On building a theatre / Stage construction and equipment for small theatres, schools and community

by Irving Pichel

The most 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. These are 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 in Redemption, is both drama and beauty. Imagine Wallace Stevens’ Carlos Among the Candles shown 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 his Lear or the mists and fogs of The Tempest is 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 cleverness with 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 medium per 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.