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 of low 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.