"Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design," Article 8

[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, of which this is  the final installment.  The eighth and last article in the AT lighting series, also the final article from the print edition of American Theatre, is “They Speak Lighting” by Stuart Miller, a look at master lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer and how they work with directors.]

Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

“THEY SPEAK LIGHTING”

by Stuart Miller

How master designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer help us see what their directors want to show us.

The cast of The Iceman Cometh stands in a circle onstage at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, hands clasped, lines from the play ricocheting from one actor to another. It’s a starry group—David Morse, Bill Irwin, Colm Meaney, and, of course, Denzel Washington—yet during this rehearsal they are left in semi-darkness. The only person fully illuminated is an 80-year-old man, standing alone, unmoving, at the top of the staircase stage right.

That man, Jules Fisher, is not part of the cast, yet he is an essential part of the show; he has been lighting up stages in New York City (and beyond) for more than 50 years. Fisher, along with his working partner Peggy Eisenhauer, 55, are among the preeminent lighting designers in the American theatre, while also lending their illuminative talents to movies, rock concerts, opera, and Las Vegas spectacles. Fisher made his Broadway debut in 1963, seven years before a Tony Award for lighting even existed. He has been nominated, solo or with Eisenhauer, 21 times for that award, winning nine.

Light is, of course, ephemeral—both wave and particle, a thing and not a thing. And even for old hands like Fisher and Eisenhauer, things get a bit blurry when they try to describe what they do, whether it’s to a reporter or to a director counting on them to match his or her vision, or to a producer about to lay out a major investment for the equipment they need before a show.

“Our primary job is enhancing the mood and emotion of the storytelling,” Eisenhauer says, hastening to add, “The most difficult thing about being a lighting designer is communicating what we do.”

The pair has struggled over the years to develop a vocabulary that directors and producers can relate to, pulling in words or phrases from other media. “We can relate something we’re planning to a painting or music or to a scene from The Godfather,” Fisher says, and Eisenhauer chimes in that they “collect words” that resonate—“words about speed and tempo and time, or an emotional quality, and every word that has to do with brightness or dimness or darkness or shadow and time of day.”

Ultimately, Fisher says, to communicate fully they need to look at the director face to face to “see in their eyes if they understand what we are saying. We are trying to inhabit the mind of the director.”

This kind of mind reading is necessary because, until a show is up onstage, there is no way to demonstrate in advance how a lighting design will work. Even during that Iceman rehearsal, Fisher was pointing out how the actors’ street clothes would reflect or absorb the light differently than their costumes.

“We can’t show them what we are planning beforehand,” Fisher emphasizes. “The costume designers or scenic designers can bring a rendering, a photograph, or a model to show the director or producer.” This isn’t just an aesthetic challenge but an economic one: Producers have to take their word that they need a half-million dollars worth of equipment rather than a quarter-million dollars worth. “It is a gigantic leap of faith on the part of producers,” Eisenhauer concedes, explaining that directors are at least more attuned to their ideas and concepts, like working with the dynamics of a space.

Some of this has to be modesty, as directors continually clamor to work with the duo. Director George C.  Wolfe has previously collaborated with them 11 times before Iceman.  “George shows confidence in us, and we’ve developed a shorthand with him,” Fisher says. “He rarely says ‘make this blue’ or ‘make that brighter’—he’ll say, ‘I don’t understand the fear in that scene,’” and his designers will interpret that on their lighting board.

Wolfe might be the team’s biggest fan. “They have incredible sense of craft and storytelling, regardless of what show it is,” the prolific director says. “On Jelly’s Last Jam, I had the idea of darkness as a color, and they were able to articulate that. And on Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk, I wanted lighting fueled by the rhythm—and they did that.”

In Noise/Funk, Wolfe wanted the dancing to suddenly bring a lynching to mind. He says that Eisenhauer and Fisher took that impulse and translated it by embedding a light in the cotton bales onstage to make it look like the dancer’s head was disembodied.

Fisher had climbed up onstage during Wolfe’s Iceman rehearsal just hours before a preview because he and Eisenhauer were relentlessly trying to tweak a minor problem. “Denzel leans over every night when he’s on the staircase, taking him out where there is no light,” Fisher explains, after climbing down from Washington’s spot on the staircase. “We ask him to stand straight, but he has his way of doing it. Now Peggy has found way to keep him in the light that should work. We’ll see tonight.”

The Lennon-McCartney-style share-all-credit partnership between Fisher and Eisenhauer is unusual in lighting design, which is typically a field for solo artists, and it’s even more surprising because of the quarter-century difference in their ages. Yet it was that gap that actually led to their working together.

Fisher grew up in Norristown, Pa., and as a child aspired to be a magician, another field that relies on a flair for making audiences see what you want them to see. An uncle in New York would take him to magic shows where he’d see how the magicians used lighting to their advantage. In Delbert Unruh’s book The Designs of Jules Fisher, the designer recalls building a puppet theatre with red and blue bulbs, then creating switches that enabled him to mix the colors in different ways. On the stage crew in high school, he’d sneak in alone and run the dimmers in the theatre to see how the colors mixed there.

“I liked science—the idea of the physics of things,” Fisher recalls. He really wanted to be a magician, but this son of a delicatessen owner was “too practical” to take the plunge. “Maybe it was a mistake—maybe I would have been a wonderful magician,” he says with a laugh.

Instead, in 1954, after his last year of high school, he worked for the summer at the Valley Forge Music Fair doing various jobs. “I looked up at the lighting and said, ‘I can do that,’” Fisher recalls. He got encouragement from a colleague who told him that Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) had the top lighting program. Fisher was already enrolled at Penn State but he quit to move to Philadelphia, where he picked up a job loading in shows, many heading for Broadway, while working in lighting in amateur theatre.

One day he was carrying lights for The Most Happy Fella when designing legend Jo Mielziner took the time to explain some tricks of the trade to him. That made a lasting impression and helped inspire Fisher to apply to Carnegie Tech to study lighting. During his senior year there, a friend who had graduated invited him to light All the King’s Men Off-Broadway, so he got permission to miss a couple of weeks of class. Then that show’s scenic designer invited him to light the Off-Broadway production of Jerry Herman’s Parade. His professors weren’t thrilled, but Fisher would not be deterred—even when that gig led to a third show and more missed class time. He did finally graduate, and was able to move to New York as an established lighting designer in 1960.

Fisher worked on nearly two dozen Off-Broadway shows—and patented one of the first pan-and-tilt moving lights—before landing his first Broadway job in 1963 in Spoon River Anthology. He got to work with everyone from Mielziner to Richard Rodgers to Stephen Sondheim, and lit Hair not only on Broadway but all over the world. By the 1970s, he’d emerged as a star. In one seven-year span, he lit 21 Broadway shows (including an Iceman starring James Earl Jones), raking in six Tony nominations and three awards.

But his career also expanded wildly to include lighting and production supervision for epic tours by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, George Clinton, and KISS, and later the Simon & Garfunkel reunion in Central Park. He oversaw the concert sequences for the Barbra Streisand movie A Star Is Born, and started theatre consulting and architectural lighting firms, with projects including the disco Studio 54. He was so much the epitome of a lighting designer that when he wasn’t lighting such Bob Fosse shows as Pippin, Chicago, and Dancin’, he was playing a lighting designer named Jules Fisher in a small role in Fosse’s film All That Jazz.

Fisher divides most directors into nurturers or despots, but says Fosse was both—he could be cruel but still get the best out of people. “I once told him my solution to a problem he’d raised, and he asked if I was sure it would work,” Fisher recalls. When Fisher expressed confidence, Fosse changed tactics, asking if Fisher had ever used that particular idea before. Fisher said he had once, but this didn’t placate the director. “He said, ‘Then I don’t want it!’ He always wanted something fresh, something new.”

Working with Fosse on Pippin brought Fisher his first Tony, but the bigger impact on his career was the effect his magical work in that show had on the audience—or at least on one teenage girl.

Peggy Eisenhauer started training in classical piano at age six in Nyack, a New York suburb. “It was very serious,” she says, explaining that the following year her instructor added music theory to her education. “My folks didn’t know where it would lead, but they felt it really was important to learn a discipline early, to learn the importance of practice.” Eisenhauer says that her relentless work ethic and willingness to try every possibility in lighting a scene to get it right dates back to those days of endless practice. “We are performing as lighting designers—we are delivering a creative performance in the now, driven by the clock of the tight production schedule.”

When Eisenhauer was 13, her attention shifted: She started hanging around a community theatre and helping out. “I thought I wanted to be a performer, maybe a tap dancer,” she says. One day a grown-up didn’t show and they stuck this teen girl on the lighting console. She loved the job and stuck with it. Within two years she was designing lighting for the theatre.

That 13th year proved particularly important, as Eisenhauer got invited by a friend to see Pippin. Just describing the experience seems to transport Eisenhauer back to the gushing enthusiasm of a teen.

“I don’t have a great visual memory, but I can still picture this moment where Ben Vereen popped out with his white gloves and black bowler hat,” Eisenhauer recalls. “He delivered his line in a sharp purple spotlight—POW. The light created a visceral sensation.”

She noted the name of the designer, Jules Fisher, and her parents—“my clipping service”—began to look for information about him and encourage her to see shows he designed. When The New York Times profiled Fisher (“above the fold,” she remembers), her mom had the paper waiting for Peggy on her breakfast plate.

Carnegie Mellon was the ideal college for an aspiring lighting designer, but Eisenhauer readily adds that one impetus for going there was to follow in Fisher’s footsteps. On the essay question that asked, “What person, living or dead, would you want to meet, and why?” she wrote about…well, everyone reading this article can guess.

During her sophomore year she saw an announcement posted about a “mandatory attendance” lecture from a certain famous alum. Her wish was about to come true. Fisher spoke to the whole theatre department, then made a special visit to a lighting class, since the professor, Bill Nelson, had also been his professor two decades earlier. Most students asked specific questions—about what gel Fisher might use on a light in a certain scene, or the like—but Eisenhauer went for the big picture, inquiring, “How do you know if you’re any good?” Neither recall what he answered, but they both know what happened next.

Eisenhauer raced out afterward and called home (“long distance”) to gush, “Mom, I met him, I met him. It was worth all the tuition!”

Eisenhauer’s mom sprang into action and found Fisher’s address in New York, writing him a note thanking him for taking the time to talk to the class and explaining how excited her daughter had been. Fisher, who had been so thrilled as a youngster when Mielziner took the time to encourage him, wrote back (“Of course I still have the letter,” Eisenhauer says with a grin) to offer to lend her a helping hand.

So in 1982, after college, Eisenhauer ditched her summer stock gig to come to New York, where Fisher’s street cred helped get her name on the roster at the Public Theater. She worked there as a spot operator for designer Richard Nelson on The Death of Von Richtofen as Witnessed from Earth. She proved her chops assisting Nelson over the next few years, and then began assisting Fisher when she was 23. Over the next seven years she was by his side for every show.

Then, around 1992, Fisher decided that that alignment no longer made sense. “I said, ‘Well, she’s just as good at this as I am, and she can make me look even better, so we should be partners.’” A few years later they incorporated as Third Eye Studio, which shares headquarters with Fisher’s architectural lighting design company, Fisher Marantz Stone, and with his theatrical consulting company, Fisher Dachs Associates.

Their work succeeds in part, Fisher believes, because they push each other. “We look at something and see two different problems and try solving both,” he says. But, Eisenhauer points out, when they are creating, they work as a single unit: “We don’t have any pride of ownership for our ideas.”

Tommy Tune, who directed four Broadway shows lit by the duo and who first worked with Fisher back in 1973, says, “They share the same eyes, with a sense of color and drama and place and time.” Tune adds that “they have an astonishing work ethic and they maintain an equilibrium that is highly appealing in the days before a show opens, when everything is crashing.”

One reason they are able to stay relatively calm, they both say, is that they have each other. Being a lighting designer, Eisenhauer concedes, can be “isolating,” with “fear and loneliness” built in. As a duo they can face those challenges with complementary strengths: she the meticulous planner, he the more patient crisis manager.

“I take pride in planning and always think ahead and use all our experience to think about possible outcomes,” Eisenhauer says. “But when the wheels start to fly off, I don’t have the flexibility. Jules can peel off and help solve the problem. It’s amazing to me how other designers do both things at once.”

“She’s more critical—in a good sense—and will tell me why something wasn’t okay, and she’s usually right,” Fisher says. “I’m more relaxed and more used to dealing with the other personnel.”

Each day during Iceman previews, Eisenhauer and Fisher made adjustments based on notes from Wolfe and from his stage manager, but the most detailed course corrections came from the pair’s own pages and pages of notes. Those early stagings are their first chance to really see how their choices play out on the actors’ varying skin tones and in their actual costumes.

“As we go on in previews, the number of notes doesn’t decline, we just get more granular in the details,” Eisenhauer said, sitting at her temporary lighting desk in the back of the orchestra one afternoon, running through various cues on her headset with her computer programmer positioned at the back of the balcony. She methodically ran through each note, taking lights up or down one at a time, discussing with Fisher his idea about changing the color correction. They would run any significant change by Wolfe, but Fisher said the director does not insist on controlling every tiny detail. “Some directors do not want us to touch anything without consulting them,” he said.

Still, no matter what the director’s style is, Eisenhauer noted, “The director’s vision always comes first and comes last. We may feel a spark of an idea and see if we can develop it on our own, but once it grows, then we submit it to the director.” The key, Fisher chimed in wryly, is to get them to own the idea. “Then they like it because they’ve said it,” he joked.

During previews, they will sit in different seats to make sure the lighting works not only from their booth but everywhere from front of the orchestra to the back of the balcony. “Sometimes the actors look great from the balcony, but you see the light causing patterns on the stage that can be a distraction,” Fisher explained. “Or you find a dark hole and you need to fix it without making it worse elsewhere.”

Iceman’s four-hour run time and large cast means lighting the show in such a way that “the audience won’t get bored,” but Wolfe insisted it not look “too pretty or eloquent,” Eisenhauer elaborated. So ultimately “what makes Iceman exciting is that we are hiding the lighting—we are pulling the audience’s attention around and setting the right mood without people really seeing it.”

By the time that show’s previews were over, they’d solved the staircase problem: When Washington briefly appeared there, he remained brilliantly lit. And then the moment was gone in the blink of an eye, before the audience could even appreciate the time and effort that had gone into perfecting it. (Tony voters at least recognized the duo’s work with their 21st nomination.)

The Fisher-Eisenhauer partnership has not changed much over the years, though Fisher says he gradually became more trusting of Eisenhauer’s superior musicality and her understanding of rhythms in lighting. And Eisenhauer says their style has evolved over time. “I like to think we carry the influences of all the directors we have worked with,” she said.

That heritage is important, she continued, pointing out that Iceman brings them back to the very venue where Eisenhauer first worked with Fisher as his assistant back in 1985.

“It’s nice feeling a sense of community and a sense of lineage,” she said. “To know that you take a little bit of George Wolfe or Bob Fosse with you—that this is where and who you come from—is just incredible.”

[New York City-based arts journalist Stuart Miller writes frequently for American Theatre magazine.]

"Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design," Article 7

[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, which I’ll finish posting on Rick On Theater today and next week.  Post seven in the AT series on the lighting arts is another article from the print edition of American Theatre, Jerald Raymond Pierce’s “Charge of the LED Brigade,” a look at the latest lighting technology for the stage.]

Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

“CHARGE OF THE LED BRIGADE”

by Jerald Raymond Pierce

Tomorrow’s lighting technology is already here, though the changeover is not yet complete.

Theatre has come a long way from the days when “lighting” meant the ability to manipulate or work around the movement of the sun. Now theatres have extensive grids that allow designers to hang and focus tens and hundreds of lights to conjure everything from bright sunlight to a candlelit dinner, and all points in between.

Until fairly recently, if you walked into any given theatre that was setting up for tech, you’d often see a lighting designer up on a ladder on the stage, possibly with an assistant down below. They’d hang one, two, maybe a third instrument and focus all of them on the same area. One area, three lights, each with its own gel—specific colors selected to provide a warm or cool or specialized light, as the case may be.

Now you might see something a little different, as theatre is in the midst of a fundamental lighting change—one that will narrow those three instruments down to one, and make them at least partly remotely adjustable. The change has a bulky official name, Light Emitting Diode, but everyone knows it as LED.

“They’re great time-savers,” said lighting designer Kathy A. Perkins of the lighting technology that is sweeping the field. “Where I used to double-hang and triple-hang down and back light, I only do it with one light source. I’m hanging fewer lights, I’m having to focus fewer lights, and it gives me more time in tech.”

This shift will see most if not all of the traditional lighting instruments in theatres replaced with LED lights, which designers previously kept at arm’s length. About a decade ago, around 2007 and 2008, LED lights were just starting to hit stages around the world. In a 2010 interview, Tony Award-winning lighting designer Kevin Adams discussed his use of LEDs in Spring Awakening, Next to Normal, and American Idiot. At the time he used them primarily as a way to light background surfaces, he explained, and as lights to point at the audience. Specifically citing the color that LEDs were able to produce, Adams said that it was “a little bit tricky to get a variety of colors that look handsome on skin.”

That has begun to change. Around the time Adams was using LEDs mainly for supplementary lighting, Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc. (ETC) acquired the Selador product line from Selador co-founders Rob Gerlach and Novella Smith. This game-changing acquisition meant that LEDs, once possessed of a simple red/green/blue combination, could containing seven different colors, thus increasing the nuance available to designers.

Color is the key to LEDs’ appeal, as Michael Lincoln, a lighting designer and professor at Ohio University, explained, and it’s hard to understate how fundamental a change they’re making in the way lighting designers work. “We’ve never had a source before that instantly changes color, that you didn’t have to have some mechanical means of changing the color,” Lincoln marveled.

With incandescent instruments designers must place color gels in front of the light to change the color of the light onstage—the equivalent of draping a scarf over a lamp to set up lighting for a party. And to change the color, the gel either needs to be changed, or another light with a different gel has to be employed. But LEDs change colors digitally, both in the original red/blue/green models and the newer seven-colored instruments.

Lincoln, who has designed more than 300 productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in regional theatre, raved about the “crazy amount of control” that designers have with LEDs. Previously Lincoln had to use what he called “scrollers” if he wanted one incandescent instrument to create different colors during the course of a show. These attachments for the front of lighting instruments allow designers to scroll among multiple different color gels, in a programmed sequence, usually changing over repeatedly throughout a performance.

The trick, and the difficulty, comes in those changeovers. Because scrollers aren’t instantaneous, Lincoln said, a lighting designer needs to carefully figure out when to take a light out so that the machine has time to scroll to the next color—not a terribly quick process sometimes—before the light comes back up. Poor timing, or just a short blackout, can result in the light coming up while odd colors scroll by onstage, like one part of a kaleidoscope that can’t quite keep up with the rest.

LEDs have changed that, effectively putting scrollers out of their misery, according to Lincoln. “We tried to get our (scrollers) fixed and they’re like, ‘Nope, we can’t, sorry, we can’t fix those anymore,’” Lincoln explained. “You can’t get the parts. So as they die, they’re just dead.”

The advantages of LEDs being able to change colors more or less instantaneously means that the conversation designers have around lighting and color is changing, Lincoln said. Those trained in a previous era, he pointed out, are used to discussing color based on Rosco gel labels. For instance, R68 is “sort of a medium blue.” But LED systems, which don’t require gel labels at all, present designers with a circle containing the entire spectrum of light.

“You just click on a place in that color spectrum and say, ‘Give me that color,’” Lincoln said. “You don’t even pay attention to the fact that it’s an old R68 or something like that—it’s just what color looks good onstage right now.”

Designers still go through their extensive planning process before they get into the theatre and start hanging and focusing, but LEDs and their numerous color options give designers more freedom throughout the whole process. Lighting designers always create a color palette that allows them to paint with light during the tech process. What LEDs do is give them the opportunity to expand and adjust that palette on the fly, without needing to climb a ladder to replace a no-longer-needed gel.

Despite the obvious benefits, designers have had their reservations about LEDs.

“A lot of us wouldn’t use LEDs because they had such a harsh quality of lighting,” said Perkins, who has worked regionally with theatres such as St. Louis Black Rep, the Goodman, and Steppenwolf. “You could definitely tell it from an incandescent.”

LEDs were first invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr. while he was working for General Electric. The first LEDs were only red and were used for indicator lights and calculator displays in the 1970s. Soon pale yellow, green, and blue diodes were invented, which quickly led to researchers producing a white light using a combination of red, green, and blue LEDs.

Holonyak wasn’t trying replace incandescent bulbs when he invented LEDs; he wasn’t even trying to create a light source. He was actually trying to make a laser. But as researchers continued to work on his LED discovery, LEDs became brighter and found more uses, thanks to the advantages they presented over incandescent lights. While incandescent bulbs lose 90 percent of their energy as heat, because they use electricity to heat the metal filament inside until it becomes hot, LEDs emit very little heat at all. LEDs also emit light in a specific direction, which reduces the need for elements that can trap light, like reflectors and diffusers, which could result in more than half of the light never leaving the fixture.

Since their invention, LEDs have been used in flashlights, kids’ light-up shoes, optical computer mice, car headlights, and televisions. In addition to being more energy-efficient, LED bulbs can have a lifespan of upwards of 25,000 hours, or more than 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Still, despite their advancements, the different science behind LED meant they had their own particular look which theatres weren’t initially eager to accept.

The big change Lincoln has seen over the last two or three years has been in how much more intricate LEDs have become. While LED lights used to emit a distinctive cold blue light, they’re now able to mimic color temperature anywhere from the harsh fluorescent of a hospital room to the warmth of a regular tungsten fixture, like any in-home light bulb.

“The technology, as it always does, advanced rapidly, and now they’re the most sophisticated conventional unit,” Lincoln said. “You can produce a light that I don’t think any lighting designer—if they didn’t know that it was an LED source, they couldn’t tell.”

Lincoln compared the shift to what he saw when the Source Four instrument came out. Conventional instruments before the Source Four used halogen bulbs and produced a warm tungsten light. Lincoln said he heard established designers vow they’d never use the Source Four because it didn’t look like the old units. Now, he points out, the Source Four is dominant in the theatre because it was simply the most sophisticated option.

Despite initial resistance, Lincoln suspects that the LED movement will eventually be widespread. So far, however, the cost of a complete switch-over remains prohibitive for many. As an example of the price difference, Lincoln estimated that, leaving aside bulk deals, a standard Source Four instrument can run a company around $300, while an LED Source Four can be in the neighborhood of $2,300.

Christ Conti, a product manager at Production Resource Group (PRG), sits on the supply end of these transactions. PRG supplies lighting equipment and support for theatre, television, film, concerts, and other major events. Conti sees the additional cost as an unintended consequence of designers so excited to upgrade that they haven’t sufficiently planned for the changeover. One problem is that “the infrastructure,” as Conti explained, “the cable and the power and data distribution infrastructure—to connect the front end, the control console, with the back end of the lights—is a significant increase over conventional tungsten lighting. That adds cost.”

While both LED and tungsten units have power cables, Conti continued, the tungsten power connects to a dimmer, while the LED just connects to a power distribution rack. For the tungsten fixtures, a control cable is simply run to the dimmer, which only needed to control the fixture’s intensity. But for LEDs, a data cable has to be run to each LED fixture. Then, for each LED fixture, there are multiple control channels needed to control the overall intensity, as well as the red LED, the white LED, the blue LED, the green LED, and combinations of the four to make the color the designer chooses. The sheer amount of physical data means that a more refined and capable lighting console is needed.

“Often,” Conti said, “that infrastructure cost gets lost or it gets forgotten about until you have to pay the piper on it.”

But it’s money well spent in the long run, Lincoln noted. LEDs are “really expensive, but then they are so much more efficient; they use about 10 percent of the power that an old fixture uses. Producing organizations have to get on board, or they’re left behind.”

And the increase in availability has started to lead some prices to come down, which should help smaller theatres to afford more. Conti said he’s seen high schools start to buy and use LED tape—thin strips of programmable LEDs that can be attached to set pieces for illumination. LED tape is an easy gateway to LEDs in general, because it’s low-cost and doesn’t require a lot of skill to pull off.

So far the cost of the best LED fixtures has meant that the shift has happened most rapidly where there’s money for it: on Broadway, where producers and rental companies have been willing to invest in the latest technology.

Broadway is also on the front lines of another big change for lighting designers: video projection. In some cases, LED has gotten into that act. On Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a show on which PRG worked, LED video screens were used. These large panels can be used behind scenery as a cyc or backdrop, or can even be used as moveable legs, as they were in Spider-Man. Adding these massive video panels—in the case of Spider-Man, eight feet wide and 33 feet high—adds a new challenge for lighting designers, who have to work with the panels and consider them as their own light source.

“It’s an arms race,” Conti said. “When you start incorporating LED video panels, the light levels onstage go up significantly. It’s a big Lite-Brite, for lack of a better term.” He did point out that rarely do they run LED video panels above 30 or 40 percent power, dimming them as much as possible. But even then, “when you have a video wall, it’s hundreds of thousands of LEDs. It puts off a lot of light.”

Both because of cost, and perhaps just ease, many theatres still use traditional projectors for video elements. This has added another element that lighting designers are still figuring out the best way to collaborate with.

“There’s a lot more of a blend now,” Conti said. “We see the lighting guys are wanting to control the light levels onstage a lot better, so they’re working with the video guys or, in many cases, are handling the video themselves. We’re seeing a lot more cross-pollination between the departments, and the lines between the departments are blending.”

Another technological change that’s gaining momentum (literally) is moving lights. Conti pointed out that while moving lights have been fairly common for the last decade or so, the trickle-down of affordable products is in full swing. “It used to be only top-tier productions were able to afford that,” Conti said. “That’s no longer the case. The barrier of entry has been lowered significantly.”

For Perkins, moving lights and products like I-Cue’s have proven invaluable tools. I-Cue attaches a programmable mirror to the front of a basic instrument, effectively turning that instrument into a moving light. Now Perkins is able to handle contemporary plays that call for more offbeat locations and numerous scenes.

“With younger playwrights, they write for TV,” Perkins said. “It’s no longer A Raisin in the Sun, all in the kitchen or the living room. They’re all over the place.”

Moving lights give her the freedom to know that she can give the director as many specials (lights used to highlight a particular area or object) as needed; she never has to say she doesn’t have enough instruments, or that the crew needs to refocus instruments that are already up in the air. She can simply program a moving light to do the heavy lifting she needs.

“Light plots on Broadway—I would say most of them are predominantly moving lights,” Lincoln said. “On Broadway, space is at such a premium because those theatres really aren’t very big. They’re desperate for every square inch, so if you put a bunch of moving lights in, you’ve got ultimate flexibility.”

Between LEDs and moving lights, lighting grids across the country could look completely different within the next few decades—assuming, of course, that the prices for LEDs, moving lights, and the highly coveted moving LEDs come down to something manageable for regional and smaller theatres. The advancements that LEDs have seen have simply made them irresistible to most in the industry.

“If I had enough money,” Lincoln said, “I would go to all LEDs on everything we have.”

[Chicago-based writer Jerald Raymond Pierce is a former intern of American Theatre magazine.

[There’s one more article in the American Theatre series on lighting .  I hope readers will return on Sunday, 11 November, for the last article, a look at master lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer and how they work with directors.]

"Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design," Article 6

[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, which I’ll post on Rick On Theater over the next few weeks.  The fourth article in AT’s “Light the Lights”  series, the first from the print edition of American Theatre, is “Andrew Hungerford: Art + Science” by Jackie Mulay,  about  the lighting designer who’s artistic director of Know Theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio.]

Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

“ANDREW HUNGERFORD: ART + SCIENCE”

by Jackie Mulay

A tall, lanky man in his late 30s stands in front of a small but packed house. He rocks on his feet, practically dancing with anticipation, and flashes the audience a beaming smile. As he launches into the de rigueur “no cell phones, note the exits” pre-show monologue, he cracks jokes with the lighthearted familiarity of someone who has done this approximately 1,000 times before. This man is Andrew Hungerford, and he is the producing artistic director at Know Theatre of Cincinnati.

But Hungerford also wears a few other hats: He’s the director as well as the scenic and lighting designer of tonight’s show, the regional premiere of playwright Lauren Gunderson’s Ada & the Engine, a play about scientific pioneer Ada Byron Lovelace, who invented the first computer program, and her relationship with inventor Charles Babbage, the “father of computers.”

“I was lucky enough to have seen the demonstration of Babbage’s machine about 10 years ago, before I read this play,” Hungerford recalled a few days before opening, leaning back in his chair at the local coffee shop just around the corner from the Know. “Watching it work was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” he said.

It’s not just the kind of show Hungerford is attracted to but one he may be uniquely suited to. (His theatre previously staged Gunderson’s Silent Sky, another show about forgotten women in scientific history.) An unlikely pairing of science and art has characterized Hungerford’s career in the theatre from the start, and may be the reason for his singular position as a lighting designer who runs a theatre.

His college résumé gives some clue as to his diverse interests: He holds a B.S. in astrophysics and a B.A. in theatre from Michigan State University, as well as an MFA in lighting design from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. One reason he’s not doing science today, in fact, is that it was in the university’s theatre department that he discovered the passion that would become his profession. At Michigan State, as part of an assistantship, Hungerford happened to shadow a professor who was assigned to the school’s scenic and lighting department. That was his first exposure to design.

His original plan, he explained, had been to go to grad school for physics and seek theatre design work on the side. But after doing another assistantship for an astrophysics professor, he saw the tedium of that line of work in the field, and his plans shifted dramatically.

“I spent more time working on shows than, say, my thermodynamics homework,” he recalled with a twinkle in his eye.

In 2001, Hungerford studied abroad in London, and there he saw Robert Lepage’s one-man show The Far Side of the Moon, performed in both English and French (“The French version is 15 minutes longer, which I find fascinating,” he interjected). The final scene of the show, he said, left him with an image and impression he will never forget: a scene featuring Lepage, a bed, two mirrors, and an orange that created the illusion that Lepage was sitting up in bed and the orange was floating. This moment, Hungerford said, changed the trajectory of his life.

“This is the thing that made me think, okay, I have to do theatre,” he says. “Visually inventive worlds are the center of my design aesthetic.”

After that fateful trip, Hungerford began assisting in scenic design. Then in his junior year he discovered lighting design, in what might literally be described as a lightbulb moment. “Lighting design awoke the science part of my brain,” he recalled.

Indeed lighting design fused Hungerford’s two academic interests in a perfect marriage of two subjects often thought to be wildly different from each other. “The depth of research of science combined with the artistry was so engaging and compelling,” he said. “So I ran with that and then designed as many shows as possible.”

At times Hungerford’s right-brain/left-brain intellect can seem intimidating. Local actor Maggie Lou Rader, who is also Know Theatre’s education director, described her boss’s intelligence as a vital asset. As an example, she offered an anecdote about starring as Henrietta Levitt in Gunderson’s Silent Sky, which told the story of the women at Harvard Observatory who manually mapped the stars and galaxies the male scientists observed. When she asked Hungerford why the play’s characters were “charting this and this and this,” and “why is that important?” he sat down and enthusiastically explained it all to her in detail. “I think I gathered enough to understand why Henrietta was brilliant, but that was the extent,” she said with a laugh.

You can see what she means: Hungerford’s eyes positively glow with enthusiasm when he describes the favorite gel colors he uses in his designs. But the way he speaks about those colors and their inspiration is so poetic, you almost wouldn’t believe he’s thinking about the science too. His current favorite color belongs to the LEE palette and is LEE 728, which is called Steel Green, which he described thus, “I love it because it’s the color of a summer sky in Michigan as a tornado approaches. It’s such a great, unexpected color, and it looks spectacular on scenery.”

Hungerford often uses paintings and photographs from the period in which the show he’s designing is set to find the color palettes for the show. Lately he’s taken a particular interest in blue-green and silver gels. “There’s something really painterly about it,” he describes. “Combining unexpected colors so you get unexpected undertones adds depth to the overall picture.”

Part of his design process includes analyzing the script to determine the actionable goals of the characters moment to moment, then designing a lighting plot that supports those goals. “For me, lighting design is about taking it all and translating it into the actual lighting systems,” he explained.

Hungerford got his professional start as a lighting designer in 2004 at the Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati, then was hired by the Know’s artistic director, Jason Bruffy, to be the theatre’s resident scenic and lighting designer in 2007. In 2010, he started another role as a set, lighting, and sometime sound designer at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company.

Darnell Pierre Benjamin met Hungerford when the latter was the scenic designer for Know Theatre’s 2010 staging of Angels in America. But their professional working relationship extended through work at both the Know and Cincinnati Shakespeare Company.

“I saw him as a nerdy guy who was somehow able to have great social skills,” Benjamin recalled, smiling fondly. “Whenever we did chat, we always had great conversations. But our friendship flourished right as he became artistic director at the Know.”

That was in late 2012. The interview for the artistic director position took place in the local coffee shop around the corner from the theatre. It was a casual conversation with the Know’s then-artistic director, Eric Vosmeier, and it lasted around 15 minutes. It ended with a difficult choice for Hungerford, whose home is in L.A. with his wife, Elizabeth, a screenwriter.

“It was tough, because I am based in L.A., but I had invested five years of my life into the organization at the time,” Hungerford said. “Which seems like such a small amount of time looking back,” he added.

All of the previous artistic directors at the Know came from directing backgrounds, as do most artistic directors of most theatres. Hungerford brings with him a different way of looking at theatre. While he has taken on many other roles at the Know, his lighting design remains paramount to his vision. “There have only been two or three times in my career where someone has designed the lighting for a set I designed,” he said.

While it’s rare for a designer to run a theatre, Hungerford has found a way to incorporate his lighting background into his work on scenic design and his directing as well. There is no better example of Hungerford succeeding at this than with Ada & the Engine.

That play, he said, was his favorite show to design so far, in part because he had been thinking about it for such a long time. “I thought about what I wanted it to be, but it didn’t crystalize,” he explained. “Like, I had all of these amorphous thoughts. It was partly the struggle that made it so satisfying. It turned into something super-magical.”

Magical is a good word for the work produced at the Know, whose own website describes itself as “Cincinnati’s Theatrical Playground.” A pointedly experimental theatre, the Know hosts several programs outside of the regular mainstage season, including an annual Fringe Festival, which introduces new shows from independent artists over the course of 11 days, hosting more than 150 live performances from groups all over the country.

Reflecting on the Know programming outside the mainstage, Benjamin observed that the content seems to get stranger and stranger. “Andrew is seen as the leader of the weird stuff,” Benjamin said. “He is more than willing to give people a place to test things.”

A good example would be the show Calculus: The Musical, a musical comedy about a contemporary student named Ada who is visited by the historic Isaac Newton. After its 2007 Cincinnati Fringe performance, Calculus: The Musical became the only show in Fringe history to be granted an extended run due to audience demand. This year, Calculus: The Musical kicked off the Cincinnati Fringe Festival’s announcement party with a revival performance, proving that there is always a home for the offbeat at the Know.

One reason Hungerford ardently pursues producing and introducing the Cincinnati community to new works has to do with their content—and their design challenges. Benjamin recalled working with Hungerford on a show in which Benjamin was an actor and Hungerford was the lighting designer. “He asked me to stand in place for a while,” Benjamin said. “I’m not stupid—I’m a dark-skinned black man surrounded by pale white people. That is not easy to light.”

He asked Hungerford if that was the reason for the long lighting process, and the designer confirmed it with a wry smile. Benjamin found it “so refreshing” that the designer would make the effort to ensure everyone involved in the production receive the same level of attention to detail, something Benjamin hasn’t often encountered in his career, he said.

Hungerford’s sensitivity to diversity and inclusion onstage also suffuses the shows he selects as the Know’s artistic director. A crucial aspect of producing new plays is a bold commitment to telling diverse stories. “He’s very passionate about giving voices to marginalized groups,” Benjamin said.

As Hungerford put it, “We have such problems with representation on our stages that any opportunity we have to expand who is represented onstage in all aspects, the better. I want our plays to reflect the diversity of the world around us. This is the world we live in; let’s represent it.”

In addition to being a home for diversity, Alice Flanders, Know Theatre’s managing director, said she thinks of the theatre as “a breeding ground for young artists. One of Andrew’s favorite things is to host the opening or regional premieres of shows,” she added. As a member of the National New Play Network (NNPN), the Know has become quite familiar with staging new works and regional premieres.

Rader described working on the premiere of a show called Pulp, by Joseph Zettelmaier, which the Know hosted as part of the NNPN’s Rolling World Premiere program, which supports three or more theatres willing to produce a show during a 12-month period. As a part of the process, Zettelmaier came in to watch a run.

“To have the playwright in the room was so scary, and it was something that none of us had ever done before,” Rader explained. But because Hungerford made the effort to lighten the room and relieve the stress, it turned into one of the most fun rehearsal periods Rader’s had. Hungerford has a knack for stress relief, she said. “If it ever does get tense he’ll be the first to remind you that, ‘Eh, you know, it’s just a play.’”

“If we’re not having fun practicing our art in the room, why are we doing this?” Hungerford asked rhetorically. “If the cast had fun and had an enjoyable experience making the show, then the audience can see and feel it. It’s part of that infectious joy of the live experience.”

A sense of humor and cool under pressure is something those who’ve worked with Hungerford for a long time have noticed. Jeremy Dubin, company member and director of creative education at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, described Hungerford as a “fount of positivity. I think he always tends to influence a room. He always brings kind of a lightness to it.”

My first encounter with Hungerford rang all these bells. I was invited to an off-site rehearsal for Ada & the Engine; I’d slipped in through the side door as he was offering direction to the cast. He stood, settled onto one of his lanky hips, one hand entangled in his scruffy brown hair, as he searched excitedly for the right words to capture his thoughts. When he finished, he jumped back into his chair and directed the cast to begin the scene again before grabbing his coffee mug.

This first introduction perfectly captured his sense of humor, his creative passion, and his love for science: On his coffee mug was Neil deGrasse Tyson and the words, “Y’all Mothafuckas Need Science.”

[Jackie Mulay is a theater critic and writer based in Cincinnati.

[There are three more articles in the American Theatre series on lighting design.  I hope readers will return on Thursday, 8 November, for the next post, a look at the latest technology in stage lighting, already in use across the U.S.]