Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

108 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
Visibility and focus are the primary considerations of
lighting design: visibility ensures that the audience sees
what it’s meant to see, and focus ensures that it sees this
without undue distraction. The spotlight, a development
of the twentieth century, has fostered something akin to
a revolution in staging. Contemporary productions now
routinely feature a darkened auditorium (a rarity prior to
the 1880s) and a deliberate effort to illuminate certain
characters (or props or set pieces) more than others—in
other words, to direct the audience’s attention toward
those visual elements that are dramatically the most
significant.
Verisimilitude (lifelikeness) and atmosphere also
are common goals of the lighting designer, and both
can be achieved largely through the color and direction
of lighting. Verisimilitude is crucial in realistic
dramas, where the style generally demands that the
lighting appear as if emanating from familiar sources:
as from the sun, from “practical” (physically present)
lamps on the stage, or from moonlight, firelight,
streetlights, neon signs, or perhaps the headlights of
moving automobiles. Atmospheric lighting, by contrast,
need not suggest any particular source and can
be used simply to evoke a mood appropriate to a scene
or to a moment’s action: gloomy, for example—or
sparkling, oppressive, nightmarish, austere, verdant,
smoky, funereal, or regal.
Sharp, bold lighting designs are often employed to
create highly theatrical effects, from the glittery entertainments
of the Broadway musical tradition to harsher
experimental stagings. The playwright and theorist Bertolt
Brecht developed the concept of a “didactic” theatre
that favors bright, cold (uncolored), and deliberately
“unmagical” lighting. Brecht suggested, in fact, that the
lighting instruments be made part of the setting, placed
in full view of the audience. This “theatricalist” use
of the lighting units is now widespread, even in more
traditional plays. Moodier plays may employ dense or
unnatural colors, gobo templates that break light beams
into shadowy fragments (such as leaf patterns), or
atmospheric fog effects that make light appear misty,
gloomy, or mysterious. The Broadway-type musical, in
contrast, often makes splashy use of banks of colored
footlights and border lights, high-intensity follow-spots
that track actors around the stage, “chaser” lights that
flash on and off in sequence, and an intense, almost
unbearable brightness that makes a finale seem to burn
up the stage. In fact, this traditional exploitation of light
has done as much to give Broadway the name “Great
White Way” as have the famous billboards and marquees
that line the street.
Stylized lighting effects are also often used to express
radical changes of mood or event. The use of lighting
alone to signal a complete change of scene, without any
changes to the physical set, is an increasingly common
technique. Merely by switching from full front to full
overhead lighting, for example, a designer can throw
a character into silhouette and make her or his figure
appear suddenly ominous, grotesque, or isolated. The
illumination of an actor with odd lighting colors, such
as green, or from odd lighting positions, such as from
below, can create mysterious, unsettling effects. And
the use of follow-spots can quite literally put a character
“on the spot” and convey a specific sense of terror.
Highly expressive lighting and projections, when
applied to a production utilizing only a cyclorama
(a scenic backdrop at the rear of the stage that often
represents the sky), a set piece, sculpture, or stage
mechanism and neutrally clad actors, can create an infinite
variety of convincing theatrical environments. It is
here, in the area of stylization and expressive theatricality,
that the modern lighting designer has made the most
significant mark.
THE LIGHTING DESIGNER AT WORK
The lighting designer ordinarily conceives a design by
synthesizing many discrete elements: the action and ideas
of the play, discussions with the director and other members
of the design team about the approach or concept of
the production, the characteristics of the theatre building
(its lighting positions, control facilities, and wiring system),
the scenery and costume designs, the movements
and behavior of the actors, the available lighting instruments,
and an experienced lighting crew. Because not
all of these variables can be known from the outset (the
stage movement, for example, may change from one day
to the next right up to the final dress rehearsal), the lighting
designer must be skilled at making adjustments and
must have the opportunity to exercise a certain amount
of control, or at least to voice concerns about possible
lighting problems.
Ordinarily, the two major preparations required of the
lighting designer are the light plot and the cue sheet. A
light plot is a plan that shows the placement of each lighting
instrument; its type, wattage, and size; its wiring and
connection to an appropriate dimmer; its color; and sometimes
its physical movement, since lighting instruments