Video Transcript: 10 Years of Theater Design at Princeton

Jane Cox:

[Jane Cox is the Director of the Program in Theater & Music Theater and a Professor of the Practice at Princeton University.]

When I was growing up, I was interested in all the arts. I was interested in dance and theater and poetry and writing, and I think I chose a career that allowed me to stay engaged in a lot of different things. And that career is theater design.

Elena Milliken ’26:

[Elena Milliken is an Anthropology major pursuing minors in Theater & Music Theater and Spanish.]

So I’ve been a theater kid pretty much my entire life. My grandpa would always have show tunes playing, so I’ve been kind of immersed as long as I can remember. But it wasn’t until I got to Princeton that I learned that it was something that someone could like do with purpose or with intention.

Jane Cox:

I started teaching lighting design at Princeton in 2007. Tim Vasen was the previous director of the Program in Theater, and he and I worked together very closely to make design a more central part of the program. And he passed away in 2015. Before Tim died, the last conversation I had with him was that he wanted his legacy in the theater program to be design, so we feel that we’re carrying his legacy forward with that. Thank you.

Layla Williams ’25:

[Layla Williams is an African American Studies major pursuing minors in the Theater & Music Theater and Creative Writing.]

Beginning at Princeton, I had done a lot of like acting. I had done a lot of being a part of productions but not necessarily a part of the production team. I think it came around my freshman year that I started to become interested in design.

Alexander Picoult ’26:

[Alexander Picoult is a History of Art major pursing a minor in Theater & Music Theater.]

I dance and choreograph for the Princeton University Ballet, and I often found that when I choreographed a piece, and I talked to the lighting designer on the project, it was really hard to convey my ideas. That was actually my main impulse for taking Jane’s Lighting course.

Jane Cox:

I think of design as the conceptual heart of theater making. Actors are the breathing soul of theater. In our program, we encourage our students to think about design as world making. We encourage our students to think about creating a world with rules, with space, with relationships between people and objects. We encourage our students to think about the world in a visual and physicalized way. We teach design in the classroom. We teach multiple courses at the introductory level. We teach lighting, we teach scenery. We sometimes teach costumes. We teach sound. We also teach our centerpiece course, Theater 400, in which design students who have different disciplinary backgrounds but a really strong interest in theater can work together around our theater making season.

Layla Williams:

A lot of designers will come and enroll in the course, and then they’re assigned projects based on like interests and experience levels.

Elena Milliken:

So in Theater 400 this year, I worked on two productions. I worked on “Anonymous” as the lighting designer, and I’m working on “To Dream About Wings” as the set designer.

Alexander Picoult:

I worked as the lighting designer on the musical “A Life Worth Living.”

Layla Williams:

The project that I worked on in Theater 400 was “Macbeth in Stride,” and I am the director and thesis proposer of the project. I found the design team for “Macbeth in Stride” in Theater 400. Theater 400 really walks you through before you’re even thinking about what is something on stage, what does this text feel like? What does it look like? What feeling do you want the audience to have? What feelings do you want the actors to have throughout the process? And I think that Theater 400 is that opportunity to really break it down and understand where you’re coming from in design.

Elena Milliken:

We take everything that we’ve learned in this class and figure out how we can apply it to each of the productions that we’re working on. A mixture of the practical skills, but also just learning how to define a visual language for a production. And that shows up in really every aspect of our design going into the rehearsal room and into the stage.

Alexander Picoult:

The main thing that we’re all learning in Theater 400 is how to talk like a designer and how to think like a designer in the real world to make sure that people understand what you’re trying to talk about, and you can convey your artistic ideas thoughtfully and clearly.

Elena Milliken:

My role as the set designer has been really collaborative with the other designers in figuring out what this show needs. As you can guess by the title, the show really revolves around themes of flight and movement and falling. And so figuring out how the space transforms from a lifted moment of joy to something where really a world is crumbling is a really difficult task, but one that I feel like set plays a really important role in.

Jane Cox:

We’re very lucky to have these extraordinarily well-equipped spaces in which we have up-to-the-minute lighting and sound systems and projection capabilities. This allows students who are interested in the STEM fields to come to the Lewis Center and explore those ideas in physicalized space in a creative way. One of the things we hope to teach in all of our design classes is visual literacy so that students can have a critical analysis and a more in-depth exploration of the skills that they’re already bringing to the table from their more informal interactions with social media.

Elena Milliken:

For this class, we all put together these design boards. That’s one of our main homeworks throughout the course of the semester is generating visual research. I found this cup with this really kind of disgusting gold spikes, and immediately when I saw this cup, I was like, “This is Calista!”

Jane Cox:

Theater 400 is an incredible opportunity for students to bridge the gap from introductory design classes that are quite theoretical into creating a fully realized production in collaboration with our amazing production staff. And that’s a really unique and incredible opportunity that undergraduates have at Princeton.

Layla Williams:

You get to work not only with professional faculty members working out in the field, but you also get to work with professional practicing designers and staff members. So for example, like we have a professional costume shop that has an amazing stock, and also they’re designing costumes and making costumes all the time. We have a professional scenic shop, professional sound designers, and lighting designers. It’s a really great opportunity to be within Theater 400 and within the LCA more generally.

Jane Cox:

Theater design is a excellent education in collaboration, in bringing strong ideas to the table boldly and being willing to hold them very, very loosely, being able to make something with a group of other people collaboratively.

Layla Williams:

We had reflections at the end of our course last week, and I was saying that I wish I took Theater 400 in like my sophomore year or my junior year because it’s given me a roadmap to how to be a successful part of a design team in this kind of form of collaboration.

Alexander Picoult:

I actually started my freshman year here as an ecology and evolution major and then switched to art history after realizing that I was meant to work in a more creative world, in a more creative environment. Whether it’s design or just behind the scenes in administrative arts, I definitely wanna work in that environment, and so I guess we’ll see what the future has in store.

Elena Milliken:

I think my theater work on campus is one of the most important things that I do on campus, if not the most important thing because it really has defined my time here as it ends up being a form of my rest and relaxation and joy on campus. It’s like if I was, I don’t know, taking time and watching TV or hanging out with friends because that’s kind of what I’m doing. I’m hanging out with the other people working on the production and doing something fun!