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Linda Essig - Stanley McCandless, Lighting History, and Me - Theatre Topics 17:1

Article  in  Theatre Topics · January 2007

DOI: 10.1353/tt.2007.0008

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 Stanley McCandless, Lighting History, and Me

Linda Essig

Recently, I was seated at a lighting-industry banquet with two of the elder statesmen of that
industry. Our table happened to be situated directly below the lighting equipment that had been
hung to light the platform stage for the evening’s presentation. As we waited for the pecan-crusted
salmon to arrive, one of the elder statesmen, a true pioneer in mid-twentieth-century lighting tech-
nology, looked up and then turned to the other, who has been a force in the buying and selling that
funds the research and development of that technology, and said: “Look at that: the light’s coming
in dead-on to the stage! Haven’t people heard of McCandless? What are they thinking, light straight
on like that!” I mustered all the self-control I could to refrain from saying anything at all, let alone
what I was thinking: “It’s been eighty years since McCandless first published his Glossary of Stage
Lighting [and subsequently the Syllabus of Stage Lighting in 1931 and A Method of Lighting the Stage
in 1932]. Can’t you break away from lighting a performer from 45-degree angles?” I respectfully
kept my mouth shut; to say anything there would serve no purpose. What could be gained from
asking this distinguished gentleman, whose career has impacted the theatre in many positive ways,
to acknowledge that the lighting design paradigm he was devoted to, a method first codified by
Stanley McCandless seventy-five years ago, would be better left to theatre history than contemporary
lighting practice? Instead, we discussed travel plans and family and I acknowledged (albeit to myself )
that I was dining with living history.

The study of design history is, of course, an important component of an overall theatrical
design education. Most often, however, design history is considered as foundational to the set design
and costume design curricula, where the flat, painted scenery of the 1930s and 1940s is viewed as
past practice and the pinched waist and flared skirt silhouette of the 1950s is as much a period gar-
ment as a hobble skirt. Lighting design practices of those same periods are, however, rarely presented
historically. In many lighting design studios, the lighting design methods of the 1930s are still given
currency instead of being considered as a phase, now complete, in lighting design history. Yet both
the student lighting designer and the professional lighting designer, like the set and costume designer,
are best equipped to achieve innovation for the future when they view the historical past from the
distance, and within the context, of the present.

McCandless’s original method espouses only four functions of stage light: visibility, form,
naturalism, and mood (McCandless, Syllabus 2–3). Later texts by others essentially adopted or slightly
adapted these four functions to visibility, selective focus, modeling, and mood (Gillette), or selective
visibility, composition, revelation of form, mood, and a fifth, information, meaning the conveyance
of place and time-of-day information (Pilbrow), or selective visibility, composition, revelation of
form, mood, and a fifth, “reinforcing theme . . . the compositional revelation of the thematic forms
of the setting” (Parker and Wolf 375). These four functions provided a firm foundation for decades
for designers who had a limited palette of technological resources with which to work. State-of-the-art
lighting technology from the time McCandless’s method was first published until the 1970s consisted
essentially of only four types of fixed-focus lighting instruments (ellipsoidal reflector spotlights, fresnel
spotlights, beam projectors, and floodlights for cyc lighting), all controlled by between twelve and
seventy-two cumbersome manual resistance dimmers. Although the sophistication and quantity of
the technological tools available to the lighting designer have increased exponentially in the last thirty

61
62 Linda Essig

years, the foundational methodology of much—though not all—lighting education has remained
rooted in McCandless’s mid-twentieth-century paradigm until only recently.

I have been designing without either the benefit or the curse of McCandless’s method for quite
some time. I teach students of its historical importance as the first modern codified methodology for
stage lighting while simultaneously requesting that they not employ it in their own work in order to
ensure that their work is, in fact, their own. My approach has had its supporters (whose students use
hundreds of copies of Lighting and the Design Idea every year) and its detractors (who call it idiosyn-
cratic or don’t understand how to teach it), but after almost two decades of teaching lighting design, I
found further legitimization of my views several months after that industry dinner mentioned above,
when I saw the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd under John Doyle’s Tony Award–winning direction
with lighting design by Richard G. Jones. When I took my seat in the balcony of the Eugene O’Neill
Theatre, I noticed that there were very few lights hung on the theatre’s box booms, those front-of-
house positions that provide an obtuse angle of diagonal front light to the stage. Most Broadway
theatres predate the broad adoption of McCandless’s method, as does this one, which opened in 1925
as the Forrest Theatre. There are rarely lighting positions in these older houses from which a lighting
designer can achieve McCandless’s optimum 45-degree above-and-to-one-side angle of lighting—an
angle of light that had earlier been advocated by nineteenth-century critics of footlights (Penzel). In
older theatres such as this one, the box boom provides the closest approximation to this angle and
consequently is often loaded to maximum capacity with lighting instruments.

In this fascinating production of the Sondheim musical-theatre psychodrama, light functions

in ways that McCandless and the legions of designers who have used his method since have not
even considered. Jones’s design for Sweeney Todd seemed not to have been a product of a formula
derived from these functions, but rather to have emerged organically from an overall conception
of the work that focused on storytelling within a spatial volume filled by a hierarchy of sound, ac-
tors, characters, light, and “stuff ” (chairs, musical instruments, a coffin, and shelves and shelves of
miscellany). Doyle himself said in a National Public Radio interview: “My aim . . . is to ask the
audience to use its imagination. It’s to engage the audience to be a vital part of the storytelling and
to have to imagine” (Weekend Edition Saturday). Light in this production, therefore, did not need to
ally itself with the traditional four functions of light as defined by McCandless; rather, light framed
the volume of the set both through the distribution of the light itself and the regular placement of
booms (vertical lighting positions) along the sides of the playing area. There is not a 45-degree angle
to be had in that lighting design. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with light from this
popular, appealing, attractive, natural-looking angle, but in this particular application a 45-degree-
angle front light would have softened the effect of light on the actors and on the space in this piece,
contradicting the spatial rigidity of Doyle’s set and staging.

Lighting designer Jones had little if any formal training. Instead, he had what he calls “on-the-
job training” since age 16, starting at the Swan Theatre in Worcester (UK). Unlike the US, where
there have been graduate programs in lighting design for thirty-five years or more, there were not
many specialized courses available to him when he was starting out twenty-five years ago. When Jones
himself teaches in such courses now, he says he “uses guidance rather than formulae” (interview).

A rigid adherence to formulae would have impeded the creativity of Doyle’s direction and
Jones’s lighting design. For that matter, Doyle did not adhere to conventional methods of direct-
ing and acting either—methods that had been developed to address the issues confronting theatre
practitioners of the last century. Though clearly influenced by the acting and design aesthetic of
Bertolt Brecht and the Epic Theatre, the production did not get “stuck” there either. To create freely
and inventively as they did necessitates an understanding that methods are meant to be studied, but
then freely adapted and changed—or rejected outright. Jones says of his own work that “I don’t ever
do the same thing twice on two different shows” (interview). So that young designers can have the
freedom to exercise the kind of creativity that Jones exhibited in this design, they should approach
 Stanley McCandless, Lighting History, and Me 63

McCandless’s method (or any technique) as “a method,” as McCandless himself called it, rather than
“The method,” and as a method born in a particular period of lighting design and theatre history.

McCandless, who trained as an architect, developed his method for lighting the stage while
teaching at Yale. The method addressed a perceived need to provide uniform illumination across
a proscenium stage in such a way as to render actors’ features naturally and without distortion or
distracting shadows. This method was an important step forward in lighting design education dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s.

During my own training in the early 1980s at New York University’s Department of Design,
I never once heard my mentors, John Gleason and Arden Fingerhut, utter the name of Stanley
McCandless. In fact, we did not study lighting history at all. That history was missing, I realized
in retrospect, was a sin of commission as well as omission. This was training that was firmly rooted
in its own present, in the moment, and in the professional / commercial theatre scene of New York
City. And, because this was my earliest formal training in lighting design, I had no preconceived
notions about how one should develop a lighting design. I was taught to start with the play and my
own point of view toward it and then to work out from that center. That is what I did then and
have done since.

Fast-forward seven or eight years and I am teaching lighting design at the University of Wis-
consin. Tasked with interviewing prospective students for the MFA program in lighting design, I
would inquire of these eager young lighting designers as we pored over their portfolios, “Please tell
me how you conceptualized your design choices for this production of Fifth of July [or The Miss
Firecracker Contest or Come Back to the Five and Dime or some other American realist play of the
second half of the last century].” All too often the response was a variant of, “Well, I chose R02 for
my warms and R53 for my cools.” To which I would further inquire, “Why?” By the early 1990s,
after several recruiting cycles during which I heard many unsatisfactory responses similar to “This
is how I was taught to do my light plot,” I came to the conclusion that in much undergraduate
lighting education in the United States there was significant devotion to a formulaic approach to
lighting design, an approach derived from McCandless’s 1920s-era method. Students were not being
taught to design from the center of the material, but instead to impose on a play a formula from
outside of it. This conclusion was developed over an extensive period of time, roughly 1988–1998,
while reviewing multiple portfolios (between ten and thirty) each year in the relatively controlled
environment of the U / RTA unified national auditions.

A quick survey of the lighting literature available at that time confirmed my impression that in
many lighting design classrooms there was an almost slavish adherence to portraying lighting design
as a secondary or tertiary design element that was little more than a service to the set designer and a
means of seeing the actors. And, to perform that service, one could organize a design around lighting
acting areas with warm and cool colors and some texture or a third color for accent. Students were
taught to develop a “color key” for each acting area so that the same lighting composition could be
uniformly applied across multiple acting areas on the stage. There was little or no attention paid to
spatial factors, to creating stage compositions that were not uniform, to creating or enhancing texture
and three-dimensional forms, or, most importantly, to making specific design choices that related
to a point of view toward the material being designed. Texts of that period did not, as McCandless
also did not, claim to espouse the only method of lighting design, but each in its own way served to
perpetuate the use of McCandless’s method both in the classroom and on the stage.1

At the same time that I was decrying this lack of more concept-based and spatially aware
lighting design training, I was struggling in my own classroom because of my insistence that there
was no formula for good lighting, that there is not one right way to develop a lighting design. Un-
dergraduate students especially were hoping for a playbook that would provide the answers to the
difficult questions: What do you want it to look like and how can you make it look that way? I had
64 Linda Essig

been as adamant about not teaching method lighting as its adherents were about doing so. Eventu-
ally, however, I realized that to move forward, my students and I had to look backward.

In a seminar-style design class of four or five students, one can work on a student’s individual
design process and development of design technique, but in a classroom of twenty-five to thirty-
five students from all over the campus who were hoping to learn something about lighting design
that they could apply to their communications, theatre, art, or zoology major, it became clear that
I needed to provide some solid ground upon which these students could build. I started, therefore,
to provide more historical context for the development of lighting as a design discipline very early
in the semester. The history of lighting technology (Sabbatini’s rudimentary dimming system, gas-
light, early electric lighting) would come later, but from the outset I started to provide information
about where we had come from in order to explain where we were as lighting designers and where
we might be headed.

Lighting design, like computer science, is a young discipline. It has been taught in the acad-
emy since only the 1920s, when McCandless taught lighting design at Yale. In artisan-like fashion,
his knowledge was passed on to one of his students, Jean Rosenthal, who then disseminated this
knowledge to a variety of assistants (including Tharon Musser) as well as through her seminal text,
The Magic of Light. In this book, she refers to McCandless as “the granddaddy of us all,” but also
acknowledged that, although he was a great teacher, he was not an artist (16).

To provide some background for my students I could present McCandless’s four functions
and four properties as a phase (now complete) in the development of this young discipline, and, by
placing his method in historical context, diverge from and react to it during the subsequent weeks
of the course. I could also borrow from the language of our contemporary digital age to explain
that McCandless’s “4 properties x 4 functions” method, while groundbreaking for its clarity and
simplicity in its own time, provided a “resolution” of only sixteen pixels (or mosaic tiles), but that
an audience in the twenty-first century is so much more visually sophisticated than the audience of
the 1920s that it requires a higher-resolution “mosaic” that is also three-dimensional and temporal.
Contemporary lighting technology could support that multidimensional mosaic in a way that it
would not have been able to eighty years ago. McCandless, therefore, becomes the antithesis to my
thesis that “there is not one right way to develop a lighting design.”

The stated learning goals for my course, Stage Lighting Design I, as it evolved over the years
were:

• To help the student become a keen observer of light in real, painted, and theatrical environ-
ments.
• To understand the functions of light in theatrical usage and in our everyday environment.
• To understand the process of theatrical lighting design.
• To be able to apply basic lighting design techniques to a short play.
• To introduce students to lighting technology, color theory, drafting, lighting history, and
other lighting-related topics.

Of these, the most ephemeral, or perhaps most individualized, is to foster an understanding of the
process of theatrical lighting design. If one does not rely on McCandless’s method, this process is
inherently nonlinear and iterative. Instead of describing a method, my course evolved into one that
presented design process as an open structure, a kind of scaffold, the foundation of which was the
material itself and the student designer’s own point of view toward it. The multiple routes to the top
of that scaffold (the design completed in the theatre) would be determined by the student designer
passing through each level of the scaffold: understanding the material (conceptualization), figuring
out what it should look like (design), determining how to make it look that way (technique), and then
making it look that way in the theatre (the synthesis of conceptualization, design, and technique).
 Stanley McCandless, Lighting History, and Me 65

This learning goal was assessed via project work in all four phases (the last in a four-day
marathon of scenes presented in the lighting lab). Once I started to provide the historical context
for the development of lighting as a design discipline, students were better able to understand more
consistently the contemporary design process and its open structure. Students focused more on issues
of developing a point of view and understanding the style of the material so that they could apply
their own ideas within the framework of that structure. They began to focus less on figuring out the
“right way” to do something, and more on developing their own aesthetic response to the material.
It is worth noting that a subsequent advanced class focused on techniques for implementing that
aesthetic vision in light, but for this introductory class, the firmer ground provided by the historical
context enabled individual students better to understand contemporary process. As an added bonus,
my teaching evaluations improved!

Providing context for the development of lighting as a design discipline is not the only way
that lighting history can be incorporated into the design classroom, though the lighting design
curriculum’s exploration of history doesn’t need to be limited to lighting history alone. If students
are taught a design process that begins with understanding the material, then they also need to
be taught how to research the history of that material so that they can develop their own point of
view toward it. Historical research methods are, therefore, also part and parcel of this introductory
lighting design course.2 Students are taught that in order fully to understand the material they are
designing, they should research the production and critical history of the play and the playwright as
well as familiarize themselves with the social, cultural, and political history of both the era in which
the play was written and the period in which it is set.

Why should a twenty-first-century lighting designer understand the stagecraft of an Eliza-

bethan theatre to effectively design, for example, The Merchant of Venice, a play first performed in
an open-air theatre under natural light?3 For this particular play, the lighting designer’s reading of
Shakespeare’s vivid description of the moonlit night in the fifth act (“In such a night . . .”) is informed
by the knowledge that these words had impact without the visual support that contemporary light-
ing could provide. This frees the designer to make choices about the moonlight—whether to create
stage pictures that translate Shakespeare’s words in a literal way, or more abstractly—and helps stu-
dent lighting designers understand the importance of the text itself, which does not require lighting
support to convey its meaning. Further study of lighting history might include the development of
lighting positions during the Renaissance, the development of gaslight, and, finally, electric light
and its digital control. Such study plays a role in fostering an understanding of how far lighting has
come since its beginnings in, arguably, ritual performance before a fire.

The study of lighting history also provides lighting designers with a vocabulary with which
to discuss staging options and an understanding of the sources, positions, control, and distribution
of lighting in these historical periods. That knowledge then becomes part of the lighting designer’s
palette of visual images, enabling him or her to make informed choices as to whether or not ac-
curately to recreate the look the lighting might have had one, two, or three hundred years ago or
to reject it outright and start with a different image altogether. The use of McCandless’s method
of employing 45-degree angles of front light colored with opposing warm and cool tints of bastard
amber and lavender or pink and blue, then, would be for its period effect, to advance the overall
conception of the play, as was done, for example, in the first play-within-the-play segments of The
Drowsy Chaperone in which 1920s lighting angles and colors are used to support the story and
establish the production’s campy visual style. Most importantly, however, the study of the history
of plays and their productions, as noted earlier in this essay, serves the crucial purpose of helping
lighting designers (student or professional) understand the material and develop a point of view
toward it through which all other design choices are made.

Lighting design educators need always to be looking to the future because the frontiers of
lighting technology are constantly advancing. I have also found that students have a better grasp
66 Linda Essig

of contemporary trends in lighting technology when these also are given their place in history. For
example, students struggling with the concept of “tracking” on certain kinds of control consoles
are able to grasp it when taught that tracking evolved from the way shows using manual resistance
dimmers were cued: a handle stayed where the electricians placed it (it “tracked”) until the electri-
cian moved it. Even better, when this explanation is accompanied by an actual demonstration with
a seventy-five-year-old dimmer pack that looks like something from Rube Goldberg’s garage, the
students can literally place their hands on history. For those students whose learning style does not
respond to written numerical examples, this kind of hands-on demonstration of a control philoso-
phy can help students advance beyond the obstacle of trying to program a computer console for
the first time. For any young lighting designer trying to grasp key technological concepts, fiddling
with a seemingly ancient resistance rack is akin to a theatre historian walking onto the stage at the
Drottningholm Court Theatre.

Lighting history is an important means by which students can access an understanding of

technology and the development of contemporary lighting aesthetics. It is also a necessary departure
point from which serious students of lighting design must diverge in order to create something
truly new: their own design aesthetic. Thirty years ago there were still manual resistance dimmers
being used to control the lighting of Broadway shows. Thirty years from now, what we teach today
will need to be contextualized as history so that those future students can be launched forward on
their individual creative trajectories. And what was taught seventy-five years ago should likewise be
contextualized as history. Formulae and method can only take a designer so far; at some point he or
she must declare artistic independence from McCandless’s method lighting or any other doctrine.
Stanley McCandless’s method was groundbreaking and it deserves an important place in the lighting
curriculum—the lighting history curriculum.

Linda Essig has designed lighting for theatres throughout the US, including the Cleveland Playhouse,
Milwaukee Rep, Missouri Rep, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Westport Playhouse, LaMama ETC,
Texas Opera Theatre, Opera Delaware, and many others. She is director of the School of Theatre
and Film at Arizona State University and the author of Lighting and the Design Idea (Thomson
Wadsworth, 2005) and The Speed of Light: Dialogues on Lighting Design and Technological Change
(Heinemann, 2002).

Notes

1. The exception to this trend was Richard Palmer’s The Lighting Art, which focused more on lighting style and
on the physical and psychophysical elements of light and perception.

2. For a more in-depth discussion of the various kinds of research a lighting designer undertakes in developing
and executing a design, see chapter 6, “Lighting Design Research,” in Essig, Lighting and the Design Idea.

3. This question was posed to me by theatre historian Margaret Knapp after reading an earlier version of this
essay.

Works Cited

Essig, Linda. Lighting and the Design Idea. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.

Gillette, Michael. Designing with Light: An Introduction to Stage Lighting. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield
Publishing, 1998.
 Stanley McCandless, Lighting History, and Me 67

Jones, Richard G. Personal interview. 19 June 2006.

McCandless, Stanley. Glossary of Stage Lighting. New York: Theatre Arts, Inc., 1926.

_____. A Method of Lighting the Stage. 4th ed. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1954 (1932).

_____. A Syllabus of Stage Lighting. New Haven, CT: Whitlock’s, 1931.

Palmer, Richard. The Lighting Art: The Aesthetics of Stage Lighting Design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1985.

Parker, W. Oren, and Craig R. Wolf. Scene Design and Stage Lighting. 6th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1990.

Penzel, Frederick. Theatre Lighting before Electricity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1978.

Pilbrow, Richard. Stage Lighting Design: The Art, the Craft, the Life. New York: By Design P, 1997.

Rosenthal, Jean, and Lael Wertenbaker. The Magic of Light. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

Weekend Edition Saturday. National Public Radio. 19 November 2005.

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