How do you describe light? It’s a very difficult thing. Often directors and designers communicate about light in emotional terms, broken sentences, and even bizarre hand gestures. “The light in this moment should be mysterious and bordering on scary” he says as his hands are swirling above his head, or “The light in this scene should be welcoming and provoke a sense of happiness?” as shoulders are shrugged looking for acceptance. These are hypothetical statements not actual comments from the production process, mostly it’s fragmented sentences accompanied by darting eye movements and ending in a “You know what I mean…Right?” My son often describes sun light to me as “The happiness” “Dad, I want to go to the happiness, I’m cold.” he will say if he’s standing in the shade of a tree after playing in a pool (he’s 2 ½).

So my job on a production is to take all of the descriptions of light from the text, stage directions, directors’ concepts, my concepts, and mush it all together to create a lighting plan that will be our visual language for a play, or at least the building blocks of the language which won’t be realized until half way through the technical rehearsals of the show. This plan also needs to facilitate the practical needs of the play by allowing me to shift focus around the stage, acting as a guide to show the audience where to look (provided they want to look where I put the light, some times the more interesting place to look is into the shadows, we all love a good mystery). This lighting plan should also help explain and support the information not in the text, like time of day, weather, motivating light sources in a room, closure, openness and that kind of thing. However the power of light often comes from what can’t be easily described in words. Most people don’t think about the functions of the light they see by breaking it down into its individual qualities (color, intensity, form, direction, and movement), they have a reaction on a more primal level. Often you have a reaction that invokes an emotional response of safety, fear, happiness, sadness, etc you get the picture. So the power of light is best used trying to invoke those emotional responses in a way that supports the direction of the play. As an audience member you can listen to a scene, think of its meaning, and then make an intellectual judgment about it and decide if you believe it or not. Light is much sneaker than that, because it triggers these very basic emotions. Your higher-level brain doesn’t have time to make a judgment on what it just saw, so you just believe it its right, what ever you felt is correct and your brain doesn’t try to dispute it. If I can sneak those moments into the play over and over it will support the work both intellectually and emotionally and help you disregard the other 150 people around you so you can focus on the story at hand, and maybe feel something unexpected.