Director - Casey Sams

Scenic Design - Leilane Bertunes

Costume Design - Matthew Carl

Sound Design - Chance Beck

Lighting Design - Miguel J Santiago

Photography - Kenton Yeager

Failure: A Love Story

By Philip Dawkins

Clarence Brown Lab Theatre

March 2025

Design Statement

Failure: A Love Story follows the lives and deaths of the three Fail sisters, Gerty, Jenny June, and Nelly Fail, as well as a young man named Mortimer Mortimer. The play explores themes of love, loss, life and death. The brilliance of this play, and playwright, is it’s ability to frame these difficult topics in humor and hopefulness.

As the lighting designer, one of my goals was to lean into the show’s abstraction while providing enough grounding to bring the audience along. In my conversations with the director, we realized that lighting would be doing a lot of the heavy lifting both in storytelling and shifting locations. The play moves through a lot of locations very quickly and we needed to keep the show moving. By creating clear settings with light, we were able to quickly shift location and not confuse the audience.

The design team as a whole was particularly interested in balancing both the light-heartedness and the seriousness of the play. We wanted to keep the show upbeat and leave the audience feeling uplifted and hopeful, while still dealing with themes of death, loss, and failure. One of our driving ideas was holding the joy of life in the face of death.