In the Green is a musical about two women who are trapped in a cell trying to heal fromtrauma inflicted on them from the outside world. It tells the story of Hildegard von Bingen, who was a German nun in the 12th century along with Jutta, who was an anchoress and Hildegard’s tutor. Hildegard was a writer, composer, poet, scientist and eventually was declared a Catholic Saint and Doctor of the Church. When Hildegard was 8, her family consigned her to a life as an oblate in a monastery. This is where In The Green begins. In this cell, Hildegard is broken into 3 pieces of herself: her hand, eyes, and mouth. Jutta agrees to help her learn to become “whole” again and we follow their journey as Hildegard grows, changes, and learns. It is a journey where one woman is led to embrace death and the other is led to embrace a full life. As a design team, we wanted to create a "living grave" within the world of In The Green and the impact of being OF the world and not IN the world.

The manipulation of voice is a huge part of In the Green, both musically and emotionally. This production required the use of live playback and recording using Ableton live, along with Jutta using an IEM to successfully record in tempo with the track and with herself. With this in mind, my goal was to use my design to highlight the voice in different ways. Since this show is in tight quarters and performers will be close for many parts of the show, the vocal system was an A/B system to avoid comb filtering or muddying the mix in any way. The music system was a band left/right on the same plane as the vocal A/B. The vocal system was supplemented by adding two speakers aimed at the balcony seats to reinforce vocal clarity. Due to the rake of the seats and the rear balcony, a second pair of A/B speakers will be placed in the midpoint of the house.

A big part of the sound for this show was to be immersive. To emphasize how they are stuck
in this chamber, I placed speakers around the audience curve to use for spatial effects and for moments that the voices can “surround” the audience and put them IN the cell. I think it is important that the audience be in the world with the performers and to experience their journey. This musical is very singular, as we stay in one location the whole time, so a big challenge will be to create different feelings when needed for each song as we are transported through their journey. Jutta’s songs use a looping mechanism that highlight her struggle to always stay in the same place. She manipulates things but never actually goes anywhere, and I want to use highlight that she is stuck in the cell, with her voice bouncing around her.

Lastly, the use of effects were crucial for this production and were used to highlight emotions within the cell. Playing with placement of voices, loops, echoes, and reverbs were used to highlight intimate moments or to overwhelm the audience or make them uncomfortable. This journey is not a smooth one and we don’t necessarily have a true happy ending, so making the audience feel unsettled will was a part of the story.

In The Green was a huge labor of love and collaboration between every member of the production team, and especially between music and sound. From the start of this production, we knew we would need extra time in space with cast, MD, band, director, and the sound team in order to practice using and recording the loops. Jacob Priddy, music director, and I had extensive meetings to plan out how we were going to implement Ableton Live into our process, as it had to be worked in from day one. Before we began, it was decided that we were going to be pre-recording some of the vocal loops (mainly the percussive tempo setting ones) and having Jacob cue the recordings live during the show. This changed the dynamic of how we were operating, and led to us having to reprogram chunks of the prebuilt Ableton and Qlab files given to us by the licensing company. A mobile looping station was built for rehearsals so that performers could practice the looping from day one and be prepared for planned "sound week" in space with the full system. Once in space, we tackled tempo issues by adding a second click track, implementing a full backup recording rig, and doing it all twice for the two casts of the show. This production would not have been pulled off without each department working with each other to make every piece fit together.