How to Embrace the Dramaturgy of Creative Caption Design

Captions play an important role in the accessibility of theatrical productions for all audience members, particularly those who are d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHOH), neurodivergent, and/or living with sensory processing disorders. Secondary to their use as an accessibility tool, captions are an important visual element of a theatrical production and should be approached with the same thought, artistry, and attention as design elements like lighting and projections. This is where the concept of creative captions come in.

Creative captions are integrated into the set and developed alongside lighting and projections to ensure visibility and legibility. This process introduces discussions of captions and accessibility from the first production meeting and allows the development of the production to affect the caption design.

So how does one approach creative caption design?

I have worked on a variety of productions as a caption designer, most while I was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). I’ll use two of these projects, Unstageably Fresh Gynt and Macbeth, as case studies in creative caption design. My work participates in a growing landscape of access work in theatrical spaces, from creative captioners like Tim Kelly to access dramaturgs—as introduced in an essay by Alison Kopit, Ann Marie Dorr, and Maggie Bridger—and disability-centric artists such as Morgan Skolnik.

The Landscape of Captioning

Approaches to captioning in theatre include closed captioning, with captions on devices used by individual audience members; open captioning, with captions all audience members can see; and creative captioning, a form of open captioning incorporated into the design of the show.

With apps like GalaPro, closed captions are an accessibility tool offered to audience members that require them to opt-in using their own devices. At theatres with the resources to provide open captions, they are most often prewritten captions displayed on a three-line LED screen and run live by a captioner in the audience. The company StageText, for example, is a deaf-led charity that works with theatres, museums, and presenters in the United Kingdom to provide open captioning using a three-line LED screen set on or near the stage.

Open- and closed-captioning serve similar but different roles: closed captions are individualized, with the formatting often controlled by the user. They are typically available at most or all performances for a given production. Open captions allow for less distracting accessibility for the user, as the captions will be closer to the action of the show. They are often only available for a select set of performances in the run of a show. Open captions are also more communal, as the entire audience has access to them instead of opting in individually.

Creative Captioning builds on the foundation created by open- and closed-captioning to establish the accessibility tool as a design element that participates in and supports the world of the show. Formatting such as color, font, placement, line breaks, timing, and speaker attribution is approached artistically alongside scenery, lighting, projections, and sound.

Dramaturgy in Captions

In the design and production process, one role of dramaturgy is to advocate for the audience. Captions connect to dramaturgy as a form of the script that supports and contextualizes the acting and directing choices onstage. Creative caption design asks the dramaturgical question of what information can be delivered to the audience to support their engagement in the production. In this way, a dramaturgical perspective can enhance the audience’s comprehension of the show, whether they use captions to follow the dialogue or not.

Dramaturgical considerations in captions can be applied to various design elements. For example, text color could be matched to costume design for the most efficient identification of the speaker, or it could represent a characteristic of the character. Different fonts create different perceptions of tone and status. Placement of captions onstage can mirror blocking. Even punctuation and line splitting (the practice of choosing how a line of dialogue is split between captions) will impact the audience’s perception of the production. Descriptions of sound are also a great opportunity for dramaturgy, as describing the intended feeling or impact of a sound in addition to the literal description (i.e. “bittersweet piano music”) is more accessible.

Case Studies: Unstageably Fresh Gynt and Macbeth

Unstageably Fresh Gynt, produced at RIT in the fall of 2024, consisted of Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater as its first act and a physical theatre adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as its second act. The shows shared a production team and crew but had different casts, directors, and stage management teams. I was a student caption designer. In 2025, I returned to RIT professionally as the caption designer for a physical theatre production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Each show held unique challenges and solutions to various captioning elements.

Caption Placement and Program

As with any other theatrical design, the caption designer should discuss how the captions will fit into the vision for the show as a whole. The designer also needs to know as early as possible where the captions will be located and how they interact with other design elements. An ideal caption background is static, flat, and entirely one plain color—preferably gray or a dark shade.

Captions in Unstageably Fresh Gynt were projected onto a dark brown wooden board upstage and vertically center. Benefits of this included its set location, the ability to light it separately from the backdrop and stage, and a consistent, monochrome background for the captions. There were small disadvantages in the range of font sizes that could be used and the shadow the wooden board cast on the backdrop. These captions were built on Google Slides and run through Keynote, which allowed them to be built outside of the rehearsal space and by multiple people simultaneously, though formatting proved time-consuming and fickle.

For Macbeth, the set had a cyclorama upstage. This was regularly lit by various fixtures to create shadows and environments through color. The captions were projected onto the cyclorama with the lighting, which allowed for larger text and more flexibility in spacing but minimized the range of legible font colors, particularly with scenes that used drastically different light colors. These captions were built and run through Qlab using their subtitles workspace; I built off of existing code to incorporate font and color choices.

Font and Color

Once the technical aspects are determined, the caption designer understands which colors they can use, if they want to use colors at all, and how much space they have. Some shows may have an additional need for the design. For example, Unstageably Fresh Gynt needed consistency for the audience across the two different shows. I accomplished this by keeping the same base font and text placement for both.

For Freshwater, the characters often quote well-known writers or scholars (including themselves) to sound more intelligent and show off their knowledge. To represent this tone shift in the captions, we added a “quotation font” that would be used only for the quotation itself. This communicated to the audience a change in tone from the actor and showed which part of a sentence was quoted.

Similarly, in Macbeth, there were three separate fonts used to establish groups of characters: the “serving class” characters (murderers, attendants, messengers, etc.) were captioned with a sans serif font, the “royal” characters with a serif font, and the “supernatural” characters with a font closer to handwriting.

The color of caption text works best for accessibility when it matches the costumes, as the color change in the captions will signal a change in speaker and identify the speaker through their costume. Where this matching is not possible, the color choice can instead give more information about the character. There are shows where colorful captions don’t fit into the design and will break the audience out of the show, in which case white text should be used.

For Freshwater and Peer Gynt, I utilized both costume color-coding and text colors connected to character traits and lighting. The text colors for two characters in Freshwater were chosen in relation to each other: George Frederick Watts’s captions were red to represent his passion and anger, and John Craig’s captions were pink to oppose Watts’s toxicity and portray a healthier form of masculinity. Peer Gynt consisted of five scenes with different actors playing the titular Peer (whose captions were red, to match the red scarf they all shared), each with a different color palette for lighting. In each scene, the captions used different shades of the lighting color to tie the characters to their time in the story.

The approach to text color in Macbeth changed late in the process due to the intensity of the light on the cyclorama. After I looked through cues with the lighting designer, it became clear that choosing one color for a character to carry throughout the show would not work across various lighting looks. To consider text color options, I spoke with our Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL) and a Deaf audience member who watched the show during tech. We determined that white was the most reliable color throughout the show, but a minor change to distinguish speakers would still be helpful to the audience. The final design had the first speaker in each scene use white captions, while every following character used a light or pastel shade that appropriately contrasted the lighting on the cyclorama. This solution maintained the visual cue of a new speaker while making sure the captions were still legible, and it had the added benefit of centering each scene around the first speaker.

Caption Format

The format of the caption is another element that benefits from a dramaturgical approach. It’s important to think about how the caption will be read by the audience. In both Unstageably Fresh Gynt and Macbeth, captions always began with the character’s name bolded on the top line. This clarified who was speaking at all times and provided a visual anchor for the audience.

Format also includes the way the lines are written, including line breaks. Where do actors place the emphasis in a line? Is there a joke that you don’t want to give away too early? Splitting up lines to match the actors’ delivery increases accessibility by ensuring that audience members using captions receive the show in a similar time and rhythm as the rest of the audience. Similarly, timing jokes or suspenseful moments through line splitting allows those moments to hit the entire audience at the same time, ensuring no audience members have jumped ahead or been left behind.

The most important aspect of the format is the layout of each part of the caption—name, dialogue, and sound—on the projection surface. In the case of Freshwater, sound effects rarely occurred under dialogue, so sounds were displayed as their own captions in between lines. Peer Gynt, on the other hand, had a near-constant soundscape made by instruments and actors underneath and in between lines of dialogue, so the sound descriptions had to be projected constantly alongside the dialogue. During moments of silence, the “sound effect” section of the caption would be left blank, to mirror the audible silence with a visual one. 

Macbeth and Peer Gynt were physical theatre adaptations by the same director, and both had a focus on sound. For that reason, I initially built captions for Macbeth following the design established in Peer Gynt. However, because Macbeth’s captions were on a cyclorama and not a separate board, the DASL and I recognized that the side-by-side approach was not as accessible, and centering the captions would be best. The final layout had sound descriptions projected in smaller text underneath the dialogue.

Designing for Operation

The final element of caption design has to do with the operator. How can the captions be built to serve the person running them in the show? The most important aspect for the operator is line splitting. The closer the captions are to the way the actors say the lines, the easier it is for the operator to run with the actors. This includes the pauses, pacing, and emphasis an actor performs.

An advantage of running in Google Slides or Keynote is the ease of going backwards if an operator moves too quickly, but sounds and dialogue cannot be projected separately in these programs. In Qlab, sounds and dialogue can be cued separately and timed or played independent of each other, but it’s much harder to go backwards. The best bet is to get an operator in the rehearsal room as early as possible once the show has solidified, so they can get a sense of how the timing and performance runs.

The Access of Captions Goes Beyond Just the Script

Approaching captions as a design element incorporates them into the world of the show and, by extension, includes the audience members who rely on them. Captions provide access for d/Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and neurodivergent audiences, as well as those with sensory processing disorders, those who struggle to understand accents, and those for whom the language of the dialogue is not their native language.

When we apply a dramaturgical lens to this tool, we open up an entire world of discussion with the audience, allowing them to access a deeper understanding and engagement in the characters and shows they’re seeing. There is no one way or best way to caption a show; every script, operator, and production will have different focuses and needs. Some shows may require adaptations or concessions, or design elements like fonts and colors may be inaccessible in the space. Building and designing captions can be time-consuming, but it is also incredibly rewarding to be able to share the stories onstage with more audience members and provide deeper insight to all participants.