Theatrical Lighting Design in the 21st Century

A Critique Of The Acting Area Theory Of Lighting Design

By

DELBERT UNRUH

Illustrations by

Mark Reaney

The acting area theory of stage lighting was invented by Stanley McCandless in 1938 – 1938! He was then teaching lighting at Yale University. The theory was disseminated by his book, A Method Of Lighting The Stage, which is still available in print today. However, in 2023, the book and theory are now out of date.

A BRIEF HISTORY

Louis Hartman, David Belasco’s electrician, invented the plano-convex spotlight in 1879. It was the first spotlight in the American theatre, and it came in 250 watt and later in 400 and 1000-2000 watt versions. The small diameter Fresnel spotlight became popular when the large diameter Fresnel lens, originally invented for lighthouses, became available for stage lighting purposes. Small Fresnels first came in 400 watt, 6” lens versions, with larger wattages and diameters coming later. Even larger units now exist for TV and motion pictures.

By at least 1930, electricity had replaced all other forms of power in theaters in the US except Broadway, which held onto its ancient DC current supply.

Theodore Fuchs published his book, Stage Lighting, in 1929. The ellipsoidal reflector was developed in Germany, first demonstrated in the US by Kliegl Brothers and first introduced into the theatre as the Leko by Century Lighting in 1933.

In 1938, Stanley McCandless published his book, A Method Of

Lighting The Stage. The work of Fuchs and McCandless, and others, resulted in the birth of the “Acting Area Method” of stage lighting.

The method was invented as a way of getting maximum results from minimum materials, and minimum materials were all that were available in 1938.

THEATRICAL STAGE LIGHTING

The first function of stage lighting is visibility. If you can’t see the performer, whatever else you are doing doesn’t make any difference. Here is a simple test: Give a person one light, a simple spotlight, and tell that person to light a performer

standing stage center. Inevitably, the person will put the lighting instrument on the center line, pointed directly at the performer.

Give that person a second spotlight and tell him or her to now use both to light the performer. The correct answer is for them to put the second instrument directly to the side of the performer at 45 to 90o. If the person re-positions the two lights into a front position, and creates the now familiar 45o cross-spotted acting area, all is lost!

The historic acting area method of stage lighting invented by McCandless in 1938 is out-of-date! It should

not be used any longer, although it is almost always taught in school, from high school through university. It is artificial, unnatural, and it cannot be achieved in a typical proscenium theatre.

We live in a world that is most often illuminated by a single source – the sun. Stage lighting design often seen in the playhouses of America is usually attempting to imitate the effect of sunlight in its various forms and situations.

What is the distinguishing feature of the light that is produced by the sun? Its direction. In normal exterior environments that are lit by the sun, we do not cast two shadows, and one side of our body is warm while

the other side is cool. This condition, however, is demonstrated as the truth in the classic acting area system. It takes two instruments separated by 90 degrees to make this happen. In order to take our discussion to the next level, a brief history of the of stage lighting in 1938 is necessary.

What would the environment and equipment be in the typical American theatre – say, on Broadway – for stage lighting in 1938? First, there is a conventional lobby, box office and audience area opening from a public street. The auditorium has two side aisles and two aisles far right and left, with conventional seating of up to 1000 seats on a slightly sloped floor and continuing in one or two balconies. Side seating boxes line the auditorium walls from the proscenium arch to the first balcony. At the rear of the auditorium, there is usually a booth for followspots and perhaps a motion picture projector.

The first and second balcony faces would have three to six planoconvex spotlights mounted on them, pointed at the stage. The stage’s front edge would have a full stage footlight pit recessed into it, with at least three color circuits with general service lamps

with spherical reflectors behind and perhaps a low small pipe or chain rail immediately upstage of it.

Immediately upstage of the proscenium arch and the act curtain there would have been a full stage three-circuit border light unit with primary red, green, and blue glass roundels and 500 watt general service lamps. This kind of unit would be repeated at approximately 8-foot intervals above the stage. Directly below the first border light and right or left would be a resistance dimmer board, with an electrical patch panel built into it. Broadway houses may also have had additional portable “piano boards” with resistance dimmers supplied by lighting supply companies for a particular production, along with any number of full-stage 1.5-inch steel pipe battens for canvas drops. The last borderlight unit may have had 1000 watt general service lamps in it to light a canvas sky drop. The stage floor would have two to four circuits each in multiple pockets cut into the floor and covered with metal lids. That was about it.

Incidentally, Stanley McCandless actually designed a Broadway show during this time. The Internet Broadway Database shows

that, in 1944, he designed the lighting for an operetta, Rhapsody, that opened in the New Century Theatre in NYC on November 22, 1944. It closed ten days later. Sets were by Oliver Smith, and costumes were by Frank Bevan. This theatre, like all Broadway theaters of the time, did not have a ceiling lighting port, which made McCandless’s job very difficult. His new acting area theory was impossible to implement correctly. The second balcony position, if this theatre had one, was the best McCandless could use. This theatre, incidentally, was also noted for its horrible acoustics and was demolished in 1962.

This was the best McCandless had in 1944. It is unclear as to whether the theatre that McCandless used for the first illustration of his acting area method book actually had a ceiling port. Nevertheless, he drew out his new theory, assuming such a port existed. Let’s examine what he actually did.

Typical lighting in the 1938 theatre in America was

from footlights and border lights. It was uniform, with simple color variations, bright and flat. There was no dimension. It was the perfect light for the two dimensional painted scenery that was hanging from the battens over the stage. If emphasis was needed, a carbon arc followspot would provide it. Separate control of stage areas was not possible or even thought to be desirable.

What McCandless proposed with his new acting area division was revolutionary! Each acting area on the stage, six in the first version – three downstage and three midstage areas – could be controlled separately. It was new! But, the new theory was deeply flawed because each acting area was lit by two separate instruments separated by 90o. Nevertheless, it became instantaneously popular, and it is said that the stagehands union gave McCandless an award for his idea.

Later on, other designers suggested a warm and a cool color for the two plano-convex instruments that were used to cross-focus for each area. It was then possible to crudely approximate daylight and evening light by dimming one set of lights against the other. This made the new system even more popular. Readers of the first edition of his book will notice that side lighting, back lighting, and top lighting are not mentioned. They were probably not in the commonly held lighting vocabulary of lighting designers (of which there were very few at the time).

Jean Rosenthal, a United Scenic Artist Union lighting designer on Broadway in the mid-century, was most influential in the introduction of side lighting, which she transferred to Broadway from her work with the Martha Graham Dance Company. The introduction of new side lighting ideas into the normal Broadway fare made her the most popular Broadway lighting designer of the period. These ideas are the foundation of her first important book on lighting design – The Magic of Light

Readers of McCandless’s first book may also notice that complementary tints are not suggested as appropriate colors for the two cross-focused acting area lights. That idea was an unfortunate invention by later designers. Complementary lighting tints could be mixed on the actor’s face, and while it did result in a very crude approximation of white light, it was too harsh for an audience member to believe.

Now let’s examine, briefly, the most positive result of the McCandless method – it brought to stage lighting, for the first time ever, a sense of the third dimension. Stage lighting was changed! Artfully placed shadows were not possible in the lighting solely from borderlights and footlights. This fact alone would lead in many later years to the revolution of the “New Stagecraft” in Europe and America, and it made the dimensional construction of stage scenery logical. It was the beginning of a new way of seeing in the theatre. But, that would take a long time to accomplish.

When I arrived in Evanston, Illinois, in the fall of 1966 to begin graduate study in theatre at Northwestern University, the stage floor in Annie May Swift Hall had the downstage and midstage acting areas – all six of them – painted in Roman numerals on the floor in

reflective paint. They were holy writ, and Theodore Fuchs, former lighting designer, was in his office downstairs. It was his adaptation of McCandless’s method. The “stage” in Annie May Swift Hall was just an adaption by Fuchs of a large and very limited classroom space.

Sam Ball, the newly hired stage designer at Northwestern, had replaced the plano-convex spotlights in the first beam of the so-called theatre with new Altman Ellipsoidal Spotlights. He had also replaced the old resistance dimmer board with a new Ward Leonard 2-scene SCR system, which was remarkable for the time.

But, just as no one drives a 1966 car today, lighting instruments and lighting theory have progressed in the years following. Fuchs, McCandless, and Ball did the best they could with what they had at the time, but that was decades ago. Times have changed, and we are indebted to many known and unknown designers and electricians who have improved on those initial ideas.

FRONT LIGHTING TODAY

Today, front lighting, or acting area lighting, should be done directly, in a straight ahead, parallel-to-the-centerline fashion, with ellipsoidal spotlights from the ceiling port or the first beam to light the three downstage areas. The midstage areas are lit from the first electric in the same manner. The lighting of the acting areas in this “straight ahead” manner creates simple and strong advantages.

First, and most important, the shadow from these lights falls directly behind the performer and thus cannot normally be seen by the majority of the audience. Most audience members likely assume that the light must be

coming from the performer. This is a very powerful and useful illusion!

Second, this position for the front light makes a shadow cast by a sidelight more pronounced and dominant. Each acting area front light must have two sidelights –one left and one right. And they must be independently circuited, as they are essential to the working of this new position for the front light. Ultimately, in a real production, the DS 3 acting areas must be sidelit. That means a total of six lighting units devoted to side lighting the DS 3 acting areas, and only from one side.

This position of the direct front light is logically arranged into numbered areas across the stage from stage left to right – the way humans read. These rows always end in odd numbers. This allows for a center stage area, which is always important in the theatre. It also allows the areas to easily overlap by 50%, so there are no dark spots.

Ellipsoidal spotlights, the kind that are used for direct front light, have a beam angle and a field angle. The beam angle is where the light falls off by 50%. The field angle is where the light falls off by 90%. Direct front light beams, especially from the ceiling port, and the 1st electric need to overlap by 50% so that the beam angles touch and there are no dark spots. The average acting area is 12 to 15 feet wide and overlaps its neighbors by 50% – the beam angles touch.

The old acting area cross–spotted method (the McCandless method), when the right and the left unit are sometimes on the same circuit – always a bad idea – makes the blending of acting areas near impossible because of the light pattern that results from such an arrangement. For reasons lost to history, every lighting designer, when laying out a theatrical lighting plot, has either drawn an ellipse on its side or a circle to define a

lighted acting area in the “Method” system. But, reality shows what the area lighted actually looks like. That reality also shows why dark spots are inevitable in the McCandless acting area method.

Anyone who has set up the acting area method knows this to be true, and fixing this flaw in the system has been accomplished in the past by hanging a three or four color strip light over the acting areas and using its diffused light to blend the acting areas together. “Blending lighting” is one of the kinds of lighting called for in all descriptions of the traditional acting area method. The most frequently used way of widening the beam of the two cross-focused acting area lights was using Fresnel spots. They were frequently used in the ceiling port and 1st electric and running them at near flood focus would widen the beam. This explains why the large theatre where I worked in the ’60s and ’70s had 8” Fresnel spots in the ceiling port position—a most unfortunate solution—because the whole proscenium arch was always lighted, and its shadow was visible on any background.

Further, seemingly unknown, or ignored by all, the typical architectural layout of the proscenium arch and the house ceiling port was almost always compromised. Consider this: The focus point of the down center area is located on the centerline, 5’-0” from the front edge of the stage. A 45o angle intersecting a point 5’-6” high and 5’-0” from the edge of the stage floor

shows the ceiling port to be approximately 35’-0” above the stage floor, at a 45o angle. By extending the math we find that the length of the ceiling port should be, at a minimum, 160’-0” long in order to make true 45o cross-spotting remotely possible. This dimension of the length of the ceiling port is almost never achieved.

As a result, the correct method angle for the three downstage acting areas lights left and right is never achieved. They are always crowded together at the right and left ends of the ceiling port, making true 45o lighting impossible.

Further, seemingly no one has ever asked why two crossfocused lights – one warm, one cool – are necessary for a single acting area. The only reason seems to be that having warm light from one side and cool light from the opposite side made it possible to create a crude approximation of daylight and evening light on the stage by dimming one set of lights against the other. The much later introduction of side lighting creates a more successful and flattering method of doing this.

The absence of a side lighting system, in favor of the McCandless acting area system of lighting creates a non–dramatic scene. The new arrangement of the front light solves this problem. ■

In Memoriam: designing lighting (dl)’s salute to great lighting talent, now departed.

Claude R. Engle III

March 30, 1938 – December 3, 2023

A world-renowned lighting designer, Claude Engle was a visionary whose career spanned over 50 years. In 1963, Claude played a crucial role in establishing the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) along with nine other lighting designers. Claude's impressive portfolio includes lighting designs for iconic structures such as the Sears Tower, the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, and the Freedom Tower (now known as One World Trade Center). He also designed lighting for several memorials, including the Vietnam, Korean, and Japanese American Memorials, as well as for renowned cultural institutions like the Louvre in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin, and the British Museum in London.

His legacy will continue to inspire many lighting designers and professionals across the globe for generations to come.

Photo courtesy of Claude R. Engle III Estate and IALD.