With reference to a play you have studied, consider how playwrights incorporates light to convey their ideas.

Excerpt of longer essay, comparing Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Lighting in the opening scenes is used by Williams and Milled to present the hardships faced by their protagonist against suffocating realities. In the visual presentation of the singular Loman home  surrounded by the towering angular building of the city, Miller uses light to enhance concrete shapes. The building are covering in a harsh orange lights, contrasting to the singular beam of calm blue rising from the Loman home. The visual contrast between the blue light of the house, with undertones of of illusion and hope, and the orange lights, with understones of aggressiona and tension, is symbolizing a family lost in their illusions against an unforgiving reality. Stifled and suffocated by the forces of life, Willy escaped to illusions, the blue light amonst the orange, which is what Miller conveys to the audience in their own experience of this entrapment. Similar to Miller, Wolliams uses the opening lighting of Scene 3 to reflect character turmoil. When Tom is fighitng with his mother, the stage is covered in a smoky red glow of light, which connotes anger and frustration as well as passion. In the context of Tom's situation of having to remain where he is despite his deams of wanting to travel the world, Williams uses the red glow as a visual representation of Tom's confined passions. In their respective plays, the use of lighting presents particular characters situations. Miller reflects his protagonists stifling of dreams, and Williams's reflects the tension his protagonists feels at home as a result of his frustrated disillusionment, a senitment shared by both.