Once called “a bloody electrician with notions” she was influential in raising the status of lighting to a central design element on par with scenery and costumes. While she did not do it alone, the development of the by line for “Lighting Designer” was made a reality in large part because of her work.

Access to some of her original paperwork is now freely available at The Lighting Archive.

Happy Birthday Ms. Rosenthal

Directed by Mark Streshinsky
Scenery by Mark Streshinsky
Projections by Jeremy Knight
Costumes by Romy Douglass

All photographs courtesy Steve Hughes

The first is Den of Thieves at SF Playhouse. More info, including ticketing, can be found here.

The second is Emax and Zurno’s Amazing Circus Humans a circus show for kids created and directed by my old friend Jaron Hollander. More info, and ticketing, can be found here.

I hope you enjoy!

More coming soon.

The aesthetics of Minimalism are at once precise and freeing. Precise because as one removes extraneous elements from a work what remains takes on increasing significance. Freeing because the relationships are so clear that one can shift and recombine them in a multitude of ways allowing the multiplicity of experience to shine through.

So often the theatre is dominated by a kind of maximalism. A desire to put everything possible into a single work as if by desperation trying to contain all of experience in a few hours performance. The result is often the opposite of what is intended. Rather that giving the fullness of experience, each element is diminished as it all fades into a wash of gray, bland and undistinguished.

This is not to say that minimalism does not employ a rigid and tightly controlled grayscale, but it does so knowing that the fullness of each of those few grays will come across. The depth and subtlety of slight variation becomes a thing of power and strength rather than a faltering weakness.

To work from a minimalist aesthetic requires rigor and discipline. Because while there is a great deal of freedom, if any single element is out of place the work implodes under the weight of its own delicate structure.

Every move must be precise and calculated. At the same time one must allow for room to breathe. For play. Minimalism defines itself not in relation to itself but in relation to the varied multiplicity of the world around it. A blank page only appears blank when surrounded by the frantic modern world. Taken on its own the blank white page is a universe unto itself, filled with color and texture and infinite stories. The filled page is far more fixed and reduced in scale by comparison.

It is interesting to me how much the theatre of the Greeks lends itself to a minimalist aesthetic. When I worked on Medea we employed a very strict minimalism with incredibly slight changes in angle or color. With Antigone we opened up the palette more allowing for greater, yet still a very slight, range of color. This control of the color palette cause the shifts in angle and direction of the light to be quite significant.

In a minimalist aesthetic one often takes a single characteristic or element that remains static around which all other elements rotate. In painting perhaps one employs the use of strict linearity but then gives great variety and contrast to the colors, with vibrant and bold strokes.

In Antigone a tightly controlled color palette gave rise to a great variety in angle, direction and shadow. The simplicity of the setting allowed for a high contrast with the costume. Finding these points of control is what makes possible the freedom in a minimalist work. A clear centerpoint is the basis of minimalism.

I have focused lights everywhere from 60 seat off-off-B’way houses in New York, to Broadway national tours And everything in between. Over the years I have developed some best practices for making the process go smoothly and quickly. Remember, the designer probably wants to get through the focus as fast as (or faster than) you. Focus is not exactly fun, but it is a necessary part of the process to get on to the interesting work. The focus session helps to set the tone for the production. Having a quick and efficient focus allows the designer to enter the technical rehearsals in a state of calm, ready to create.

Any designer who has properly done their homework, with regards to working out the angles of their lighting system, will be able to start anywhere on stage and is not dependent on “Oh we need to begin with channel 1.” Rather than asking “where do you want to start,” because the honest answer is probably something akin to “With a beer at the bar down the street,” figure out the best place to start in your theater and ask the designer “Can we begin at such and such a position?” Chances are the designer will say yes. The designer is busy enough thinking about how a particular light will be used, “and should it be cut off the Act 1 or the Act 2 legs,” that they don’t need to worry about what light they are going to next. That is your job. You should direct the focus call such that the session moves at an average of about a minute and a half per light. Faster is nice, but much slower gets very tedious.

I like to start with something easy like catwalks or balcony rails to get everyone into a rhythm. Once a good working rhythm has been established, mixing up more difficult positions into the focus (like climbable torms) can balance the pace with something easy light PARcan backlight systems. The person calling focus needs to think systemically to make the process go fast. Systemically in terms of how the designer laid out their lighting systems as well as the systems of the lighting positions. Act like an electrician, think like a designer.

Once you have determined the optimal starting positions, you need to break your crew up and send them to those positions. For the purposes of this post I will be assuming a 4+ electrician/1 ME crew for a standard three position focus. This means that three electricians are pointing lights and one (or more) is acting as a runner/lift mover, while the ME turns lights on and off at the console. How you divide your crew up can be critical to the speed of the focus. If you don’t know the skill level of your crew, putting everyone front of house to focus can be a good way to find the fast/skilled electricians and the less proficient ones. Once you know that, you can move on to more complicated positions.

Here is a basic rundown of the tools you will need to call the focus:

• A console with the completed patch
• Full size copy of the plot (1/2″ or 1/4″ as needed)
• Printed Channel Hookup
• Printed Instrument Schedule
• Laptop with the current Lightwright (or other lighting database) file
• Note paper
• Two different colored highlighters
• Writing Pen

If you are an assistant you will also need:

• Blank Focus Charts
• Tape Measure
• Sharpie
• Painter’s Tape

A quick note on plots. I have seen, on smaller shows (typically 100 units or less), a tendency to print the plot on standard office paper. While this is faster (at first) the end result can be a nightmare. Units often get hung in the wrong place and have to be moved at focus, numbers can not easily be read, and sometimes the wrong fixture entirely gets hung at a position. Taking the half hour to go make a large format print of the plot will save you hours of work down the road. Trust me. It’s worth it.

When you send your electricians to their positions it is a good idea to glow the units they will be going to. This allows them to get in place and start working faster. Once you glow a unit, put a dot of highlighter 1 on the channel on the plot. This is an easily visible way to note a channel you will soon be going to, and with the plot in front of you, allow you to strategize the best path through the plot. Also, when you stop for breaks, this will be a quick reference to get right back to where you were. When a light is turned on to full for focus, you fill in the channel circle with highlighter 1 completely. If you need to skip a light, or it is broken or has otherwise been touched but not completed, put a dot from highlighter 2 over the Unit Number. Write down any worknotes that can not immediately be solved on your pad of paper. When the light is focused, you fill in the whole instrument symbol with highlighter 2. This is a clear graphic way to determine what you have done and where you have to go.

When you turn a light on to full, call out to the designer the channel number and its purpose. For example, “This is channel 2 Front Warm DLC.” This allows the designer to get to focusing the light without fumbling over their own channel hookup or cheatsheet. This will save you about 10-20 seconds per light. When you move on to the next light turn the new light on FIRST, call out its number and purpose, THEN turn off the previous light. This will save you about 10 seconds per light. This total of 30 seconds may not seem like much, but in a 250+ unit plot that means almost an hour and a half that could be spent fixing troubled gear or getting to the bar sooner. The bigger the plot, the more the time savings.

In terms of assigning electricians I find the following system works very well. If your crew is widely varied in terms of skill, pair your best and worst electrician on symmetrical systems(Box Booms, High Sides, etc.). When you turn the lights on, turn the light for the worst electrician FIRST. At the same time you glow the light that will focus in a mirror location for the second electrician (If electrician one is Focusing “BB Frm Lt FAR” you glow “BB Frm Rt FAR” for electrician two) . The first electrician will take however long they take. Because you are glowing the mirror image for the fast electrician, they are probably paying attention to the designer and focusing that light while it is glowing. So while it may take the first electrician two minutes to point the light, when you turn on the next unit it is all focused except for shuttercuts and color. It takes 30 seconds to focus that one and thus you have an average of 1:15/per light. Not too shabby.

Keeping a steady pace is critical. If you are always one step ahead of your designer and thinking with them in terms of systems you can get your plot focused quickly and efficiently. The faster the plot is focused, the sooner we can all get to the bar. Or in the unfortunate case that there are serious problems, or the set moved and thus half the lights need to move, you have the time built in to the focus session to deal with those scenarios. The technical rehearsal will start at the same time no matter how long (or how complete) the focus is. We don’t want to be rushed. We want to move quickly.

How do you call focus? This is only one person’s system and there are infinite details which can not be put in a single blog post. I would love to hear your thoughts in comments.

I need to confess something to my readers at this point. I don’t like reading plays. I enjoy rehearsals, and techs, and worksheets, and everything that goes into making a play, with one exception. I don’t like reading plays. Thus it was with my usual resignation of “Well, I have to get through this part in order to get to the fun stuff” that I picked up Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Den of Thieves and began reading.

The result? I had not laughed so hard in quite some time. The script is so outrageously funny that I had trouble getting through it, but this time for totally different reasons than a typical script read. I kept laughing so hard I had to put the script down repeatedly. The story revolves around a group of thieves in a kleptomaniacs recovery program. Then someone shows up with the perfect heist. Wackiness ensues.

When I did finish the play I began thinking through how to light it. There is a sharpness to the comedy that demands to be addressed through light. No mushy recessive stuff here. Both colors and angles need to be crisp and distinct.

The first thing I saw clearly was that the air must feel colorful. Much like approaching musical comedy, the farcical nature of the piece demands a feeling of color everywhere. But that color must be carefully chosen to augment the crisp dialogue. I also knew that I wanted a very sharp look in terms of my approach to angle but was not sure how to achieve that.

At the first production meeting Bill, who was designing the scenery, came in with a corner set on a 90 degree angle (the US was the corner of a room with walls at approximately 45 degrees from that point). Upon seeing this I was immediately struck with my solution to the sharp angle. I would hang a two color system of diagonal front Head-Hi’s following the angles of the walls. Once this piece was resolved everything else fell into place.

Backlight would be a cool and a color changing system. Sidelight would be a pair of pipe-ends from each side. A bunch of scenery specials. Both the Act 1 and Act 2 set had windows, so light through the windows would be prominent. The nature of the comedy led me to choose to fill in the shadows with color. As such there would be a medium blue through the windows for the night scenes and a dark blue frontlight system to fill from front of house. A pair of FOH IQs would do any additional specials as needed. The final element would be a lot of practicals in each scene to really bring the world to life.

Lighting systems are as follows:

• Cool Head His in L201+R132
• Lavender Head His in R51+R132
• Warm Diagonal Fronts in R302+R132
• Low Blue Fron in L079
• Straight CLR Front in CLR
• Cool Backs in L202
• Color Backs (the house scroll is a standard apollo rock&roll string)
• CLR Cross Light in R132
• Outside Night in R68
• Outside Dawn in L201
• Outside Sun in R318
• Practicals are all CLR
• IQs in R132

Below is a look at the lightplot:

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Inside the Design Idea. Please leave any comments or questions you might have.

If I would speak to you, how should I speak?

I know one mustn’t use certain expressions these days,
among your generation.
One mustn’t call people barracudas, for example
no matter how they behave.

Shall I apologize?
This was your mother, after all,
my daughter,
even if she was a slut.

But one mustn’t speak this way, I know.
For this is rude and might offend one’s feelings.

(He takes his time)

There are words these days, I know, that cause a certain pain–
like”slut” or “sweetie” or “dear” or “peg leg,” or–”watermelon.”

There is some quality of magical thinking in this, a certain
“primitive” turn of mind, if I may use the word, that seems to fly to
the belief that if one disposes of a word, one disposes of all the
dreadful or disagreeable things that have become attached to it.

So that if one simply doesn’t use the word “articulate,” in referring
to a certain sort of person who is articulate, as though a certain sort
of person’s competence with language were an exceptional matter, then
the exceptionality of this articulateness will disappear.

Or, if one will eschew the word “community,” in speaking of a group of
people, as though that group shared a monolithic culture in which they
all acted and thought in the same way, then one’s language would not
create ghettoes in which these groups are constrained to live. One
should never refer to the black community, for example, or the gay
community. One should refer, rather, to the black residents in a
southside neighborhood.

Then, too, one ought not to say “oreo” in reference to black Americans
who have abandoned their culture, or refer in a similar fashion to
Asians as bananas or Mexicans as coconuts.

One ought not to say “illegal alien,” when one has available such
vocabulary as undocumented worker or undocumented resident.

One ought not to use the expression “qualified minorities,” as though
minorities were in general unqualified.

One ought not to use the word “swarthy.”

One ought not to say “blonde and blue-eyed” unless one is prepared to
use the expression “brown-haired and brown-eyed” as an expression of
equal attractiveness.

One ought not to say “inscrutable” in speaking of an Asian.

One ought not to say “Dutch treat,” as though to say the Dutch people
are cheap.

One ought not to say “fried chicken,” under any circumstances as I
understand it.

One ought not to say Jew–or I should say that some people prefer the
expression Jewish person, and in any case that the word should never be
used as a synonym for stingy. And that it should always be used as a
noun, never as a verb.

One ought not to say buxom or fragile or feminine or pert or petite or
gorgeous or stunning or statuesque or full-figured or in any other way
refer to the physical attributes of a woman.

I can accept all this with equanimity.

And yet, one can commit murder and find the words to justify it.

This is your sort of civilization, then. It speaks nicely and behaves
barbarously.

Indeed, it thinks that speaking well, putting a nice face on things,
will transform the very stuff of life on earth.

No, no, no.
You’ve come unhinged.
You’ve lost your bearings altogether.
You’ve assaulted the very foundations of your home.
You’ve forgotten who you are, where you come from.

You remember nothing: not your parents, nor the values they held dear,
not your country, nor the polity it once held in its grasp, or at the
very least aspired to, not your history, nor your religion, nor even
the most rudimentary tenets of ethics or gentleness.

And this is what you ask me to give my blessing to.
No.

(To Menelaus)

As for you, Menelaus, I don’t expect some form of civil behavior from a
man who has just returned from rendering an entire civilization into a
smoking ruin, while his own home sinks in rot and violence, husbands
murdered by their wives, mothers murdered by their sons, sleeping
children shot through bedroom doors. I know of a boy who poured
kerosene on a derelict and lit him on fire and burned him to a crisp,
not thinking he, the boy, had done anything wrong. That’s the value
they place on human life in the world that boy comes from. And soon
enough such boys will fill your neighborhood. You flatter yourself that
you are an old-fashioned sort of man, but you’ve no idea what it is you
ought to be old-fashioned about.

And I will tell you this:
for the murder of my daughter,
I expect the murderer to suffer the punishment of the state.
No more. No less.
That’s what I mean by a civil society.
I’ll hold you responsible.
Let us begin there to put the world to rights.