“In any artistic pursuit,” the lighting designer Donald Holder told me the other day in the lobby of the Vivian Beaumont, “you have to embrace risk-taking. Otherwise, you don’t have as much relevance.” Holder’s Beaumont theater bow came in 1996, with Juan Darien, directed by Julie Taymor. Eleven LCT productions later, he continues to take risks with the current McNEAL, written by Ayad Akhtar and directed by Bartlett Sher. Holder chatted with me not only about the challenges associated with the new drama’s AI content but about what he’s learned over his award-laden career designing for the Beaumont’s large thrust stage.
“Because McNEAL delves into technology that is impacting our lives in large and small ways,” related Holder, “I had to operate out of my comfort zone. I had to introduce technology into the visual landscape of the show that was in sync with the metaphorical content.” Holder continued: “Ayad is asking whether in this era of AI we can detect the source of something. Is what we see and read borrowed and not truthful or is it traceable to a real source? Are we experiencing a deep fake?”
According to Holder, lighting designers often work in subliminal terms, shifting perceptions without an audience being consciously aware of it. As an example, he mentioned a scene in McNEAL. “At the beginning of it,” Holder said, “we encounter McNeal and his son, Harlan, at McNeal’s house in upstate New York. At first, things seem normal and natural. But then we morph into something that feels almost hallucinatory.”
That effect is achieved, Holder said, in part by use of an Infared tracking system that follows actors around the space. McNEAL marks his first use of it. Holder recalled that Juan Darien occasioned his first professional use of another innovative tool: automated lighting – Holder’s Beaumont career is bookended by risk-taking.
“Juan Darien,” said Holder, “was very challenging because the entire space was covered by a canopy of leaves. In a thrust space, light from above is important and we had to do without that tool.” What’s more, the show’s Bunraku puppetry required extremely precise lighting. Holder, however, is a gifted problem solver, and Taymor continued their collaboration on her beautiful and boffo production of The Lion King. (For his work on it, Holder received his first Tony.)
Holder called the Beaumont “a thrilling space to work in.” Its deep thrust allows him to create corridors of light: think of the Navy boardroom scene in South Pacific (Holder’s second Tony), or the “Something Wonderful” scene in The King and I, a magnificent setting for Ruthie Ann Miles (who is also in McNEAL) to deliver her show-stopper. In fact, that scene immediately came to mind when Holder said that one of the primary tasks of a lighting designer is “to make magic.”
To do that it is not enough, Holder said, to exercise command over the designer’s tech toolbox. “I equate what we do to playing jazz: we’re basically improvising. Musical improvisation requires staying within a predetermined chord structure. Our constraints are the text and the directorial point of view.”
Holder explained that lighting designers can learn not only from music but from painting. “I still remember seeing the original production of A Chorus Line when I was young,” Holder recalled. “The way Tharon Musser” -- the show’s lighting designer -- “used those Mondrian squares blew me away. The way she lit the floor on that stage was astounding.”
Returning to talk of McNEAL and the Beaumont, Holder said, “Whenever I design for this theater and its thrust configuration, I think primarily of the floor. There’s a lot of it, providing much of the focus for what the audience is looking at. And like all the surfaces in McNEAL, how the floor is lit must work with the fact that the whole set is conceived as a projection surface. The light must aid the storytelling but stay out of the way. Which is a pretty good description of what lighting designers do generally.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
