Independent Arts News Reporting Jane Cox, Director of the Program in Theater & Music Theater, wins Tony Award
Reported Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Pictured Above: Jane Cox with her 2024 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play, standing with her daughter Beckett Alexander. Photo courtesy Jane Cox.
Awarded Best Lighting of a Play for her work on Appropriate by Princeton alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Newsroom Post: PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Princeton, NJ – Director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater Jane Cox won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, Appropriate. This is Cox’s fourth nomination and first win.
Appropriate received the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. Jacobs-Jenkins is a member of Princeton’s Class of 2006 and of the Lewis Center’s Advisory Council and has taught in the Theater Program at Princeton. The production garnered a third Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for Sarah Paulson.
“I’m so delighted to win a Tony for working on a play by one of the greatest writers of our time –Princeton alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins,” said Cox. “This brilliant, provocative and haunted play is an incredible vehicle for design, calling for precision and imagination in getting light into this metaphorical and literally dark space.”
“It was also delightful,” she added, “to be in the company of several Princeton folks, including the incredible alum Jeff Kuperman, Class of 2012, whose choreography (along with brother Rick) for the Tony-winning musical The Outsiderswas brilliantly displayed during the awards ceremony.”
Cox also recently won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Appropriate.
“We are thrilled to congratulate Jane on her much-deserved Tony win,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “Her nationally renowned excellence as an artist is of a piece with her outstanding teaching and dedicated service to the Lewis Center for the Arts and to the University.”
Appropriate follows the dysfunctional Lafayette family as they return to a decaying plantation mansion in Arkansas to battle over their recently deceased father’s inheritance. It’s summer, and the cicadas are singing. Toni, the eldest daughter, hopes they’ll spend the weekend remembering and reconnecting over their beloved father. Bo, her brother, wants to recoup some of the funds he spent caring for Dad at the end of his life. But things take a turn when their estranged brother, Franz, appears late one night, and mysterious objects are discovered among the clutter., Soon after the discovery of a relic buried deep in the recess of their family’s past, decades of resentment burst through centuries of historical sin. Suddenly, long-hidden secrets and buried resentments can’t be contained, and the family is forced to face the ghosts of their past. Variety described the play as, “A searing narrative about family ties, past hurts and unbridled pain. It’s a shocking play centering on legacy, race and the fragility of memory.”
In describing her lighting for the play, Cox explained earlier to BroadwayWorld: “It’s hard to get light into this house, which is a wonderful metaphor for this play. We wanted you to feel the dark corners inside, and the shadows in the space, and know that outside is oppressively hot and bright. Also, the story of the play is so exciting and keeps the audience guessing every step of the way – I love how fast the play moves and how brilliant the mind of the playwright is. The play is intended to be hilarious and also to make the audience really uncomfortable – the lighting tries to support that tension, using contrast and darkness as well as intense brightness to modulate the audience mood. Much of the play is set at night, listening to the sounds of cicadas outside; it was a delight to use all the different apertures to the dark box of the space to get directional light in, and to try to light scenes with the light of candles or a single lamp. I really enjoyed finding ways to get the audience to really listen – from the careful use of darkness to subtle ‘close-up’ lighting that really focuses on actors’ faces in the most intensely personal moments.”
The New York Times stated that director Lila Neugebauer’s staging and the set design by design collective dots are “nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters.”
Jane Cox designs lighting for theater, opera, dance and music. Her other recent lighting design work includes Michael R. Jackson’s and Anna K. Jacobs’ Teeth at Playwrights Horizons; The Marriage of Figaro at San Francisco Opera; Fefu and her Friends at Theater for a New Audience in New York City, directed by Princeton alum Lileana Blain-Cruz; King Lear with Glenda Jackson on Broadway, directed by Sam Gold; a new musical adaptation of Secret Life of Bees; The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by former Princeton faculty member John Doyle; a theatrical adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between The World and Me, directed by Kamilah Forbes; and a revival of True West on Broadway, directed by British director James McDonald. She has also designed lighting for the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park and Jitney on Broadway, both directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; All the Way and Roe directed by Bill Rauch; Annie Baker’s The Flick, directed by Sam Gold; a new musical of Amelie, directed by Pam MacKinnon; The Color Purple directed by John Doyle; and Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch directed by Lyndsey Turner. She has also been nominated for four other Drama Desk awards and three Lortel awards, and in 2013, was awarded the Henry Hewes Design Award for her work on The Flick. In 2016, Cox was awarded the Ruth Morley Design Award by the League of Professional Theater Women, and a British What’s Onstage award for her work on Hamlet. In 2020, she received a special citation from the Henry Hewes Design Awards as part of the design team for María Irene Fornés’ Fefu and Her Friends. Cox has been a company member of the Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company for 20 years. She has served on the faculty at Princeton since 2007 and became director of the Program in Theater and Music Theater in 2016.
The relentless screaming of cicadas that contributes to the rising tension in the play inspired Cox’s dress for the Tony Awards ceremony. Using a print fabric featuring large cicadas on a green background, the dress was designed and constructed by the Lewis Center’s Assistant Costume Shop Manager Caitlin Brown. The look was heightened by a large cicada pendant.
Cox, a Princeton resident, was joined at the Tony Awards ceremony by her husband Evan Alexander and daughter Beckett.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Theater and Music Theater and the Lewis Center for the Arts, including the more than 110 courses offered each year and the more than 120 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented annually, most of them free.
