CHAPTER V.

STAGE LIGHTING

Themost vital part of the stage machine is yet to be touched upon, the only part in which any mystery is involved. After all, most of our machinery of the theatre is of the simplest type,—ropes and pulleys and simple bracing. In a double sense, the electrical equipment is approached with more awe. While most people know a little about the simpler laws of mechanics, electricity, guarded by an element of danger, is a matter too recondite to be brought into the fold of everyday information out of mere curiosity, or to be reasoned out as the childish working of a pulley can be figured out by common sense; it has to be studied and learned. And besides being outside common matter-of-fact, light is mystery itself, unplumbed nature, a fraction of the inscrutable life of the world led by strings to the stage.

If the little playhouse is without any mechanical convenience, if its stage is cramped and mean, it can still achieve visual beauty through light. This force brings into the playhouse the most vibrant, subtle and affecting gift of the physical world, barring only the human presence.

Ultimately it will be seen that a forthright attempt to imitate nature on the stage can result only in failure; the painted or modeled semblances of rocks, trees, grass or distant prospects are in the long run seen to be what they are not what they pretend to be. Similarly, close as the light of the stage can be brought to resemble the light of the outer world, it will still be short of complete fidelity to its original. But it is, in itself, a force of beauty, an authentic transplanting of the revealer of nature’s divers beauties, so that, if it fails to achieve what the manipulator tries to make it do, it may achieve something possibly more beautiful.

More and more can this be true in the theatre, as the artist comes to regard light as a pure medium, as he learns more of its profound effect on human emotion, even on the working of the body’s organs, and as he becomes familiar with the thousand subtle ways in which the earth and its atmosphere modify the light sent by the sun, reflecting and refracting it, stealing certain colors from its whiteness and leaving others, resolving it prismatically by mists and clouds and the swirls of atmosphere. Theseare a few of the ways in which nature plays the artist with light. They point to unlimited lessons in technique that the theatre artist in light has yet to learn.

The little theatre, or any theatre for that matter, cannot go wrong by beginning at the beginning. Let it revalue the customary machinery for stage lighting, and the results achieved by its use. Later I shall describe this customary equipment, for it has its great uses, and much of the criticism that I shall apply to it applies perhaps with greater justice to the manner in which it is used. But, implicit in the system itself, is a criticism of its purpose to reproduce the effects of nature under conditions that in nowise resemble those of nature, or its laying over a convention (artistic at its best, futilely anachronistic at its worst) not another convention, but a lantern of Diogenes, showing up shams.

Go back to the beginning. One candle rightly used, as in Robert Edmond Jones’ lighting of the den scene inRedemption, is both drama and beauty. Imagine Wallace Stevens’Carlos Among the Candlesshown upon the stage by the candle light of the strange room-world which is the play’s universe. Here is a complete wedding of drama and the mobile beauty of light itself, a light we can readily achieve. From these candles to the sun of Shakespeare’s comedies, the storms of hisLearor the mists and fogs ofThe Tempestis a far cry. He begged the question, in extraordinary verse, and acted the words and emotions of his plays in the plain light of day, which is bound to be beautiful, even when it is not illusive of the moon.

Right here lies the crux of the problem of installing lights in the little theatre. A dual approach is required, as in any art: the creator’s vision of what he wishes to do, and the technician’s knowledge of how to go about it. The greater responsibility rests on the first function, for we must settle whether we are to try to reproduce nature or attain a correlative beauty. To me the beauty of a stage sunset has rarely been the beauty of a real sunset; it has been the beauty of rosy light. If anything, the unreality of the sunset has stood in the way of my appreciation of the reality of red. The beauty of red was accidental, and not the artist’s intention. It could not have been avoided, for it is germane to sunset, but the fact remains that the artist achieved something other than he set out to achieve. It would have been better to go in for red and attain it than to go in for sunset and attain red. If blue light intimates the moon, well and good. It is beautiful itself, and does not awaken marvel at the clevernesswith which we have contrived an effect. Whereas a nicely operated moonrise, or a jiggling procession of stereoptican clouds leaves us gaping while the tragedy hobbles, unattended, to it close.

When the theatre forsook the sunlight, it faced the question of light solely as illumination. By various means,—torches and tapers, gas, “limes” and electricity,—it has made its art visible indoors and at night. The introduction of electric light into the theatre has made possible an illumination so dependable and controllable that of late years attention has been turned to other phases of the lighting problem. Thanks must be given for most of the advance thus far to the effort of the illusion-theatre to imitate the light of nature. My belief is that the greater advance lies ahead, in the study of light on the stage as an art mediumper se.

Two important things the stage worker of the modern theatre contributed, through his rough approximations of realistic effect, two things that will serve, whatever our aim in lighting. He saw that the light at some seasons, in some weathers, and at some times of day, is less bright than at others, and that it fades at dusk. He devised means, therefore, of varying its intensity. Second, he perceived that at sunset light is one color, at noon another, and by full moon another. He gave us dyes and color screens, and with them and his dimmers brought to the stage the important element of control.

Other advances, through other agencies in the theatre, tend to subtilize the function of light, carrying it beyond primary illumination. Second, perhaps, comes the scene designer, who demands that the light, in addition to illuminating the players and stating the time of day or year, shall contribute values to his design as picture. It shall be made to cast shadows where dark masses are wanted in his composition. It shall highlight other features of the scene; it shall reinforce the painter’s work with color; it shall give plasticity to the builder’s work with its highlight and shadow.

Next, the dramatist and producer make their demands—the light shall reinforce the mood and meanings of the play. By its intensity or dimness, it gives “atmosphere”; by its color it has a direct psychological and physiological effect on the spectator, sensitizing him to values in the play he might not perceive were it enacted in light of another sort. Dramatist, director and designer, in the lighting of a play, if nowhere else, should be so much at one that it is easy to understand Gordon Craig’s wish that one man should combine the functions of all three.

Light, in the theatre, then: (1) illuminates the stage and actors; (2) states hour, season, and weather, through suggestion of the light effects in nature; (3) helps paint the scene (stage picture) by manipulation of masses of light and shadow and by heightening color values; (4) lends relief to the actors and to the plastic elements of the scene; and (5) helps act the play, by symbolizing its meanings and reinforcing its psychology.

To achieve these five functions of stage light, five different kinds or sources of light are not, of course, needed. One light may combine several, or all, of these functions. In Joseph Urban’s lighting and setting of the last act ofTristan and Isoldesome years ago at the Boston Opera House, a beam of late afternoon sunlight struck across the stage to the figure of Tristan lying beneath a great oak tree. Slowly, as the day waned, the sun patch crept from the figure, until, at his death, it had left him in cool shadow. Thus, a light that illuminated, that told the time of day, that gave the figure of the singer and the bole of the great tree high relief by striking from only one side, also aided symbolically and psychologically in the interpretation of the drama. Thus to make light function in many ways is to use it with a sense of its ductility and subtlety as a medium of theatre art. In it we have the only single agency in the theatre that can work with all the other agencies, binding them together—that can reveal with the dramatist, paint with the designer, and act with the actors.

The machinery by which this medium is brought to the stage and through which its wonders are wrought commands a deep respect. Tradition has already laid its heavy hand here, and innovation in lighting equipment moves slowly. It is almost wholly within the last five years in the United States that lighting units of marked novelty have been introduced.

Of first importance is the machinery of control, the switchboard and dimmers. The customary place for the board in American theatres is at one side of the proscenium arch, either on the stage floor level, or on a perch raised some nine or ten feet above the stage floor. The manifest disadvantage of this location is that the operator cannot see the whole of the stage, and must depend for his cues upon a stage manager. It has, therefore, become the practice in many European theatres to place the operator in a pit directly in front of the stage, shielded from the auditorium and facing the actors. From here he can watch the action and see theeffects of his lights constantly. Telephone connections with lamp operators at the back of the stage enable him to keep them under his control.

The construction of the board and mounting of the switches are strictly prescribed by boards of fire underwriters in various cities, and need not be detailed here. The important consideration at this point is that, so far as possible, each light unit on the stage shall be subject to central control from a vantage point from which the stage can be seen; that each unit shall be subject toseparatecontrol; that groups of like units, classed by location or color, shall be subject to group control, apart from other groups; and that the stage light, as a whole, shall be controllable apart from the house lights.

That is, assuming, for purposes of illustration, the arrangement of lights common to most theatres, the white lights of the first border shall be controlled by a switch apart from that controlling the white lights of the second border or the third or the fourth. So, likewise, for each color circuit of each border, separately. Then there should be a white border main switch, controlling the white lights of all the borders, and a blue border main, etc. Above these, there should be a border main switch controlling all the border lights simultaneously. And thus with each division of the stage lights. Over all, one stage main switch should control all the lights of the stage. The auditorium lights, with their own switches, should be controlled from the same board as the stage lights.

The outstanding item of expense in building a good switchboard is the cost of dimmers, the resistance devices by which the intensity of the light is controlled. They vary in capacity with their wattage and type. But the dimmers, more than any other part of the control system, contribute to the flexibility of the machine. In a modern theatre they are indispensable.

So far as possible, there should be a dimmer for each switch on the board, controlling each light unit separately. With “master” levers, related light units can be ganged and controlled simultaneously. When only a limited number of dimmers can be afforded, it is possible so to construct the switchboard that circuits to be dimmed can be “shunted” through the dimmers, while circuits that need not be dimmed remain on constant. A very ingenious board of this type was designed by Mr. Bassett Jones for the Artists’ Guild Theatre in St. Louis. This board has eight dimmers which can be used for any eight light units on the stage,giving it a far greater flexibility than it would have if only a particular eight could be dimmed. It is, however, rather complicated, with its dual system of constant and dimmer plugs and connectors, so that only great familiarity with it makes it quick in action.

In addition to the switchboard type of dimmer, there are also smaller dimmers made for use with nitrogen lamp spots and floods. Where these are used I believe they should be set by the main switchboard, rather than on the lamp itself. Attached to the lamp they require an additional operator and break up the centralization of control.

The actual stage lights fall into two classes—stationary and movable. The stationary or fixed equipment has remained, on the whole, highly conventional. It consists, primarily, of the footlights, a trough of lights set along the floor at the front edge of the stage, throwing light upward upon the actors and the scene, and the border lights, hanging troughs, adjustable in height, throwing their light downward. The first of these border lights, often known as the concert border, hangs immediately behind the curtain or proscenium drapery, and the others are hung at intervals of seven feet from center to center. The footlights and borders are usually wired in three circuits, each circuit being filled with lamps of a different color, customarily white, red or amber, and blue.

Of late, these customary units have been put on trial and found wanting. They serve principally, and almost exclusively, the first function of stage light—illumination—and are found, on the modern stage, not to serve it well. Footlights, especially, have come under the ban, though the campaign against them has been waged a little indiscriminately. When footlights alone are used in a realistic scene, they are bad. If the light from the floor dominates, the under surfaces of the face—chin, nose-tip, eyelids—are unnaturally and disagreeably accentuated. If the light from below and above is balanced, the result, though more natural, is perhaps as bad, for the lighting is flat, and there is no relief in the features or figures of the players. For plays and scenes of a heroic or fantastic sort, treated decoratively, rather than literally, lighting entirely from above gives interesting and picturesque results. It shadows the features heavily, and lends a sculptured, massive quality to the face. More and more, this overhead lighting has come to be used, and with some producers has been made a fetish.

The very quality that makes this sort of lighting interesting in scenes of a certain kind exhibits its strongest disadvantage in naturalistic lighting. In the average room, during the daytime, light pours in through windows, striking faces at face level. The light comes mostly from one side of the room, or if there are windows on more than one side, and the light comes in several directions, it comes in varying degrees. The sun does not shine in two directions at once. That is to say, though light may come from more than one direction, and be reflected multitudinously by walls and ceiling and, in less degree, the floor, the balance of intensity is always in favor of one direction. And this direction is not up or down, but in a line approaching a right angle to the erect figure.

Something of the same sort is usually true out-of-doors. Only at noon do we have literally overhead lighting. Even then, the beam of light is so broad as to envelop the figure on all sides, and is so variously reflected by the dome of the sky, by trees, rocks, water, houses, that there is, in addition to the direct downward light, a considerable “general” diffused illumination. At most hours of the day, the rays of the sun fall upon the earth and its people at a long angle. The factor that gives relief and prevents a dull flatness in the light of nature is the dominance of east over west in the morning and of west over east in the afternoon. Night illumination indoors, though usually from fixtures above head-level, is reflected by all the walls of the room and by all the objects in it.

A soft, diffused face-level lighting is thus warranted in almost all circumstances. The hard glare of foots and borders, used unrestrictedly, does not supply this need most happily. Used moderately, footlights have a distinct function, until better means of moderating the crude shadows cast from above shall have been devised.

An effort to throw light upon the stage at an angle less perpendicular than that of footlight and border has been made at the Little Theatre in New York. Here, certain sections of the ceiling panelling can be lowered and light thrown upon the stage by diffused spot lamps at an angle of 45°. In Mr. Belasco’s theatre, lights have been installed in the face of the balcony, achieving the same result even more satisfactorily. I believe that, in good time, beautifully designed lighting units will be frankly set or hung in the auditorium of the theatre.

The footlight equipment of most theatres is, as it has long been, unmodified, consisting merely of rows of incandescent lamps oflow standard (usually forty watts). The border lights have seen more innovation during the past few years, especially the first (or concert) border, most used in lighting interior scenes. Originally, these border lights were intended to light not only the stage, but also the hanging strips of canvas (known as borders) formerly used to suggest a ceiling in interior scenes, and still used to represent foliage and to misrepresent the blue sky in exterior scenes. With the use of flat ceilings for interiors comes a demand for a light that illuminates the scene rather than the ceiling. This is best supplied by the X-Ray border, made up of a smaller number of lamps than the old border but of higher standard, each lamp being 150 or 250 watts. Each lamp is set in a separate compartment, separated from its neighbor, and each lamp is backed by an X-Ray reflector of mirrored glass with whorled corrugations, diffusing the light evenly over a large area. Each compartment may be fitted with a color screen of gelatine or dyed glass. Often, too, spot lamps, large and small, are mounted on this border to accentuate the light on certain areas of the stage.

The other borders, used mostly for exterior scenes, must serve to flood stage and scene with light. The old type of border does not serve adequately, even in the type of scene for which it was designed. The use of sky borders has largely given way to the high cyclorama of canvas or plaster, leaving the sky prospect open to the eye as far as the sight line reaches. The overhead lighting must be powerful enough to flood stage and sky with light. It is becoming more and more common to reinforce the ordinary border-light equipment with hanging thousand-watt lamps in specially constructed steel hoods. In the Arts and Crafts Theatre, in Detroit, Sam Hume installed his entire overhead equipment of such hanging lamps, and did away with the old border light altogether. In the average theatre, however, these lamps are more in the nature of movable lamps than of permanent equipment, and will be further spoken of below.

The Neighborhood Playhouse, New York. This building is one of the most satisfying examples of recent theatre design in America, being free from overdecoration and admirably fitted to its purpose technically. Harry Creighton Ingalls and F. B. Hoffman Jr., Associate Architects.

Auditorium of the Artists’ Guild Theatre, St. Louis. This little auditorium is made useful for both dramatic productions and art exhibitions by means of an ingenious device for tilting the floor, described on page 29. Above is the view toward the balcony, below the view toward the stage. Laurence Ewald, Architect.

The footlights and border lights, and, occasionally, vertical strips inside the proscenium frame at the sides, constitute the whole of the stage-lighting equipment that is more or less a part of the structure. They “go with the building.” Everything else is movable and falls into the second classification of lighting units. But, in the structure of the stage, provision must be made for the use of such additional lights. Outlets in the form of “stage pockets” are set at regular intervals in the stage floor; into thesepockets, spot and flood lamps may be plugged. The pockets are set in the stage floor in two lines running up and down stage, a short distance behind the proscenium opening, at either side of it. There are usually from four to six such pockets on each side of the stage. Sometimes there is one at the back of the stage, and one or more in the fly-gallery. Occasionally, also, in houses served by alternating current, there are pockets served by a small house generator, supplying direct current for the use of arc lamps. In some theatres, also, there are pockets connected with storage batteries, intended to supply an emergency service or for use with lighting units of a voltage other than the usual 110 volts. The pockets must, of course, be carefully insulated, and covered with a hinged iron lid set flush with the floor.

The movable lights are of two general types: flood lights, for general diffused illumination, and lens lights, for concentrated, direct “spotting.” Under the first heading may be classed all special lights known, in stage parlance, as strips, floods, or bunches. Strips are small troughs, fitted with from three to ten sockets, and are used in lighting off-stage “backings,” set-pieces of scenery, and small areas where a special accent of color or intensity is wanted. Bunches, now largely obsolete, are hoods set on extension standards, fitted with ten or twelve sockets each. These have been replaced by flood lamps, burning 500 and 1,000-watt nitrogen-filled mazda bulbs. The hoods of these flood lamps have diverging sides or are fitted with a reflector behind the light, and have grooves at the front of the hood for carrying color-frames. Formerly such lamps were equipped with arc lights, but the nitrogen lamp has wholly displaced the arc in flood lighting. Its advantages are that it does not require an attendant to “feed” the light, that it can be dimmed, giving it range of intensity to make up for decreased brilliance, and that it can be burned on either direct or alternating current, without the annoying buzz of an arc light burning alternating current.

Spot lamps are mounted in closed iron hoods, emitting light from only one end through a lens. The hoods, like those of flood lamps, are set on extension standards, and can be tipped up or down and turned from side to side. Arc spots are still in general use, as the thousand-watt lamp is not sufficiently brilliant for use on large stages or for long throws. In little theatres, however, the thousand-watt spot is bright enough and has all the advantages over the arc that apply to the newer type offlood lamp. For such small stages, the principal consideration always should be centralized control, and it cannot be got with the arc light. As incandescent, gas-filled bulbs of still higher standard are developed, the arc spot will cease to be used, even in large theatres.

There is also a small variant of the spot light, known as a “baby” spotlight, burning a lamp of 150 or 250 watts. Used with care, this is one of the most valuable stage lights we have for producing delicate variations in light volume and color in particular areas of the stage. These small lights may also be dimmed.

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I have referred above to hanging hoods with thousand-watt lamps for general illumination. Where these are not made a part of the permanent lighting equipment of the theatre, they may be introduced for special scenes and effects, being hung where desired, and massed in such numbers and of such colors as needed. The hoods are equipped with chains by which they may be hung upon pipe battens and tipped as desired. They are plugged, like other movable lights, into floor pockets or fly-gallery pockets.

The color of light on the stage is obtained in three ways. Where lamps of low standard (twenty-five or forty watts) are used, as in the foots or borders, they may be coated with dyes, put up for the purpose, made with a collodion base. The burning lamp is dipped into the liquid and left alight until the dye coat has thoroughly dried and hardened. Bulbs of high standard, however, cannot be dyed, as the dye does not stand up under the intense heat generated by a lamp of one hundred or more watts. As a matter of fact, few of the commercial dyes are wholly satisfactory, even with smaller bulbs. The blues especially deteriorate under heat, either fading or cracking, or burning to a purple or black.

The rays of larger lamps, burned either in flood or spotlight hoods, are colored with gelatine mediums, held before the light in frames of proper size. The gelatine colors also fade under heat, and, being very fragile, crack and tear, and must be frequently renewed. For durability, the best color medium is a sheet of glass with the color blown in. Unfortunately such glass is very costly, cannot be had in a large range of colors, and is usually not as translucent as might be wished.

Mr. Munroe Pevear of Boston has made interesting experiments with mediums of dyed glass. He manufactures his own dyes, and claims for them a much longer life than the commercial variety enjoys. His mediums are highly translucent, and are, of course, far more durable than the gelatine mediums. He makes them, however, in only the three primary colors, for his development of color screens has been ancillary to experiments of a larger intent—the development of a synthetic lighting system.

The principle of his color system is simply the principle of the prism inverted. The prism breaks white light up into its primaries. Mr. Pevear unites the primaries to make white. By combining his red, green, and blue light in varying degrees of each, he is able to obtain any color in the spectrum. To pale out his lights to tints, he includes in his border and footlight equipment a fourth circuit of white lights. To my knowledge, only one theatre has been equipped by Mr. Pevear—the Toy Theatre of Boston, now the Copley. But in the short-lived tenancy of the house by the Toy Theatre Company there was never a whole-hearted effort to test Mr. Pevear’s equipment. Experiments with synthetic lighting have been conducted at various times and places by Sam Hume, Norman Geddes, the present writer, and others. The results more than reward the effort of such experiment, and I commend a study of its possibilities to all workers in little theatres.

In addition to the typical theatrical lighting units, other units, not designed primarily for theatrical use, are being adopted. Foremost among these are the reflectors of the X-Ray type. These are made in a number of sizes and shapes, but are of two types, the whorled reflector and the parabolic reflector. The first type gives a diffused light and the second a concentrated beam. The X-Ray flood lamps, manufactured for lighting the exteriors of buildings and for illuminating night construction jobs, are coming to be used on the stage. They can be focused, have a higher efficiency than a lens light burning the same number of watts, and produce a more pleasant spot than the sharply defined light-area of the conventional spot light, projecting a brilliant ray, most intense at the center and fading toward the edges of the field. There are a number of firms manufacturing lights of this type, and they are now generally used for lighting outdoor pageants. They are quite as valuable in the indoor theatre as on the pageant field.

I have used frequently, instead of baby spots of the regular type, automobile windshield spots, burning a six-volt lamp. These cost perhaps one-tenth as much as the regular type, and can be used on a special circuit supplied with current either through a small step-down transformer or from a storage battery, kept continually charged by running current into it from a strip of carbon lights wired in series-multiple. These windshield spots are usually equipped with a swivel and trunnion mounting, so that they can be turned in any direction, are focusable, and have a clamp by which they can be fastened to pieces of scenery or upright pipe standards in the proscenium entrance.

Besides a goodly number of well-distributed stage pockets into which movable lamps may be plugged, there should be points of vantage from which lights may be cast, perches and bridges elevated above the level of the stage. Most useful is a bridge across the stage, just inside and above the proscenium. From this bridge, special flood and spot lamps may be manipulated. Often perches are built out from the wall at either side of the proscenium from which spots may be thrown down to the stage. Occasionally these are movable structures with several levels and can be wheeled to various points off stage. The fly-gallery, also, is used for spot lighting. When a false proscenium is used, the overhead bridge and side perches are sometimes built into the structure.

In planning the lighting equipment for a small stage, all thought of the usual theatre installation can be set aside. Border lights of the old type are not useful enough to warrant the expenditure of the money they cost. Footlights, too, though useful when no better means of front lighting can be devised, can well be replaced by face-level lights from the auditorium, concealed by wall traps or by the balcony rail, or hidden in decorative coverings suspended, chandelier-like, from the ceiling. The essentials for a flexible, adaptable lighting system are centralization and delicacy of control, numerous and well-situated current outlets, and as wide a variety as possible of movable lamps for flooding and spotting. There should be enough circuits to allow the use of a three- or four-color system, along the lines of the synthetic system of Mr. Pevear, described above. Along with this there must be facilities for throwing light from above the stage from bridges and movable platforms. The only permanently installed piece of lighting equipment that is absolutely necessary is the X-Ray border at the front of the stage for the lighting of interior scenes.

With a carefully planned switchboard and dimmer-bank, and numerous pockets or current outlets, for the initial equipment, there is hardly any limit to the development of the little theatre’s lighting facilities, for if it must begin with only a few lighting units, it can acquire more from time to time, and with each acquisition build up its means of achieving beauty. And in this direction the most vital contributions to the craft of the theatre are yet to be made.

Figure 9—The permanent “scene” of theThéâtre du Vieux Colombier. See page 74. (FromAlbum du Vieux Colombierby Fauconnet.)

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