Design Statement

The Antichrist Cometh walks a tricky line stylistically: a comedy about the potential beginning of the apocalypse. The writing was clever and funny, but the stakes had to feel very real for the characters at the center of this story to heighten the comedy and theological questions for the audience. The playwright is ambiguous about whether John is truly the Antichrist or not, and the sound design needed to reflect that. The play has two settings: the primary setting is in the living room and front entryway of John and Fiona’s home. The second setting is a scene that takes place outdoors in John and Fiona’s neighborhood. There was a record player built into a console on the set, and this became the rhetoric for much of the diegetic music in the play. The platter was controlled by a motor and the lighting console. The sound was programmed in Qlab.

The first piece of music that I connected to this play was Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand.” The things that connected for me were the religious overtones, the sinister nature without being overwrought, and the off-kilter quality. Both the play and “Red Right Hand” are moved just off of center, so to speak. The music selections for the show followed that same feeling. They are not cohesive based on strict genre or period (as I typically organize music for a production), but rather on that same aesthetic: sinister, grooving, not overwrought. I used Ultimate Vocal Remover, a sound utility based in AI, to strip the vocals out of the music until the end of the show. Music would often establish and then underscore dialog or action.

I used Bryan Ferry’s cover of “Sympathy for the Devil” for the end of the show. It plays, sans vocals, until a particularly loud thunder crash (and the accompanying lighting effect) knock out the power to the home, at which point the record “spins down.” At the end of the play, the power comes back on, the record player spins back up, at which point I introduce vocals for the first time in the play: “Please allow me to introduce myself…” 

The house system at Purple Rose for this production consisted of a mono main speaker directed at each of the four sections, one subwoofer hung with those mains, subwoofers located under each section of seating, and a series of surround loudspeakers that are hung above the last row of seating. The additional speakers I added included a series of loudspeakers secreted into the bottom of the seating structure– used primarily for tonal effects–, a “special” for the record player on stage, and three offstage loudspeakers for effects.