[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. First up are two pieces: one is a general introduction to the series and the second, a possibly unusual article for a discussion of lighting: “A Hazy Shade of Theatre: The Case for Clearer Design” by William Youmans, a stage actor and singer, is about fog and haze on 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.
“WHAT
SHINES THROUGH”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt
To tell the story of theatrical lighting design, we need
to get beyond adjectives and surfaces.
“Dusky.” “Stark.” “Versatile.”
These are some of the
adjectives I’ve used most frequently to describe lighting design in my former
(and still occasional) life as a theatre critic. Designers must know this
drill all too well: Most stage reviews focus on the work of the playwright,
with some reference to the lead performances and the work of the director,
followed by a sprinkling of somewhat obligatory mentions of set, lighting,
sound, and costumes. Typically the most these hard-working folks receive in a
review, if they’re mentioned at all, is an adjective next to their name
attempting to suggest the competence of their work (“deft,” “resourceful,”
“fluid”) or to characterize its special qualities (“glaring,” “wintry,”
“mottled,” “creepy,” “sepulchral”). In my partial defense, in my reviews I have
very occasionally devoted whole sentences to the work of designers, and even
used other parts of speech—verbs, nouns, adverbs—to capture what I think
they’re doing. But I confess that I, like many of my critical colleagues, have
mostly raided my thesaurus and imagination to come up with succinct one- or
two-word summations of what I’ve seen. (Real talk: When it comes to lighting I
apparently have food on the brain, as I’ve variously used such descriptors as
“egg-dye,” “oven-baking,” “deliciously rich,” “marzipan,” and, getting right to
the point, “edible.”)
Indeed, while lighting design
is seen as so central to movies it’s called cinematography, the work of stage
lighting designers may be the most imperceptible to the average theatregoer
(and hence to professional theatregoers, a.k.a. critics). Sets and costumes are
three-dimensional, often pictorial things, and sound design unmistakably greets
our ears; even projection design, a cousin of sorts to lighting, is right there
before our eyes. But lighting designers work on and over those palpable
surfaces, directing our attention and framing how we see more
than what we see. Their closest analogues in the film world, funnily enough,
may be sound designers: You may not quite be able to point to their work—it
seems like a simple sensory given, that there is light onstage and sound on
film—but you’d certainly miss it if it were gone. Perhaps music is a better
analogy: As the fin de siecle producer/playwright David Belasco, no slouch in
the lighting department, once said, “Lights are to a drama what music is to the
lyrics of a song…No other factor that enters into the production of a play is
so effective in conveying its moods and feeling.”
Belasco’s heyday stretched
from the 1880s through the 1920s, which means that he got in on the ground
floor of a fundamental change in theatrical lighting: from gas to electric. The
field now seems to be on the cusp of another huge transition, from incandescent
to LED, as reporter Jerald Raymond Pierce details in a story in this issue. American
Theatre doesn’t typically delve too deeply into stage tech, but
for this issue on the theme of stage lighting, we found that to do the
subject justice we had to go beyond talking about the art with such masters
as Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer or such emerging talents as Know
Theatre artistic director Andrew Hungerford. Like lighting designers, we
felt the need to reckon with the how as much as the what, all the better to
expand our vocabulary beyond mere adjectives. You might even say we’ve seen the
light.
[Rob Weinert-Kendt
is editor-in-chief of American Theatre. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles
Times. He studied film at USC and is a composer
member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.]
* * * *
“A HAZY SHADE OF THEATRE: THE CASE FOR CLEARER DESIGN”
by William Youmans
Stage fog and haze are great tools for the
right occasion. But must they be a default design element?
During
a performance of Bright Star, the superb Broadway musical of two seasons
past by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, a cast member was momentarily engulfed
by a cloud of fog. Stephen Bogardus, playing Daddy Cane, was “frog gigging”
on the bank of a river in North Carolina, and all river banks are always
completely covered in fog, as anyone who has ever been to one knows. It is a
truth universally acknowledged that you cannot show a river in a play unless
its banks are shrouded in fog; it just wouldn’t feel like a river. The fog
gives the impression of dampness, a quality hard to convey on a dry
stage—unless it’s covered with fog.
Bogardus
completely disappeared for a few seconds, just like Isaac Hayes did on the
Oscars that one time, earning him the nickname Isaac Haze. Eventually
Stephen was able to dispel the fog with a few vigorous waves of his arms; we
could see him again, and the play went on, after a few adroit improvised lines
from Stephen’s voice within the cloud (“Who started the car?” and “Is the
sausage burning?”).
Legends
of stage fog vanishings are legion. One tale has it that after the fog
cleared in Phantom of the Opera one night in the late 2000s,
an actor completely disappeared, only to turn up the following week in a touring
company of Jersey Boys. This is almost certainly exaggerated. (It
didn’t add credibility to the tale that the allegedly apparating actor’s name
was Rosco Fogg.)
Stephen
Bogardus, at any rate, did not report any ill effects from his submersion. He
was called on to roll over in the fog every night, breathing in quite a bit of
the stuff, and so far has not reported any symptoms.
Stage
“fog” is generally of two kinds: Let’s call them “fog” and “haze,”
respectively. The fog that enswathed Stephen, and on which the cute angels can
be seen sitting in in the current Broadway production of Carousel (sometimes
it sits on them), is produced from a compound made by a German company
called Look Solutions. It’s a mixture of water and triethylene glycol (a
plasticizer used to make vinyl polymers, brake fluid, and air fresheners like
Prestone; it’s also a disinfectant, a side benefit if an actor happens to have
a sore throat). It may also contain propylene glycol, found in things like
polystyrene, which is used to make styrofoam (and gives a nice kick to a
mimosa). According to Wikipedia, the acute toxicity of these is very low, and
large quantities must be ingested to cause “perceptible health damage in
humans.” Imperceptible health damage is of course nothing that need concern us.
Haze, on the other hand,
is made of “white mineral oil,” a highly refined petroleum-based substance. The
haze which permeates every scene in Hamilton, and with it the
entire Richard Rodgers Theatre, for example, was made by a Canadian firm, MDG
Fog Company, “Generateurs de Brouillard,” according to Max Frankel, the show’s
electrician. The spec sheets available on the company’s website, mdgfog.com,
report that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, (OSHA) does not
consider the product hazardous (a “keep out of reach of children” triangle with
a black exclamation point on the canister notwithstanding). No significant
critical effects or hazards are known from inhalation, eye contact, skin
contact, or ingestion, though I’m not sure I’d want this oil in my Dijon
vinaigrette.
I’ve
never met an actor who liked working in this gloomy pea soup; you don’t hear
actors exclaiming, a la Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, “Ahh, I
love the smell of theatrical haze in the morning!” It’s not pleasant, haze,
though most of the time you don’t notice it. And since it appears not to be bad
for you, no one complains. But bear in mind, “no known hazards” is not the same
as “good for you.” You won’t see hospitals administering tanks of stage fog to
the elderly.
I was a
subject in a study of the effects of haze during the late 1990s, as a member of
the cast of Titanic, the musical. The study examined our vocal
cords before and after performances of that moderately hazy show, and several
others, and found no signs of irritation worth mentioning.
So no,
I will not be attacking the use of stage fog from the standpoint of health
concerns in this piece. I, like the EPA under the current administration,
wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. The fog of theatre is clearly not as deadly as
the fog of war, although it might be used to depict it scenically.
Nor do
audiences find fog hard to take, despite the occasional cough. When I was a
stage manager for CSC Repertory’s 1974 production of Edward II, I
forgot to turn off the smoke machine one matinee, and the audience and actors
were forced to evacuate the theatre amid much coughing and gagging. But that
was the old days, when powdered smoke was burned in a coiled ceramic heating
device. This medieval procedure may have been effective for Edward, but
whatever health risks were involved don’t apply to the modern methods.
No, as
much as I dislike breathing the stuff, my objections here will not be medical,
but aesthetic.
It has
been quite a while now—maybe three decades?—that stage fog has been essential
in every production with the budget to afford it. Lighting designers love it.
It makes their beams of light cut lusciously through the atmosphere; it shows
off their fancy vari-lites and computer controlled multiple beams, as they
split, come together, and perform spectacular motions in the air. Dappled light
from gobos shows up with great effect; candy-colored light beams can dance in
the space above the stage, a dazzling display for the viewers.
So
what’s the problem, if fog supposedly isn’t harmful, and it makes the stage
pretty?
Well,
first of all, maybe it’s just because I’m an actor, but I always thought light
was supposed to illuminate the thing being lit, not draw attention
to itself. In a few productions I have found myself admiring the luminous
beams, and missing for a few seconds something that was happening in the play.
This is simply distraction, and as Shakespeare might say, it’s “villainous,”
showing a “most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.” The designer is
showing you their genius, but you are watching the air above the stage, not
what is on the stage.
Distraction
is one of the things directors have to worry about, and, to be honest, it is
usually actors, myself not excepted, who perpetrate it. But I have never met a
director who wasn’t at least a bit enthralled by gorgeous gestures of light,
which are usually larger than any actor’s arms by several orders of magnitude.
Now,
fog dissipates pretty rapidly. In Carousel’s wharf scene, the fog
is so dense at the top that the scene might be mistaken for a musical of Backdraft, but
it is mostly gone in time for Renée Fleming to sing her gorgeous rendition of
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” without looking like she she just exhaled a drag of a
Virginia Slim. But haze, which is used more often, is designed to hang around
so that the lights will be equally dazzling in all the scenes. This is fine if
your play has a single set. But since haze lingers longer, you can’t just have
it in one scene for which it might be appropriate—a rest stop outside a power
plant on the New Jersey Turnpike, say—and then clear it in time for another
scene where it might not be, like on a desert plateau in New Mexico. No, with
haze, every scene, regardless of location or atmosphere, is equally smoky.
And
smoky is the right word. A glance at the beams shows the mineral oil, in haze
form, swirling around in the light, like the smoke from Edward R. Murrow’s
cigarette in Good Night, and Good Luck. A gesture within a gesture,
you might say.
This in
turn creates a gauze effect. At times a gauze drop is brought in downstage in a
proscenium theatre, as something to project images or printed information onto.
The action of the play is still visible behind the drop, but there is
looking-through-a-veil effect, as if there were greater distance between the
actors and the audience, like blurry memory scenes in movies. With theatrical
haze, you get a kind of constant virtual gauze. And since the density increases
with distance, the farther you sit from the stage, the more blurry everything
becomes.
To be
sure, this is sometimes desirable. But what if it’s not? What if you want to
minimize, not increase the sense of distance from the action? You may have a fight
with your lighting designer on your hands.
Finally,
there’s just the truth that stage fog is already passé. It has been for
decades. It’s just so…’80s. It’s so Les Miz. So Cats.
Someday soon a lighting designer is going to light a show without using it at
all, and it will be like a revelation. Critics will rave: “The crystalline
clarity of the production is as refreshing as a dry martini.” “There was
such definition in every moment!” Audiences will cheer: “I
could see the actor’s faces, from the back row!”
“I didn’t cough once!”
Come
on, lighting designers and directors. I dare you to break the mold. It’ll make
your name. You can always go back to it, if you’re doing a play about the
Battle of Gettysburg; you can smear cannon smoke all over the Winter Garden
Theatre. But if you’re doing, oh, I don’t know, a revival of On A Clear
Day You Can See Forever, maybe try showing an actual clear day? The actors
will sing your praises, for what that’s worth.
Really,
we will. If we wanted to work in smoke, we’d have joined Ladder Company 54, the
Broadway district fire department. As it says on the engine, they’ve never
missed a show.
* * * *
Since it was posted, the preceding piece inspired
a lot of feedback, to put it mildly, reported AT’s editors, not only in the comments section
but on social media. They decided to publish a response, which you can read in
the next post. Below are some of the comments submitted to the website:
KJ Hardy • 4 months
ago
Next
week William Youman[s] covers the controversial subject of Tap dancing, and why
decibel levels from the shoe’s can be dangerous! What is the OSHA rating of a
Kick, Ball, Change? "But bear in mind, “no known hazards of Charleston” is
not the same as “good for you.
Kate McGee • 4 months ago
I think
we all need to have a hater party every now and again (preferably at the bar
:P). It's just like, dang bro, did you really need to write this in a major
trade publication? Is the industry better because you used your considerable
platform to air (ha!) a pet peeve?
Aaron Copp • 4 months ago
Haze is
a tool of the theater, like any other. Done right, in the right place, it's
awesome; done badly, it's egregious - like jazz hands, or vibrato. I think the
author is engaging in a bit of hyperbole - in reality there are shows with and
without it, and while it might be a default choice for a certain style of
Broadway musical, it's not the default choice for most other shows. Having been
at the table for plenty of these discussions, I can assure you that it's not
something lighting designers do unilaterally or take lightly. It's a design choice
that is made like any other stylistic choice - in collaboration with the team,
for good reasons. Frankly, it's often directors who ask for it, and they're not
wrong to do so. I just wish there could be a little less snark directed towards
designers who are often being underpaid and under-recognized for their efforts,
and who frequently are uncredited in press releases and reviews, including by
this magazine.
Aaron Copp - Lighting Designer, NYC
mplsbrat • 4 months ago
This
article is incredibly uninformed about the use of fog and haze, and insulting
to the entire field of lighting design. It's not true that "every
production with the budget to afford it" uses fog or haze. And to describe
that "Lighting designers love it" is to accumulate them all into one
homogeneous body. Which they are not.
The
self aggrandizing tone of "In All My Years In The Theater..." is
undercut by what is clearly a lack of actual knowledge. This article has a
citation from Wikipedia, a crowd sourced and notoriously unreliable source of
any information, let alone health information. Publishing this is article is
absurd.
[William
Youmans is best known for originating the roles of John Jacob
Astor in Titanic: The Musical (1997-99), and Doctor
Dillamond in Wicked
(2003-present).
[There are six more articles in this series. Please
come back to ROT on Saturday,
27 October, for the next installment, a response to Youmans’s column.]
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