Why I Came Back to The Theater This Fall

After years of doing off and off-off broadway theater, it might not make a lot of sense to come back to it after so many years. Yet, last month that's exactly what I did. I spent the weekends and evenings climbing around the rafters of a dusty theater working on the lighting of a production of She Loves Me at the Barn Theatre in Montville, NJ.

Beyond missing theater, why come back?

It's a mental workout.

When you walk into a theater with no inventory, paperwork or house lighting plot and you're largely working alone, problem solving becomes paramount. Every design decision you make has to be weighed against the metrics of available time and equipment.

Here’s an example:

I need to add a curtain warmer wash.

Well, that would take four 8" fresnels.

Do we have those?

We do.

Great, we only need one circuit, do we have one at the first FOH position?

No, but it wouldn't take too much work to run one.

OK great, do we have some two-fers to make the run?

You were saving those for the back light wash.

Right.

Better go up to the FOH and see what else is available.

That entire conversation happened between me and myself over something very simple - adding a Front of House curtain warmer wash. This kind of decision making process happened for every single design concept I wanted to add. High side color, back light LEDs, upstage CYC wash. Every one of them needed to run that series of mental calculations.

Some problem solving is more fun. I had a platform I needed to light and the only available fixture that was soft enough was a 12” scoop. If you’ve never seen one it’s basically a 500 watt light bulb in a can. It was spilling unwanted white light onto my nice blue-lit upstage cyc. So….

I stood on a ladder with a box cutter and piece by piece cut a hole in the blue gel of the scoop so the platform was lit with proper white light and the unwanted spill was now blue like the rest of the cyc. That kind of creative problem solving is sadly, all too necessary sometimes on fast moving design build jobs. Theatrical projects flex that part of the mental muscle.

Doing everything means you start to think a little like everyone…

In architectural lighting the roles are pretty well defined. Who "owns" what part of the project is usually clear. When you're "doing the lights" for a show at this level, you're handling every level of the lighting. You're thinking at a high level about what the show should look like, but you're also running around actually executing it, then you're programming it at the console, fixing it and watching it run.

You are working with light not specifications

We work with cut sheets and IES files. We talk about light in abstract data and rarely actually touch it. Theater offers something immediate. Climbing up to a catwalk and firing an ellipsoidal at a target and seeing what it looks like is an immediate treatment of light. It's not abstract, it's real and it happens before my eyes and with my hands. Nothing replaces that experience.

You get to be a little bold

When was the last time you got to create an imaginary cafe with saturated purple lights that faded to blue as the evening wore on? It's not something that happens in real life very much, but in the theater it happens all the time. Getting back into a theater allow you to play a little bit, stretch the imagination and enjoy what comes of it.

More so than ever, the tools of theatrical lighting (color changing, advanced cueing) are available to the architectural designer. Getting back into the theater awakens the senses and the creativity. It reminds us of what's possible, if not always practical in architectural lighting.

The Barn's production of She Loves Me closed this weekend, it was a wonderful way to visit the theater again. Thank you to everyone at the Barn for letting me play.

Re-Kindling a Passion

What do you do as designers to get back to what inspires you? For me, getting back in the theater and lighting a show reminded me how much fun it can be. It was a lot of work, and not something I’ll be able to do often. But it was also like riding a bike, remembering all the ways I would solve problems rapidly, writing out a lighting schedule, drafting a light plot. It was all a way of reminding myself how and why I got into this business. That light can make amazing things. Hanging lights 6x9 lekos that have been in service since the 1970s while hanging from the rafters of a theater 20 feet above a stage reminded me where I came from.

Show Photos By Joe Gigli