Lightstreams

Language, people and play

In Lightstreams, I worked to honour Mary Mazzilli’s poetic language while grounding it in believable relationships and everyday human detail. Our international cast and creative team brought perspectives beyond my own, which helped shape our exploration.

Through conversation and practical experimentation, we explored different ways of expressing struggle—sometimes turning a moment on its head to find joy, humour or hope. My role was to give those discoveries a clear theatrical shape while building choices the actors could believe in and own.

Finding the visual world

The designer and I developed the cardboard world through close collaboration, testing how simply we could convey the family’s unsettled existence while leaving room for the audience’s imagination. We found the right container for the piece in a giant cardboard box, with smaller boxes forming the family’s surroundings.

Their toddler son was represented by a deliberately non-realistic doll belonging to this same visual world. Together, these choices suggested the transience of their lives: the difficulty of feeling fully at home, even within their own family.