Rita Pietraszek traversed the stage slowly, thoughtfully, with hands clasped behind her back. Every few inches she paused, looking down at the dusty blond wood of the Northlight Theatre stage upon which a circle of light blossomed.
Then she peered overhead, where a flock of lighting fixtures dangled from a metal grid.
“OK. Lock it,” Pietraszek said to a member of the stage crew, one of several who crouched in the catwalk above her.
A week and a half before the March 28 opening of “The Gamester,” Pietraszek and the crew would spend 12 hours this day focusing the theater’s approximately 230 lights, one by one, according to the lighting plan she had developed for the play, which runs through April 29 at the theater in Skokie.
As tedious as the process seemed to an onlooker, to Pietraszek, a professional lighting designer, it was thrilling: a perfect marriage of technology and art, a blend of gizmos and inspiration.
While technological advances have revolutionized the field in the past two decades or so, good lighting design still is as much about understanding a play’s heart as it is about pushing buttons, as much about poetry as electronic pizazz.
Light, after all, is infinitely suggestive. It can transport a moment from the quiet and reflective to the bright and raucous, all in a split-second. It can conceal or reveal. With a change in color, it can alter mood, shift focus, heighten suspense.
But will the intricate calibration of lighting design be lost in a barrage of high-tech illumination? As the lighting aesthetic of rock concerts-marked by gyrating strobes and pulsating colors -increasingly captures the public imagination, some veteran lighting designers fear that it might.
Todd Hensley, resident lighting designer at Victory Gardens Theater, said, “I always say to young designers, ‘Think about the lighting, not about the lights.’ We’re telling the story.”
Duane Schuler, lighting designer for Lyric Opera who co-owns a Chicago firm that specializes in architectural lighting, added, “You have more and more options technologically, but you still have to have a clear creative vision.”
Traditionally, lighting design has been a relatively unheralded aspect of the performing arts. If done well, it was overlooked; audiences generally didn’t find themselves murmuring on the way home, “Wow, what great lighting!”
Yet lighting, even if subtle, is an absolutely crucial part of the theatrical experience. “Lighting is really important,” said Charles Jolls, a lighting designer for Chicago Shakespeare Theater. “It starts the play. It motivates the scene. It ends the scene. We should be called ‘lighting and shadow designers,’ because what you don’t light is as important as what you do.”
A lighting designer must maintain a delicate balance between enhancing a show without overwhelming it. But that is increasingly difficult, many lighting designers said, as technical innovations make lighting itself a distracting spectacle.
He thinks about the issue “all the time,” said Christopher Akerlind, an award-winning lighting designer based in Portland, Maine, who is designing the lighting for the upcoming Court Theatre productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Piano.”
“I’m very worried about how technology and lighting have begun to upstage what theater is. Students are very attracted to the wizardry of it.”
Rob Murphy, a lighting designer who teaches inthe University of Michigan’s theater department, said he cautions his students not to get too caught up in gadgetry at the expense of the play’s meaning.
“It’s the biggest problem I have with my students–they want to play with the technology because it’s sexy and fun. But theater, as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll, is about the text and the actors,” said Murphy.
The same technology that aids a designer such as Murphy, giving him a wider range of strategies to light shows, also is threatening the nuances and subtleties of his work. The culprit: moving lights, known as “intelligent lighting,” which rock artists began to incorporate in their shows in the 1980s.
Such lights don’t stay in a fixed position, as do traditional stage lights such as ellipsoidals (which provide a sharp-edged light) or Frenel spotlights (a softer-edged light) or wash lights. Moving lights can change positions and colors hundreds of times in the course of a show. “One moving light can replace 50 other lights,” Murphy explained.
Virtually all Broadway theaters now use moving lights, he said. Regional theaters continue to use fixed lighting, which is cheaper, but moving lights eventually will replace fixed lights everywhere, Murphy predicted.
And that’s OK–within reason, he said. It’s when moving lights become the show, rather than a means of presenting the show, that Murphy and many of his colleagues grow apprehensive. “All they’re used for now,” he said, “is flash and trash.”
Enter the computer
Before the advent of moving lights, the last bold leap forward in lighting design came from computers, which opened up new vistas for lighting designers in the mid-’70s.
Previously, someone had to manually operate a lighting board, flipping switches during a performance in response to a stage director’s cues. With a computer, however, light cues can be programmed into the computer, and the lighting changes can occur swiftly.
“Twenty years ago, it was much simpler,” said Schuler, who designed the lights for the Lyric’s recent production of “The Flying Dutchman.” As theater lighting has gotten more complex, so has lighting itself. On April 7, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh will open a exhibit called “Light! The Industrial Age 1750-1900.” The exhibit juxtaposes the technical strides in creating and understanding light with artistic representations of light. Thus Sir Isaac Newton rubs shoulders with Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Italian composer whose opera, “Le Prophete,” was the first to employ electric light to suggest a sunrise when it was performed in 1850, enthralling the audience.
Louise Lippincott, the curator who co-organized the exhibit, said that theaters “were the places where new lighting techniques were pioneered,” such as gas and electrical arc lighting.
“Light works physiologically and psychologically on us,” she said. “Everyone who looks at art ends up thinking about light.”
For Murphy, light’s principal virtue is its flexibility. “I can take a blank stage and put you in a forest, in an apartment. I can create an endless variety of feelings and places without you actually being there.”
Yet when lighting design itself takes center stage, as it has in some Broadway productions, audiences are trained to expect spectacle, Akerlind said. “People say, `I just dropped $80 on a Broadway ticket and I got a lot of lighting.’ Sadly, in this culture, we don’t put a premium on being told a beautiful story by magnificent actors.”
Lighting `Gamester’
For Pietraszek, as for other lighting designers, the process begins with reading the script and then creating cues for each moment in the script requiring a change in lighting: a scene change, a shift in mood, a focus on one character. She worked with director Michael Halberstam to decide when those moments should occur.
Each light in the theater is assigned a number, which is called a channel. Thus a lighting cue would indicate the channel (1 through 6), intensity of the light (0 to 100) and duration, which indicates the time desired for the light to fade up or fade out. Designers also use gobos, metal plates inserted over lights to create patterns such as leaves.
In “Gamester,” a comedy adapted by Freyda Thomas from the 1696 play by Jean-Francois Regnard that satirizes gambling and romance, Pietraszek needed to create three locations: a boarding-house room at dawn, a park and a nightclub. “I wanted to get three nice, different, crisp, sharp looks. The floor doesn’t change, so the lighting has to change.”
No matter how fancy the technology becomes, many designers believe, lighting begins and ends with emotional nuance, not spectacle. Lighting lays bare the stark heart of a moment, revealing it in all of its truth, be it exhilarating or painful.
When Arthur Miller’s tragic “Death of a Salesman” was in rehearsals for its 1949 Broadway opening, the playwright noticed that a large number of extra lights had been brought in. According to Miller’s 1987 autobiography, “Timebends,” he asked the lighting designer, Eddie Kook, for an explanation.
The designer replied, “It takes more lights to make it dark.”
