Seven Scripts for Teaching Lighting Design

About the Play

Wilde's masterpiece of comic absurdity follows two young men who both claim the name "Ernest" to impress their romantic interests, only to have the lie unravel spectacularly. The dialogue is fast, the wit is sharp, and the comedy holds up in a classroom reading without needing any theatrical production knowledge to enjoy.

For lighting design, the real value is the three-location structure. Act I takes place in Algernon's fashionable London flat — a formal interior calling for warm practicals, late-afternoon window light, and a controlled palette that reads as wealth. Act II moves entirely outdoors to the garden of Jack's Hertfordshire country estate, where the challenge flips: bright open sky, shifting daylight over a long garden scene, and the hard question of how to make an outdoor setting feel fresh and alive. Act III returns indoors to a morning room — same house, different time of day, different emotional register.

The three environments give students a complete range: urban interior, outdoor natural light, and country interior — each requiring a different approach to color temperature, intensity, and angle.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Warm afternoon interior — Act I London flat, practicals active, window backlight
• Pre-evening shift — cooler, dimmer as Act I builds toward the blackout
• Bright open outdoor wash — Act II garden, high-angle sun, no practicals
• Cloud cover pass — subtle intensity dip mid-act as a scene transition
• Sunlight restored — intensity and warmth returned after the scene beat
• Late-afternoon golden shift — Act II approaching its end
• Morning interior — Act III, cooler and cleaner than Act I
• Gradual brightening — story racing toward resolution
• Final comic resolution state — full warm wash, no deep shadows

About the Play

Elyot and Amanda were once married to each other. Now they are honeymooning with their new spouses — and discover they are booked into adjacent suites at the same hotel in Deauville, France, on the Normandy coast. By the end of Act I they have abandoned their new partners and run off to Paris together. The play is fast, brittle, funny, and genuinely sophisticated in its emotional intelligence.

Act I is set on a shared hotel terrace overlooking the English Channel — adjacent balconies separated by a low wall, at dusk, with music drifting up from the hotel orchestra below. This is one of the richest single-scene lighting challenges in the comedy canon: two side-by-side exterior spaces, a romantic summer evening sky, moonrise, and the warm glow of hotel windows behind, all in one sustained scene that ends in a delicate romantic haze.

Acts II and III move to Amanda's Paris flat. The emotional temperature swings wildly — romantic warmth, screaming arguments, cold silences. Each shift is a lighting cue opportunity. Private Lives entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Concord Theatricals still sells acting editions, but the text itself is now free to use, publish, and perform.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Pre-show: warm hotel terrace at early dusk, sky still light
• Moonrise — gradual blue-silver shift in sky, romantic intensification
• Orchestra below — warm practicals suggest ballroom light from beneath
• Discovery moment — isolating special on the shared balcony wall
• Act II Paris flat — warm practical interior, daytime
• Candlelit dinner scene — amber-warm, low and intimate
• Argument break — slightly colder wash strips the warmth
• Post-fight cold silence — minimal fill, deep shadows in corners
• Morning after — cool dawn light, neutral and exposed
• Final confrontation — flat, unsentimental, full stage wash

About the Play

Four young lovers flee to the woods outside Athens, where they become entangled in a fairy quarrel presided over by Oberon and Titania. Meanwhile, a group of tradesmen rehearse a play for the duke's wedding. The story ends with three weddings, one enchanted ass, and a play-within-a-play. Students who find other Shakespeare daunting usually find this one genuinely funny.

For lighting design, this play is a complete curriculum in itself. It operates in three distinct worlds: the court of Athens (formal, daytime, institutional light), the enchanted forest (night, mystery, moonlight, fairy magic), and the mechanicals' staging space. The forest scenes are the lighting design heart of the play — moonlight as the primary source, magic spells as light cues, the confusion of the lovers driving rapid scene changes within the same location at different emotional temperatures.

Particularly rich is the "Pyramus and Thisbe" scene in Act V, where the mechanicals use a man holding a lantern to represent moonlight. This is a direct opportunity to ask students what they would actually do with the lighting to portray moonlight — and how far theatrical convention has come since Shakespeare's company lit everything by daylight.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Athens court — bright, formal, neutral daytime; authority and order
• Transition to forest — crossfade from warm daylight to cool moonlit deep blue
• Fairy entrance — soft warm magic pool for Titania's bower
• Oberon's spell — uneasy blue-green, shadow-heavy
• Puck's mischief — fast follow-spot chase cues as lovers scatter
• Lovers sleeping — low-level "moonlit" blue, minimal fill
• Dawn break — gradual warm amber creep from the horizon
• Waking of the lovers — full warm morning light, disoriented clarity
• Return to Athens — back to neutral court light, reality restored
• Act V mechanicals — deliberately flat, "bad" theatrical lighting as part of the joke
• Puck's epilogue — single special, farewell mood, slow fade

About the Play

Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, has been stranded on an island for twelve years with his daughter Miranda. Using magic, he conjures a storm that shipwrecks his usurpers on the same island, setting in motion a plan for justice and reconciliation. Generally considered Shakespeare's last solo-authored play, it is laced throughout with spectacle: storms, spirits, visions, and a masque that is suddenly and violently destroyed.

The opening storm sequence is one of the most technically demanding cold opens in any script. The play begins mid-disaster — lightning, crashing waves, a ship breaking apart — before Prospero reveals that it was all an illusion. That structural choice is a full lesson in what theatrical lighting can accomplish: selling a catastrophe that never happened. From there, the play moves through Prospero's sun-baked island, the darkness of Caliban's underground, Ariel's aerial entrances and exits, and the supernatural masque of Act IV.

The play's action takes place over a single day, making it a rich exercise in tracking a complete daylight arc — from stormy morning through noon to twilight resolution.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Pre-show: calm sea, pre-storm blue-gray sky
• Storm sequence — strobe lightning, rapid intensity swings, chaos
• Prospero reveals the illusion — instant clear to full warm morning island light
• Ariel's first appearance — bright aerial special, isolating top-light
• Caliban's cave — low, cold, earthbound; contrast to Ariel's brightness
• Enchanted sleep — gentle fade to a still, hushed wash
• Noon heat — high-angle, high-intensity, saturated warm
• Act IV masque — warm spectacle light for goddesses and spirits
• Sudden breaking of the masque — hard snap to cool reality mid-speech
• Late afternoon — golden-hour light, long shadow angles
• Ariel's freedom — bright, clean, celebratory
• Epilogue — Prospero alone, single special, slow fade to near-dark

About the Play

Grandpa Vanderhof heads a large, lovably chaotic household near Columbia University in New York. His family includes a daughter who writes unfinished plays, a son-in-law who makes fireworks in the basement, a granddaughter taking ballet lessons from a Russian instructor, and assorted hangers-on who simply never left. When granddaughter Alice falls for Tony Kirby — the scion of a Wall Street family — a collision of worlds is inevitable.

The play is set entirely on one unit set: the Vanderhof living room. Because the location never changes, every shift in the story must be told through time of day, emotional temperature, and practical sources. The basement fireworks explosion at the end of Act II calls for a full theatrical effects sequence: flash, colored light, smoke, and the chaos of a house under shock. Students designing this show have to think hard about how to make a single domestic space feel different across three acts and a wide range of comic and tender moments.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Pre-show: warm domestic late afternoon, practical lamps lit, sunlight through windows
• Evening settles — exterior window light shifts to blue, practicals become primary source
• Kirby family arrival — same warm setting, slightly heightened
• FBI raid — sharp, high-contrast blue-white flash as agents enter
• Basement fireworks explosion — strobe, orange flash, smoke, practicals blow out
• Aftermath chaos — emergency work light feel, bare and unflattering
• Act III reconciliation — restored warmth, soft fill, intimate tone
• Final tableau — full warm "home" wash, generous and resolved

About the Play

Drama critic Mortimer Brewster discovers a corpse in the window seat of his sweet elderly aunts' Brooklyn home — and then discovers they put it there. Their brother believes he is Teddy Roosevelt and digs the Panama Canal in the basement. Another brother has had plastic surgery and now resembles Boris Karloff. The entire play unfolds on Halloween night, which gives the lighting designer a very specific seasonal and temporal frame to work within.

Like You Can't Take It With You, the play is set on one unit set — the Brewster living room. But where Kaufman and Hart's play spans an afternoon into evening, Arsenic and Old Lace begins in late afternoon and runs through the small hours of the night. That time-of-day arc, executed entirely within a single domestic interior, is one of the most instructive exercises in sustained lighting design. Students have noted that it can generate 30 or more distinct cues from a script that never leaves the living room. Window light, moon, streetlamps, practical table lamps, the flashlight in Mortimer's hand, storm lightning — all of it lives within one set across one long Halloween night.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Opening: late afternoon sunlight through period windows, warm amber angle
• Sunset — sky shifts from warm to deep orange, practicals come up
• Dusk — blue-grey exterior light, interior practicals now dominant
• Full night — exterior windows dark, moonlight and interior remain
• Halloween streetlight — cool amber-orange from exterior, periodic
• Storm build — exterior flicker, sky darkens, tension in levels
• Lightning flash — strobe hit through window, brief and sharp
• Thunderclap blackout — full stage to black, recover to dim interior
• Mortimer's flashlight — single moving source, deep shadows behind him
• Midnight — deep, still, minimal light; the house feels abandoned
• Pre-dawn greyness — cool flat light creeping into windows

About the Play

Six strangers are summoned to Boddy Manor on a dark and stormy night. One of them is a murderer. The rest of the evening involves dead bodies, secret passages, candlesticks, and a butler named Wadsworth who seems to know more than he lets on. The stage adaptation was written by Sandy Rustin, with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, based on Jonathan Lynn's screenplay for the beloved 1985 film.

For a lighting design exercise, Clue is the most theatrical choice on this list. The comedy depends entirely on darkness, revelation, and surprise. Blackouts drive the plot: someone dies every time the lights go out. Lightning through the mansion windows establishes both mood and menace. Candlelight creates intimate pools in a large Gothic space. Students who design this show cannot think of lighting as background — they have to think of it as the engine of the storytelling.

Production rights have cost schools $2,000 or more, making this the most expensive option on the list. For a classroom study copy, individual perusal scripts are available through Concord Theatricals' Broadway Licensing Global imprint.

Sample Lighting Cues

• Pre-show: Gothic manor atmosphere — single candle specials, deep shadow
• Storm sequence — continuous flickering practicals, wind and rain implied
• Lightning flash — sharp strobe through tall windows, faces illuminated
• Dinner scene — candlelit warm table special, darkness at stage edges
• Lights out (murder cue 1) — blackout, then recover to emergency candle state
• Secret passage reveal — cold, narrow shaft of light from hidden door
• Character monologue specials — tight pools isolating each suspect in turn
• Panic sequence — rapid partial blackouts, emergency lights
• Accusation scene — clinical, flat; strip the atmosphere, expose everyone
• Final reveal — single special on the guilty party, all others in shadow
• Resolution — full warm wash, relief and comedy restored