole is a play about a bereaved family… It’s a sad play. Don’t make it any sadder than it needs to be. Avoid sentimentality and histrionics at all costs.” – David Lindsay-Abaire.

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Although grief can be felt throughout the play. The design team is working on bringing out the other elements in the thematic constructs of the play, such as hope, evolution, and redemption. We want the audience to go home feeling that this life is not the only life. Death is not the end. There’s a thing like heaven or worm whole, or parallel universes beyond life and death.

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I have identified three thematic

chunks from the play - Grief,

Hope and Redemption. I scored

each major event in the play based

on the three chunks, and plotted

the three chunks against time to

create the chunks chart shown 

on the right. This chart perfectly

captures the emotional journey 

that the audience will go through, 

and serves as the basis for

composing the score of this piece.

 

The Role of the Sound

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The most important role of sound is to carry the hope and the sense of evolution in the play, in order to contrast the grief in the play.

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Sound will be used to create two different types of “realities” in the play. The “real” world and the “parallel” worlds. In the “real” world, there will be upbeat, and light-hearted scene transition music with drums, bass, guitars, keyboards. This is the world our Howie and Becca live in. They lost their son, and they don’t really know how to deal with it. Things seem to move on as normal, but their lives and their marriage are really on the verge of breaking down.

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In the “parallel” worlds, the music will be dark, heavy, and epic with piano, strings, and horns, etc. It will also be mixed with the sounds such as subway trains, waves, and seagulls, etc. There will be two movement pieces in the show, one at the beginning of Act 1, the other at the end of Act 1. These pieces will have multiple versions of Becca and Howie moving on stage mechanically. The music here will underscore the movement and light, and create the feeling of hope and possibilities.

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The Sound System

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There will be three loudspeakers hidden in the three areas of the set - the kitchen (Stage Right), the living room (Stage Left), and the rabbit hole (Stage Center). Together they work as an LCR system for music playback, which provide a great sense of the music coming from the stage with a huge amount of spatiality. Individually, each loudspeaker functions as a practical speaker on stage and covers one area of the stage so the sound effects appear to be originating from the correct location.

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The photo below shows the locations of the three loudspeakers hidden on stage. 

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