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

Theatre 129
Photo Essay: Sound Designer Scott Lehrer*
When Scott Lehrer received the
Tony Award in Sound Design
for South Pacific in 2008, it was an
honor not only for him but for sound
design itself, as his award was the first
Tony ever awarded in this blossoming
field; since that time he has designed
sound for 14 Broadway productions
(The King and I, Honeymoon in Vegas,
A Delicate Balance, Love Letters,
A Raisin in the Sun, Betrayal, Lucky
Guy, and Chaplin, winning a Drama
Desk Award for the latter). Lehrer
acknowledges that the Tony was
“something of a culmination after
working in the mines for many years,”
but he is also insistent that there
have been many other sound design
pioneers who should be recognized.
“I was just lucky enough to be doing a
show the year they initiated these,” he
modestly declares.
Lehrer practiced and studied music
when he went to college at Sarah
Lawrence in the mid-1970s, first
expanding his early love of rock, folk,
and jazz and then “getting weird sounds
out of synthesizers.” Soon he was
deep into electronic music, picking
up bits of “found sound” and creating
sound collages for classmate directors
and choreographers to go with their
performances. “I became fascinated by
the entire world of sound,” he explains.
“It was all quite new and wonderful.”
Not limiting himself to drama or dance
productions, he created sound for giant
public events like New York’s
SummerStage in Central Park with
100,000 attendees, along with museum
exhibitions, live industrial shows, and
corporate media. But theatre beckoned
strongly when he took a job as sound
engineer for the Colonnades Theatre
Lab, an avant-garde off-off-Broadway
theatre on New York’s Lower East
Side. “We all worked together there,”
he remembers, “blending multichannel
‘surround sound’ into the rehearsals
so that the actors would get used to
hearing sounds while rehearsing, and
would respond to those sounds like
they responded to the other actors.
Sound simply became part of their
world.” Lehrer didn’t realize how
unusual this was at the time, but in the
days when offstage sound was mainly
created by stage managers operating
wooden, handheld “door-slamming”
devices or executing “needle drops”
on long-playing records played over
a loudspeaker, he and his colleagues
were innovating truly revolutionary
techniques.
By 1980, Lehrer had moved up
the ladder to off-Broadway, where he
worked at many of the finest companies:
Circle Repertory, Manhattan Theatre
Club, the American Place, and, mainly,
Playwrights Horizons, where he
describes himself as “almost in
residence” for many years. “We were
still in the Stone Age as far as equipment
was concerned,” Lehrer recalls. “We
had to be really creative, figure out
how to do things with very little money,
invent new ways of working.”
No theatre technology has
advanced as rapidly in the past decades
as sound, Lehrer says: “Young people
coming into this field today have
little idea how new it all is. In just the
time I’ve been doing all this, we’ve
gone from records to tape decks to
samplers to digital sound and music
sequencers. The speed with which
we can create sound design, and the
level of control we have over it, have
increased almost beyond belief.” To
create the sound of road construction
1. Sound Designer Scott Lehrer, in the professional
sound studio he has built into
his apartment in lower Manhattan, builds
up possible cues for a new production.
© Robert Cohen
that director Susan Stroman had
thought of adding into her production
of Happiness, at New York’s Lincoln
Center, for example, Lehrer sent his
assistant out to record the jackhammers
then hammering away on the street
outside. “I handed him my recorder at
10:00, at 10:15 I plugged the recorder
into my Pro Tools [digital audio system],
by 10:30 I had cleaned it up, and by
10:45 I had it in my QLab [sound software]
ready to go into the show. Just a few years
ago this would have taken three days!”
By the end of the 1980s, Lehrer was on
Broadway, first with Wendy Wasserstein’s
The Heidi Chronicles, which received
the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award
for best play of the year, and soon
thereafter designing sound for Tony
Kushner’s landmark Angels in America.
At the time of this writing he has
designed thirty-three shows on
Broadway and fifty-five off.
What, aside from a mastery of
technology, does it take to be a sound
designer? Lehrer does not pretend to
*Courtesy of Scott Lehrer