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 the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier. See page 74. (From Album du Vieux Colombier by Fauconnet.)