Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Chris Akerlind: I believe that light kind of pushes, and I love backlight because it’s pushing the actors toward us. It’s really that sense of the halo of backlight, which for me, metaphorically, I think actors are angels. I mean, sometimes, you know, you can hate them, right? But I do think that it’s an angelic instinct to walk on stage and tell us a story.

Announcer: This is story beat with Steve Cuden. A podcast for the creative mind explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us on as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on Storybeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Christopher Akerlind, has designed lighting and occasionally scenery for over 650 productions of theater, opera, and dance across the US and around the world, including 24 shows on Broadway. Chris’s recent work includes waiting for Godot at Theatre for a new audience, Lynn Nottage’s play Clyde’s on Broadway, and at the Mark Taper Forum, the Light in the Piazza, for which he won his first Tony, Paula Vogel’s play indecent, winning him both the Tony and Drama Desk Awards Rocky, the Musical, which garnered him a Tony nomination, Sting’s musical the last Ship and the Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, for which he was also Tony nominated. Among Chris’s other Broadway lighting designs are August Wilson’s the Piano Lesson and seven guitars, talk radio and the Musical Waitress. Chris’s numerous shows not on Broadway include scene with Cranes for Calarts center for new performance, the premiere of M. Butterfly for the Santa Fe Opera, and Martha Clark’s devised pieces, God’s Fool, Angel Reapers, and Cherie. Chris has also received an Obie Award for sustained excellence, four Drama Desk Awards, the Michael Merritt Award for Design and collaboration, two Chicago area Joseph Jefferson Awards, as well as numerous nominations for the drama desk, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics circle awards. Chris has taught lighting at schools like CalArts, USC, CMU, and his alma mater, Yale. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s my great privilege to have the extraordinarily talented, multi award winning lighting designer Christopher Ackerland join me on Storybeat today. Chris, welcome to the show.

Christopher Akerlind: No, it’s good to be here.

Steve Cuden: It’s great to have you here. Trust me. So let’s talk about where all this began. When did you first notice light and lighting and the effect that it had on people, especially in the theater?

Christopher Akerlind: Uh, yeah, uh, in the theater. I was very fortunate. In 1981, I was 19 years old and I had been away at undergraduate school in Connecticut. I was a music major, actually, at UConn. And what I learned right away, and I was interested in jazz primarily, which I think later on feeds my penchant for improvisation in light. But I decided to take my sophomore year off. And, um, it just so happened at the moment, the Hartford stage was, um, not hiring because they didn’t pay me, but they were looking for production interns. And in high school I had been interested in puppets. I acted a little bit. I certainly stage managed and created some, you know, very basic lighting. And, um, then I had, and then I had music, uh, as well. But I, but I decided I could not spend the next three years of my life in a practice room practicing arpeggios and scales. Right. You know, so anything that I had achieved as a teenager in jazz was completely intuitive because I never practiced. But I loved playing. Um, that was, that was so great. So, but anyway, the 81 in the, uh. It would have been 81, 82. Yeah. The Hartford stage company had just, um, engaged a new artistic director called Mark Lamos, um, who was a 35 year old kind of wunderkind. Um, and I had seen projects there that he had done for his first season, and they just blew me away. Um, it was, I love classic plays and I teach. When I’m teaching, I tend to teach classic plays. But there was an Antony, Cleopatra, the Greeks, um, the, uh, Barton Cavendish adaptation of the, you know, the Oresteia. Big, big, fat, juicy productions of these plays. It’s a big space to the Hartford stage and they had just moved into it three years before. So it was a relatively new space. But, um, I was unpaid and I started as a padded, and then did a few productions with PA and I was also on the run crew of whatever show I was, you know, paing and I did a lot of work. I don’t forget exactly how it, how it happened, but they started paying me to be an electrician because it turned out that I was an excellent electrician, for what it’s worth. And there were great artists working there. John Conklin doing set in costumes, Michael Juergen and Pat Collins. Pat Collinse, who was a huge inspiration to me, I think, uh, you know, she died two years ago, as I, as I remember, which, which made me very sad. But she and I really clicked as lighting designer to electrician, you know. And she was at it. She was, she would come back almost every show at Hartford and so she all of a sudden, just leave the rig up so there weren’t specific plots for specific shows. And this is interesting because it comes out of her, all the work that she did in opera where you’re always dealing with a repertory plot anyway, right? So she would, she would come in at the last minute, see some rehearsal, come into the theater, and she would not quite always have thought out what she was doing with which group of lamps. And so occasionally she would say, go over to that, that group of beam projectors over there, do something with them, and I’d focus them all at one wall. And, um. And she loved it. And then in tech, she was very generous, um, with including my, uh, my participation in some of these looks. There was a moment in that same show where she turned those lights on the big wall and Mark Lamos was directing, and he said, pat, that’s amazing. It looks so good. And she said, chris Ackerland did that. Um, so I met a lot of people, Jim Ingalls, you know, and it was, it was not exclusively, but John Conklin did a lot, um, of work there. And I still revere him because I think he’s got an amazing dramaturgical imagination.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that your working as an electrician first taught you a lot about lighting and where angles go and color and all the rest of it?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah, I absorbed a huge amount of, uh, you know, and knowing that I had started this internship not really knowing I wanted to be in the theater, um, as an alternative to music, um, uh, but really not knowing what to do. And I think I grasped that. Um, I can draw a little bit, but I don’t draw like John Lee Beatty or Santa Lacusta or people like that. So I decided, well, there’s this kind of complex engineering thought that goes into creating lighting design. And, um, what came to me easily was images. You know, I can read a play and I can imagine what I would do to it. And then, you know, enter director and set designer, and I’m improvisational enough to know about how to take other input, let it collide with my work, and, uh, you know, hopefully to create something that nobody on the team may have expected.

Steve Cuden: You mentioned earlier that you had some improv training and that you were able to use that and translate it into lighting. And you’ve just said it again. I’m curious, how does one improv lighting, how does that work?

Christopher Akerlind: Well, I’ve done a lot of awper, too, and I’ve done a lot of opera in repertory plots. And then the specific plots that I tend to give myself contain. M about half of the gear is purposeless when I send in the plot. And it’s only after I see some rehearsal and get a feel for the vibe of the show and the structure of the staging that I can start putting, attaching ideas to lights that are in the plot that have no original purpose. And that’s what I mean, that’s really fun. So you go from the rehearsal hall on one day, and then you go in first thing in the morning and start the focus. And there’s a huge amount of improvisation that I will do to, um, affect the rig and what the rig can do based on firsthand feeling of the show in the rehearsal hall.

Steve Cuden: Are you saying you put lights up that you aren’t sure what the purpose of them are before you see a rehearsal?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, I’ve been able to do this because I’m really quick to figure out what to do with them once I’ve seen the show. I want to feel the human vibe of the show, um, before I complete the first pass at focus. And actually, it’s what the theater means to me so much is that vibe of humanity, of actors, three dimensional actors, telling us a story, telling us some playwrights story. And that, particularly nowadays, in opposition to all the 2d, you know, entertainments that we have, makes me feel really good about having spent a life in the theater.

Steve Cuden: So how does that affect a production budgetarily for you, if you’re not in a theater that already has all these lights, you’re having to bring them in? What happens when you say, I want to rent all these lights that I don’t know what I’m doing with yet? Or do you not tell them that?

Christopher Akerlind: I don’t tell them that. Production managers will finally repeat production managers. For instance, when I left grad school, I worked at Hartford stage all the time because they knew me from when I was a kid. And, um, other regional theaters, too. And so I think people started to trust that I would always pull it off. And that actually, by waiting to develop some ideas, that the work had a freshness, because it was responding to my being a spectator in the rehearsal, though, and being moved by what was being said by the various compositions that had been created by the set and then the staging, you know, on top of it. And so I never asked. I was actually, I think I did a lot of work. I never broke the budget. I mean, there were things sometimes that the set needed. They were like internal lights and things like that. And I’d say, well, listen, this is what we have to do. You’ve okayed the set and we have to do this stuff. And so the lighting is going to cost, you know, x amount of dollars. And they’re like, well, we didn’t budget anything, but you allow you okay to set with light inside it. And the budget for the set doesn’t include all the onboard light stuff. Uh, so, um, you know, it was just what I would always do was give myself basics in a space, all the various different spaces, tiny to large, you know. Um, I love backlight because I love the way I believe that light kind of pushes. And I love backlight because it’s pushing the actors toward us above, beyond the fact that it might be pale green and you might be in a world that wants to be pale green, et cetera. But it’s really that sense of the halo of backlight, which for me, metaphorically, I think actors are angels. I mean, sometimes, you know, you can hate them, right? But I do think that it’s an angelic instinct to walk on stage and tell us a story. Um, and I’m so moved by actors, I want them to really be pushed out and dimensional. And, uh, I want to see their faces. Although there are times, dramatic moments when, you know, you don’t need to see the face. There can be some contrast, etcetera.

Steve Cuden: I sometimes think of backlight and sidelight as carving the actors out of the back end of the space or negative space.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. Dimensionalizing it. And so I have students sometimes, and they all. They put all their gear front of house, so it’s all frontal. And I say, you know, it’s going to be flat.

Steve Cuden: Flat.

Christopher Akerlind: You got to get some more gear. And I have a rough rule of thumb for me, but also for my students, is that it wants to almost be like a, uh, four to one, um, ratio of lights on stage to lights front of house.

Steve Cuden: Oh, I think that’s right. I think that all the great lighting comes from the sides and the backs.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And some. A little bit from the top and sometimes from up underneath.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Cuden: That gives you all that dimensionality as you’re talking about.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right. Yeah. And I think adhering to that and insisting now, then, of course, there are. There are, um. What did I do? I did a tartuffe at the Huntington theater in Boston a few years ago, and the set had a ceiling, you know. So then you’ve got to figure it out how to do it from box booms and booms and, uh, uh, you know, et cetera because, um. Overhead light is taken away from you.

Steve Cuden: Let’s back up half a step because, uh. For those listeners who don’t really know what we’re talking about, you and I can talk about this all day and we’ll have a better understanding than many people. What for you makes lighting necessary and special for productions? Why is light so important?

Christopher Akerlind: I think it gives the production visual sizzle. And it also, you know, if you’re dealing with, say, uniset for Shakespeare or something, uh, just an empty space or whatever, that light actually gives detail and above and beyond the dimensionalizing effect it has on actors versus the background, what they’re playing against. I love composition and I love thinking about simple notions of verticality versus horizontality.

Steve Cuden: What do you mean by that? Explain verticality versus horizontality.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. Light that kind of comes down, you know, straight down, uh, as opposed to light that’s coming from low on the sides, which is horizontal. Um. Now you can’t do anything with that. But I start with an essential notion of trying to tell the story of the metaphoric importance of certain composition ideas. You know. I know, and we’ve all seen it and we’ve seen other people do it. And you know, when I get to do it, it’s amazing to just use one light, you know, to light a sea. And that’s the most exciting thing, you know, you can do. So it’s composition ideas is, you know, for instance, I throw out to my students what makes a scene look heavy, what makes a scene look buoyant, what makes. And light does that. You know, it’s. It’s um. It’s what gives the set and the play unfolding within the set gives it that kind of life.

Steve Cuden: Is it important to establish time of day or tonality of the show?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, time of day is depending on the style. Like for piano lesson, for instance, or seven guitars. I mean, those were in, um. Essentially a realistic style that I feel like I heightened but without it becoming a distraction to the idea that I’m just telling the story of what the sun is doing or what the, uh, practical lamps are doing in the show in order to tell the story that August Wilson lays out about what time of day it is. Like. It’s very important that boy Willie and Lyman in piano lesson are, um. Banging on the door at 05:00 in the morning. The house is asleep, you know, and then they come in and they’ve got their. They’re excited about. He’s excited about being at his sister’s house, boy Willie. And they’ve got this truck, um, full of watermelons. And, um, slowly the house comes alive. You know, the little girl comes down. She’s, uh, on her way to school. Doker, the uncle, kind of comes out of his room and starts to put french toast on the. And so there’s a kind of wonderful sense of blossoming. And then there are a few funny night scenes where Lyman, for instance, brings home a hooker, basically. And, um, it has to feel dark, but it also has to feel kind of romantic, because Lyman is a sort of beautiful, shy person. So there’s time of day, listen, and I think that lighting designers who do that realistic work, it’s an amazing craft. But, um, I’m happy that it’s not that the work that I’ve done is exclusive of thinking about time of day. But I love classic plays in a way, particularly Shakespeare, because it’s never going to be probably in a realistic set. So you have to figure out how to carve up the space image wise, um, to suit, you know, what, 30 locations in Antony and Cleopatra or something like that.

Steve Cuden: Do you prefer to light something that is open and empty and is just suggested sets versus a very deeply detailed, realistic set?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, absolutely. Piano lesson was a, uh, detailed set, and I loved working on it. But I was also only 29 years old, and I hadn’t spent the time in which I would never turn piano lesson down, you know, particularly in that context with Lloyd Richards directing and August there and rewriting and. Yeah, no kidding, um, I would never turn that down. But if you ask me, you know, what’s your favorite kind of context? I would say a simple, non literal set, or not time based set in which a lot of different sorts of places, uh, and images, etcetera, need to be created.

Steve Cuden: Like you could do with dance.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, exactly. Dance is a perfect example of that. You’re given an empty space, and, um, there’s nothing more pure than that, you know? And then you have the dancers, these human bodies, flinging themselves through space, creating beautiful, again, compositions and beautiful sense of movement. And also, you know, there’s always a story to everything, um, that exists in time. You know, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I haven’t done a lot of dance, but the work I do with Martha Clark is very dance like. So, um. Yeah, I like. I just. The older that I’ve become, I like simple things. And I think sometimes. It’s not that I’m anti scenery, but I think sometimes our sets, the theaters making. Making use of, um, maybe are too detailed. The primary example is that when Shakespeare was making, writing 32 of arguably the best plays that I’ve ever been written, he was in an empty space with no lighting.

Steve Cuden: No lighting and no direction in the writing either.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right. That’s right. No stage directions except the funny exit pursued by bear, et cetera. So I love that. And I call it the elizabethan effect. And that’s also, in part, what I think of the rehearsal. You know, coming in, flying in or training in or something. Coming to the rehearsal hall and going into a big, bland room with bright, you know, usually fluorescent nowadays, led lights, um, to see a rehearsal, and also by virtue of the fact that it’s a rehearsal hall and I’m there to see the work, I’m sitting in what’s probably the front row. And so that living vibe of human beings singing or speaking is so cool. And so I’m so moved by it that I always want to try to drag something about that simplicity back with me into the theater.

Steve Cuden: Do you think of yourself as painting in air?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Are you a painter of light?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes I can be a bit of a brutalist.

Steve Cuden: What does that mean?

Christopher Akerlind: It just means I like to. I like to gang lots of lights together or have big sources, big, bright, cold sources, and just turn them on, you know, to find, um. Uh. You know, to find something that. That kind of carves out just a simple notion that in some of these plays, life is hard. And I don’t think that lighting always wants to prettify, um, or to make pretty images all the time sometimes. It’s funny, I had a cousin who used to. Who lived outside of New Haven, and she used to come when I was working at Longmore a lot, when they were still sort of alive. She’d come and she’d say, oh, I loved it. I loved it. I loved it. But why did the light have to be so harsh? Um, and it’s a production of Hamlet. And I said, well, listen, hamlet is a harsh play. Not only that, but that’s a harsh play. It’s set geographically in a kind of a harsh, cold place, definitely. So, um, you know, I don’t know that it’s interesting that the expectation is that you’d go to see Hamlet and it would be pink. I just don’t quite understand.

Steve Cuden: No, no, no.

Christopher Akerlind: Don’t quite understand.

Steve Cuden: It’s steel. It’s cold steel.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, scottish play, and, you know, they’re Richard the third. I mean, they’re so hard. And I think one of the things that I love about the theater is that I have always, I mean, since I was a kid, a little bit. I don’t know what this means about my upbringing, but it’s that I’ve always sensed the dark side of life. I mean, I mean, I can be an ecstatically joyful person. Um, but I can be pretty down about, you know, certain things about the way that homo sapiens, we. Homo sapiens, um.

Steve Cuden: Um, it’s human live life.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m happy to also to do a lot of work that spans all that. And I think if you’re spanning it, but if you’re right in the middle, that’s probably the boring place.

Steve Cuden: Let’s look at your actual process in doing what you do. We’ve talked a little bit about it already, but let’s go through that creative process. You get an assignment, you book a job, and aside from reading the script, which you have to do, I assume, what is the first thing that you start to think about once you have a sense of at least the play? Or do you need to talk to director and others before you can start to formulate that?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, sometimes those things happen, um, in a different sequence. So I might have signed on to a play, and then if it’s with a director I frequently work with, have had a preliminary conversation about what are the possibilities, and then I read the play, and I’m very moved by action as opposed to place, you know, dramaturgical action, murder, revenge. You know, I’m also. I’m back in the Shakespeare world.

Steve Cuden: The great classic themes.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right, that’s right. And, um, then. And then I start. I image very fast, but again, it goes to the improv idea. What I image is just what happens to me. And then I go and have a meeting, you know, although most meetings these days, sadly, are over Zoom because they used to be in person, and that was really. I really loved that part of, you know, when you’re in person as opposed to Zoom, the meetings can kind of spin off into personal things and anecdotes about things you remember. And it’s not that that can’t happen on Zoom, but it’s less likely. But I love the interaction with the co collaborators. You know, I can’t really start to image for purposes of making a plot until I know what the space is right. And I know what the ground plan is, and I know what the, uh, you know, what the opportunities for lite r. You mentioned that musical. I did. I did what, 1011 years ago now, the Rocky, the musical. That was such a machine. The set was such a machine. There were very little places for overhead. We had a couple of electrics and lots of moving lights, which was, which was good. But that was really an adventure in cobbling, you know, a stark, handsome show from, not non traditional, but not from the overhead, uh, for sure. Because there was too much in the way.

Steve Cuden: There was too much in the way. Too much of the stuff that was going up and down or in and out.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah. There was a gantry that moved two gantries that moved up and down stage from one another. And sometimes they had, and they had tracks on them so things would slide in. It was, um, there was so much overhead stuff that I really had to think deeply about. Okay, well, this isn’t. You can’t just, you know, fall back on technique of overhead. And I love a project like that.

Steve Cuden: You like to be challenged that way.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. Uh, you know, and then my students and other professional lighting designers, they say, oh, God, you can’t do a ceiling. And I said, well, why not use your engineering imagination and figure it out? And the other one is funny, it’s classic. Is that, oh, I’d never work on a white set again. That’s a completely amazing opportunity. Um, and one of the things a white set does is that it reveals one’s use of color a lot. And I think because a lot of people use more colors than I tend to at, uh, one time. If you’ve got a side light that’s pink from one side, uh, and a sidelight that’s aqua from the other side, you see that on the floor and, or it bounces up onto the. So you have to. I think with a white set, you just have to feel confident about picking a light, you know, a color.

Steve Cuden: I saw in, I think it was 19, 78, 79 in Los Angeles. I saw the first performance of the first pre show of Evita that was done in America. It was before it ever got to New York. And the thing that blew my mind is the set was on whatever the set was, which was minimal. There was a black floor with white spattered paint on the floor. And that floor literally changed colors into whatever Theron Musser put on.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah. Cool. I saw it when it, when it finally made it to Broadway, and I loved it. I loved the music, and I liked the story quite a lot.

Steve Cuden: I’m pretty sure it was Theron Musser, am I right?

Christopher Akerlind: I think one of the Brits, I think it might have been like, what was Hal Prince? Who was then? It might have been yeah, or Ken Billington or somebody in that family.

Steve Cuden: Um, so going back a half a step here, do you think about the audience when you’re thinking about what you’re doing? Do you consider their reaction to what you’re presenting?

Christopher Akerlind: Not really, because I don’t believe that I can ever know that. Now, what’s interesting about previews is that I do sense the effect of my work. And this is why I love previews, except on Broadway where there are a month of them and it’s like. Gets a little tiresome. But I love previews because you do get, you know, and it’s, it’s uh, it’s not spoken, but again, it’s a vibe from the audience that you can feel like, well, they’re not connecting because maybe the, the faces aren’t popping enough, you know. So, uh, uh, and sometimes it’s not even, it’s not even so easy to put that into, into a language. I just know that something’s wrong. And then because it’s a preview, you have the next afternoon of rehearsal to kind of rejigger things. And, um. So it’s really, uh, an intuitive thing for me. But as I’m making the first pass, it’s not that I don’t care, but I don’t want to get too distracted by, you know, what would normally be considered concerns about the life, for instance. You know, it’s something that I do intuitively, is that I, I know that if you shine lights in the audience eyes, they’re not going to be very happy.

Steve Cuden: Yes, definitely.

Christopher Akerlind: Which is not to say that you can’t have some bursts, you know, once in a while. We did that in Rocky, um, uh, a lot. But, um, it can’t be sustained light in their eyes because they’ll tune out. They won’t be able to see, they’ll feel assaulted and they’ll tune out. Now, having said that, it’s these ideas, you know, philosophically they change depending on who the director is. Maybe the director’s totally cool with the idea that blinding the audience. And um, then there could be some directors on the opposite spectrum who wouldn’t okay it, you know, ever even an experiment in trying something like that?

Steve Cuden: So it work in rock and roll?

Christopher Akerlind: Oh, sure, sure. Well, everybody’s high and uh, they’re just listening anyway. And so, but I think in rock and roll, you know, again, the idea of where I. The focus of a light look is how are the faces floating in the void and, or the complex set or something like that. Um, I have a funny, um, aversion to gobos, because, first of all, I like to project real shadows. So if somebody wants, um, if the show wants, uh, like, all my sons or something, put a tree there and lots of light through the tree and create the shadows that way, as opposed to using gobos, which I find, uh, it’s a little silly to say because the theater is artificial, but I find them super artificial, and I think too much about the choice of them. And I also have this theory that I might have debunked once or twice in 35 years that every, you know, if you put, like, a complex leaf gobo on something, that the eye stays busy tracing the interstices of every single one of those bits and pieces of light. Now, I think broken light is great, but I really love it if it’s natural.

Steve Cuden: So for those that don’t know, explain what a gobo is.

Christopher Akerlind: A gobo is, um, a, uh, piece of, um, with steel, I think. And it’s been. It’s been imprinted and cut out with certain images, and they’re round and they go between the gobo is because they go between the lens and the reflect and the light and the lamp, which is within the reflector. This is on, um, traditional spotlights, which we still have.

Steve Cuden: It’s a pattern.

Christopher Akerlind: It’s a pattern.

Steve Cuden: It’s pattern.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. We call them templates, too, and there are thousands and thousands of them. There are spirit of 1776 gobos. There are beautiful abstracts. Right? And I find that when I use gobo, sometimes to break up the light, I put frost in front of it. So I’m nothing looking at the sharp edge, uh, because a gobo in a spotlight can be. You can sharpen on it because of the way that the lens system works. And you can also soften it, but you can also sharpen it and then put frost in front of it, which I tend to do. Um, not always, but these are just basic predilections, um, that I have about patterns.

Steve Cuden: But you would prefer to create the pattern out of something that’s happening on stage naturally, like another human being or. Or a tree or a corner of a building or something like that.

Christopher Akerlind: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: Or come through an actual window frame rather than using a gobo pattern.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t like window gobos. That really. That really feels to me, it always feels like a cop out if the director asks for a window gobo or something, um, which sometimes you need in a box set that’s three sides, and you have to pretend that the downstage is the fourth wall. You know what a good, a good example of is the kind of shadows that I like are, uh, what you normally would see in the classic film noir movie.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s it. Sure.

Christopher Akerlind: It’s just one source coming through a railing or through a window or projecting up a staircase or something like that. And to me, that’s thrilling.

Steve Cuden: Blinds. It makes blinds. That’s really good noir stuff. Casablanca has a lot of it.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those are actual effects that they managed to get together, uh, in the film studio. And to me, the effect of it is really great.

Steve Cuden: Do you do on some shows? I’m sure some you don’t need to. But do you find yourself needing to do research on some shows for imagery or pictorialization of things?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, I mean, I have a pretty good visual memory. Um, but I’m always running to the library, or it used to be. That doesn’t happen quite so often anymore. But I also like to be. The great thing about a library, or even the Internet to some degree, is to be surprised by an image. So you go out and, um, you’re thinking, well, maybe some images of light at Stonehenge might be right for a certain. For a certain play. But then on the way to Stonehenge, uh, in the stacks, you find a book about some other rock formations, and it turns out you start opening up and the photographs are like, awesome, and write exactly what you feel like you need. So that’s another role of accident, I think, in research, which I think is really, really great. Um, I tend to like to be unsettled.

Steve Cuden: What does that mean? You’d like things that are hard to understand or follow or. What do you mean by unsettled?

Christopher Akerlind: I like to. I like things that, um. That I have to think more deeply about applying, that I have to construct a unique theatrical rationale for before you start using them and then hope that it works. I mean, these days it’s a big problem. Younger students, um, or even older students, but younger students who you’re doing Romeo and Juliet and they go, and all you get back is research are renaissance pictures of balconies. It’s like, it has to be more creative than that because there have been too many renaissance balconies in productions of Romeo and Juliet. Um, so how do you take something to decide that the early part of the play might be morning like, and the latter part of the play might be nightlike or vice versa. Uh, and then find interesting images of those things and find a light quality of light or pattern or color or something that’s going to suit your production.

Steve Cuden: What would you say is the most difficult space you’ve ever had to light? And how did you solve that issue?

Christopher Akerlind: Well, that’s an interesting question.

Steve Cuden: Question, um, was it Rocky?

Christopher Akerlind: No, because we all had engineered things into the set that were going to work. We spent oodles of studio time on that with Chris Bareca, the set designer, and we really figured it out. And then there were sometimes in the tech where I would have to say, I’m not going to be able to get this until the next time we make a pass through this, this particular look for a particular scene or something. And I like to be working with directors who understand that, but there are some who are very impatient and say, no, we’re making a look now. And that look probably ends up relying too much on front light. Right. And so the look is handicapped by the fact that it’s flat, just as an aside.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s a lot of the problem of any production is time. How much rehearsal time do you have? How much tech time do you have? You don’t have an unlimited amount of time, usually. And that’s part of the job of all the designers, is here’s the budget, here’s the time you have, and go make it happen within that parameter.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, I find it fun. My colleagues sometimes, and directors will complain, you know, about it, but I feel like accept the context, financially, spatially, time wise, etcetera, accept it and run with it.

Steve Cuden: Um.

Christopher Akerlind: Um. We’re all supposed to come into this with imagination, right? And so, so, I mean, just about the most difficult thing, even though I think it’s probably solution, but for somebody to say, okay, we’re building a 1234, well, you know, a six. Six sided box, eight sided box, whatever. But it’s a box and the action is going to happen inside. And you have to, like, light it, you know, but no way to get light in the box, you know? But, um. But to me, it.

Steve Cuden: Does it have a roof on it? Does it have a ceiling on it?

Christopher Akerlind: Probably, yeah. But to me, that sort of problem, just even hypothetically, I get excited about that.

Steve Cuden: In your thinking, what would be the first thing you would think to do? Do you have to implant lights into the set somehow?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. Or they’re carrying battery operated things, or you have to have to do something. But then the interesting twist on that is that. So they’re lit inside the box. Who can see them? Right.

Steve Cuden: I once had a thought, and I don’t think it’ll ever happen, but that you would have a show in which the audience was given minors helmets and colored swatches, and during the show, they were lighting the show and holding color up in front of the light.

Christopher Akerlind: I love that. I love that. And, you know, hopefully there’s a, you know, a nice dramaturgical link to what’s happening in the play or opera or dancer.

Steve Cuden: Well, that would have to be like, if you were doing a show in a mine, that’s how you would do it.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s cool. But it’s the.

Steve Cuden: It’s.

Christopher Akerlind: The challenge is, first of all, is to be unique as a lighting designer. Like, I wouldn’t want to be doing work that looked too much like someone else’s. And then in the end, it takes a very refined viewer to sort of see the difference between my work, of course, and, uh, Ken Billington’s work or Robert Roselle’s work. And yet it’s there, I think my work, that there is something distinct, and that goes back to the backlight idea. I really push backlight really hard, um, because I like the look of it, and I like what it does to performers and in particular, that it pushes them towards us.

Steve Cuden: I have found over time that even some of the most sophisticated directors that I’ve worked with, over time, they don’t understand what it is that the lighting designer is doing. Some do, but some have no idea at all and don’t care. They just want it to look a certain way, and so you’re accommodating their vision.

Christopher Akerlind: Sometimes they don’t even care about what it looks like. They’re just like, as long as I can see the faces, I’m good. Right, right. But. But to me, it’s really great to, you know, collaborate on, um, you know, what’s the style of the show, what’s the composite? What are the composition ideas of the show? And then you. Everybody’s working, working together, hopefully towards some version of whatever you come up with.

Steve Cuden: Back when I was first starting, this is a long time ago, because I’ll, uh, let the audience know. I also have done a lot of lighting design, so I have a little bit of an understanding what Chris is talking about. Back in the day, it was manually operated lighting boards, and you were running potentiometers up and down for dimming and switching scenes and so on. You were manually lighting the show from a board. Today, it’s all computer driven. So how important is the programmer, and how important is the operator?

Christopher Akerlind: Well, the operator job is really to push the go button.

Steve Cuden: It’s just button pushing when prompted by.

Christopher Akerlind: The stage manager, so that better be easy. Right. Or if it’s not easy for your op, you probably got the rumpers.

Steve Cuden: Yeah.

Christopher Akerlind: But programmers, uh, are, they’re great. The ones that I love figure out what I’m doing and are always working to make the program, the mode of the technique of the programming, etcetera. Kind of true to where I’m coming from. And with like big effects and things like that, I let the programmer start or work with the assistant or something, because I’m not the kind of person, I mean, I know that, uh, etc. Boards very, very well, but I would say I’m a little lazy on behalf of the programmer to give them, um, uh, a kind of a chance to participate by making lightning or something like that. And then they’ll make something, or an assistant will make something and it’s like dead on. Or they’ll make something and it’s 80% on. And so I’ll go into it and just refine the 20% that is not doing it for me. Um, so program. And I can spit out words very fast. So I’m a very fast programming lighting designer, meaning what I’m saying. And so I value speed too. And there are some real fast ones.

Steve Cuden: Does it drive you a little crazy when they’re not fast?

Christopher Akerlind: Oh my God, yes. It’s like they’re not, it’s not that they’re doing something personal to you, it’s just that. But um, it’s just that they can’t keep up with, you know. And so then I find myself having to slow down. Great anecdote. Years and years ago, early nineties, I was doing a project at the Bush memorial in Hartford, Connecticut. And it was a Hartford ballet, and it was a union house. And the electricians were all wonderful. And the head electrician was really great, and he was the programmer. So we start working as a live tech with the dancers, etcetera. And I’m getting nowhere. And I’d ask for 15 and I would get 34678, uh, you know, because his fingers were so fat that when he pushed, when he pushed like six, you’d also get five and seven. Right, right. Or 56 or whatever. And so we were, we got nowhere. And he was so humble about it. And the steward, the IA steward actually gave us an extra four hour call because the, uh, the me had said, listen, I’m not doing this very well. And then, and that’s where in that local, he remained a master electrician. But they started to train a guy with thinner fingers. Um, and it was some weird early computer board where the, um, the keypad was like the size of a telephone. You know, it’s like a little, teeny tiny, um, um. Box.

Steve Cuden: Sure. And his fingers were too big for the job.

Christopher Akerlind: Yes. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: So we’ve talked about collaborating at least a couple of times in this show, and you have to be a collaborator to do what you’re doing, because you’re dealing with directors and electricians and producers and everybody else. What do you think is the best way for a designer to think about the collaboration? Collaboration or the collaborative process?

Christopher Akerlind: Well, I think you want to be able to articulate what it is that you think you’re doing and or have done as a defense of what you, uh, have done. Now, sometimes with producers, maybe even with directors with whom I have no simpatico. I mean, I’ve lived my whole career to try to find directors with whom I have a rough sympathy. Go. Then there are, you know, producers who I see that I’m talking and trying to convince, and I can see in their eyes that they’re not hearing it or not understanding it. And so then I decide, um, to cut to the chase and do what they ask.

Steve Cuden: That’s the simple way to solve it.

Christopher Akerlind: It’s a simple way to solve it. And sometimes by that point, I just want to move on to the next thing. And they are signing the paychecks. Um, you know, the contract checks, the, um, features. So, uh, you know, and with directors. Directors are important to one’s career, but there have been directors I’ve worked with who I said it to myself in the middle of the first production, I’m never doing this again. And it’s just, you know, um, what’s it called? You know, the way that we relate to one another. Um, there’s just, there’s just some relationships that don’t work out.

Steve Cuden: Um, it’s a chemical thing.

Christopher Akerlind: It’s. That’s the word I was going for. It’s. It’s a chemistry thing. And, um, set designers tend to like my work because I don’t destroy sets. And also, costume designers like my work because I essentially start from a white light perspective. And so nothing’s going to change the color of their scarlet dress. Right. It’s going to be revealed in a way that they have, that they have imagined. And I’m usually, um, I think, perceptive enough to, from seeing the rehearsal, a run through in the rehearsal hall that I get it even when I know that the it of it isn’t necessarily to my taste. I get how to do it pretty fast.

Steve Cuden: Do you think of yourself as serving the vision of the director, or are you trying to serve your own vision?

Christopher Akerlind: Uh, both. And in varying degrees. Right. So there are some directors you work with, and if you’re not serving them 100%, forget about it. But then there are some directors like Ann Bogart and Martha Clark, for that matter. They sit back and wait to see what I do, and they get jazzed by that. And these are mostly people who’ve worked with me before who trust that I’m going to do something that they appreciate and I, you know, for lack of a better word, approve of. I like those relationships and not to. It’s interesting because I’ve had a lot of good luck working with women. And what I find is that there is a not, um, maternal, but there is a, um, instinctual, instinctive way of relating to what I do. Just not to say there are never notes, you know, etcetera, but in that kind of relaxed situation, I’ll do any note, you know, because I like that place of process very much. But they are the key to working. You know, young people have to understand that if they’re not making the director feel, uh, that he she is getting something. But whether. Whether they know that I’ve intuited it, or whether they know that they’ve asked for it and I’ve given it to them, they have to feel content, uh, with it. Otherwise you won’t be asked back.

Steve Cuden: Right. And that’s part of the game, isn’t it? Is. We’ve already alluded to that before, that being friends with a director or producer or whoever may get you another job, and then it becomes a monetary thing for you. It’s a, you know, it’s a job, it’s work.

Christopher Akerlind: I mean, work is good. Uh, it certainly was. History was important in the early days when I was living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and, uh, you know, I wanted all the work I could get. One of the nice things about being a little older, um, I can pick and choose a little tiny bit. But back then I took, well, sure, the height of it. I would do 25 productions a year. And, wow, the math. Basically, one every two weeks.

Steve Cuden: Wow, that’s a lot of productions as a lighting design.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. And so I was juggling lots of ideas and drawing light plots on coffee tables, and, um, you know, it was crazy. And I was traveling a lot, but I loved it. I was so excited to be in that place.

Steve Cuden: You’re not still drafting on paper, are you?

Christopher Akerlind: I do roughs on paper.

Steve Cuden: You do roughs on paper?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. Roughs on paper. And then I hand it to, I haven’t drawn a like, plot in a long, in probably 1517 years.

Steve Cuden: It’s all done in a computer now, right?

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, it’s all, it’s all computer drafted and digitally drafted. And I’m at a point in my career where I either because I’m teaching or because of where my career is, there’s always money for an assistant. So I’ll hand a rough to an assistant with the sort of completed paperwork that helps with certain details of the drawing. And then I get it back and the producer pays for the assistant. You know, hopefully.

Steve Cuden: Hopefully. What’s your absolute favorite thing to do as a lighting designer?

Christopher Akerlind: It’s interesting because I have huge anxiety about it too. But make the first look.

Steve Cuden: Make the first look.

Christopher Akerlind: Make the first look. Because until you do that, until you start to turn things on, um, you have no idea what you’re doing. You think, you know, you might think, oh, I focused the show in such a way, I’ve plotted the show in such a way, I thought about the show, but in fact, you have no idea until, until you turn something on. And I do not like Previz, I don’t like that. I find it cartoonish. And, um, uh, even if I had it available to me, the assistants all want to do that because they’re all so excited about the software, etcetera.

Steve Cuden: Um, well, you probably have big concepts in your head, in your mind’s eye, and then you need to play that out by seeing it in reality.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. You know, and most of the time, you know, I think I’m, it’s really funny that for somebody who’s lit 650 productions or something, I’m always nervous. I never trust that I’m going to be able to do it again. So then after you get the first look in there, you can kind of relax and know that there’s something about the rig and the focus and my own imagination and collaboration with everybody else that’s going to work. And that’s a huge relief. I tend not to like closure. Um, I hate opening night because I just sit there and see everything that’s not done and that drives me bananas. But the idea of the top of the tech and everything’s a blank slate and you throw on a light. It’s funny. Just a little teaching, uh, anecdote. I observe a lot of tech at Calarts, and, um, they all start by saying they’ll start the very first looking. They’ll say, well, let’s see, three at 30. Totally. It’s like, turn it to full see what it does, and then you can almost back it off. Right. But it’s like, you know, three or 30, you’re not seeing anything profound or something that can lead m you to other, other ideas. Get some courage up and turn it on to full.

Steve Cuden: Clearly, you are into the intensity of light. Like you said, I. Brutal force in the way that you come at it. So that’s what you’re trying to teach them, is see everything, and then it’s always easier to back down than it is to build up.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, I think. Yeah. And peers of mine don’t understand this also, and the students, I have to. I focus from the auditorium. I want to see what the. What the lamp is going to look like from the place in which I’m queuing the show.

Steve Cuden: Do you need a body to stand there for you?

Christopher Akerlind: Sometimes an assistant will be a body, but I’ve become very good at, you know, two foot up stage, you know, verbally talking it through. Um, but, you know, I run into the inevitable. If I’m standing down on the apron or something and a light comes on and they point it at me at the apron, it’s like, no, no, no. This goes against the staircase on this. There’s something about wanting to see it as it will be seen. And what I have found is that it’s an more efficient use of focus time, because if you’re standing in it on stage, you’re not seeing it the way that you see it. And what it does is that it cuts to down on, uh, refining focus notes.

Steve Cuden: So I think that the listeners are not going to know what we’re talking about. That is to say that when a lighting designer focuses lights, they typically will stand on the stage where the light goes, and they wait for an electrician to push the light into position for them where it’s supposed to go. You like to step out into the audience, not be on stage, and see where the lights going from the audience’s perspective.

Christopher Akerlind: And I think that’s more. It’s more like I’m, um, calling brushstrokes in a way. So a light comes on, and I know that it’s going to actually range across the space and land on an important staircase or something. And then you can detail composition with shutter cut. Shutters are mechanisms, so that the light, if it’s, um, an ellipsoidal reflector kind of light, uh, that you can shake the beam, which is also how gobos, which we were talking about earlier, how.

Steve Cuden: Go have to go. Bows have to go into ellipsoidals they won’t work in a fresnel.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s right. Yeah. Although I, back in the day, um, grad school, sometimes they were cabaret spaces, and all I had was six inch fresnels. And I would take black wrap, which is basically black tin foil.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Christopher Akerlind: Put it in a six inch fresnel frame and just, with my. Just poke three holes in it and it would break it up. But it was never going to be sharpen or anything like that.

Steve Cuden: No.

Christopher Akerlind: There are all sorts of things that I think you learn about light by being in small spaces with, you know, less impressive inventories of lights and only six dimmers or something like.

Steve Cuden: And no power.

Christopher Akerlind: No power. Um. Uh, there’s, uh, again, and one improvises in that sense. And I think that you have to think of, in order for the light that you’re making to remain alive in some ways, there has to be some improvisational effect of it, in a way. And there will be time when I focus, too, because of the improvisational ideas. Say, one of those lights that I had spoken of, um, would come up and I’ll decide, okay, that should be a top light on the staircase. And then I’m thinking about it. Think also about the rehearsal that I’ve seen, and I’ll say, no, no, no. Let’s instead turn it all the way upright and just light that wall. And that confuses electricians, except the electricians who get it. And so. And they get it and they get the spirit of it and they like it. And they like what I liked, you know, in that anecdote about working for Pat Collins years and 100 years ago was that she appreciated it. She showed appreciation, and, um, she was very generous with, um, her time. And I really like electricians who, you know, some of them are so cool that it’s, like, aloof. And, you know, when you say, okay, well, turn it. Turn it a different way, and they don’t get it and they get pissy, and that’s no good. So.

Steve Cuden: Well, there are technicians and there are creative technicians.

Christopher Akerlind: Right, right. Yep.

Steve Cuden: I’ve been having an absolutely marvelous conversation. Probably gonna baffle some people listening to this because it’s fairly technical, but I love it. And I’ve been having this great conversation with Chris Ackerland for a little more than an hour at this point, and we’re going to wind the show down. I’m just wondering, in all of your experiences, you’ve already told us some really fantastic stories, but I’m wondering if you have a story that you can share that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny beyond what you’ve already told us.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, I was in. I won’t name them, I won’t name the theater’s name, but it was an off, ah, Broadway house that had a small space, um, which was adjacent to the big space. And it was really tiny. It only had 60 dimmers. Um, and it was a little kind of thrust. And it had only two rows of seats left center and right going around it. And I was doing, uh, this play called Day standing on its head. And it was about a professor in a UC, some sort of a California college who was having a midlife crisis. And so it turns out. So there are 60 dimmers. And then, you know, in tallying up the scenes, there were 70 locales. It was. It was total. It was like there was a noiresque quality to it, there was a realistic quality to it. So I really put these 60 dimmers and maybe maybe 80 lights. I was pushing it. But the. And the writer, it was a premiere, so the writer was there, the director was there, and they loved what I was doing. And there was some of it was contrasty, but when you’re only two rows away, you know, it doesn’t need to be hugely realized, particularly when you’re sitting there. Over time, you get to know. And I think, yeah, there were other characters, but it was primarily the professor on stage having this nervous breakdown. And so at the time, the artistic director of, uh, the theater was on some sort of, uh, health leave. And so her associate artistic director, of course, had all the artistic director power. And he came to the final dress rehearsal and we were all so happy with what we, with what we’ve achieved. And uh, at the production meeting afterwards, he held up his hand and he said, listen, I got to tell you, I can’t see a thing up there. And he pointed. Now, I hadn’t. Of, uh, my 60 dimmers. I hadn’t spent dimmers on in that intimate situation where this. Where the show wanted to be kind of noir esque. Anyway, so he points up to where the front lights usually go, and he said, there’s no front light up there, thinking, oh, God. And the writer said, listen, I think it’s okay. I think we should just go through. And he said, no, I insisted, let’s get, uh, um, uh, some trend lights up there. And so the production manager, who I knew fairly well, he’s in the back going, you know, we’ll work it out. The next day I came in, there were twelve front lights, six for upstage and six for downstage. And they were divided left center right and left center right. And they had programmed them, um, into every queue at like 10%, and then had put quadruple heavy blue color in them so the light wasn’t, there was actually nothing coming out of them. But when you looked up, you saw front lights with light in the vents, uh, etcetera, and you saw that the front lights were always on. And so, hilariously, at the production meeting, the associate artistic director turned to me and said, chris, thank you so much. The work is so. And it was essentially exactly the work that he had seen the night before with twelve fraudulent front lights that the production manager had put in just to solve the problem and move on. You know what’s an amazing thing about light and working in collaboration is how much you learn about how people see.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure.

Christopher Akerlind: And we all see differently. And um, this guy was basically blind, but he was convinced that having those lights up there, the light in the vents, meant the light was on and that it was doing something to the look.

Steve Cuden: And he didn’t want to seem like he didn’t understand.

Christopher Akerlind: Right, right.

Steve Cuden: Because you’d set something up and he wanted to be sure he understood what you were doing. And as long as he was convinced.

Christopher Akerlind: He understood it, everybody who was in on it for everybody who was in on it was terribly embarrassing for him. But it, you know, it never came up. He was happy. He walked out. We had a preview the next night and the show wasn’t a hit, but it looked good.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s all that counts.

Christopher Akerlind: That’s all that counts.

Steve Cuden: So, last question for you today, Chris. You’ve already given us a ton of things to chew on and advice and so on throughout this entire, uh, conversation, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice that you like to give to either your students or someone just starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a little bit and trying to get to that next level. What do you tell people?

Christopher Akerlind: It’s the director, stupid. You know, to use a. Who is that? Uh, Bill Clinton. Right. It’s the, it’s the economy, stupid. Right. And uh, it’s. You don’t get work without directors, so the best thing that you can do is cozy up to them. And that probably the wrong word, but you want them to like you and they, you want them to like your work and you want them to like working with you. So I, particularly in, in college, in grad programs or undergrad programs, I say build a relationship with the director. And if it’s really solid, you can go with wherever that director goes. It’s not going to solve every problem of finding work, the way to find it and to get it and to sustain it. It’s all controlled by the director, you know, from human resources.

Steve Cuden: Right. Because they’re the ones that are going to insist that you be their lighting designer.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And their name is at the top of the masthead. They control everything, even though sometimes they don’t control a thing, but they get all the credit for it. That’s the interesting. I mean, there was one director in grad school who went on to become the associate artistic director at New York Theater Workshop, which, of course, later went on to produce, rent, etcetera. And I became the resident there because he spoke so highly of me. And so it was a great entree into. Into working in New York in the off Broadway because I was being reviewed, you know, etcetera. And so it’s that relationship from grad school, which it wasn’t cultivated so much as it was just the way things worked out. We were working together and we liked it. And then he carried that affinity for my work. He carried that to New York with him. And so, um, it was a huge part of my, you know, the downbeat of what became my career.

Steve Cuden: Well, that is a very solid piece of advice, because you aren’t going to be able to just generate, I want to work in your theater. Someone has to actually bring you in to work on the show.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah. And there have been one or two times when a playwright will say, I think Chris Hackley would be really good to do this, even though the director had a different idea. But here, at the end of the day, you can know all you want about moving lights, um, about the gear, blah, blah, blah. All those moving lights are never going to get you a job. Good work is going to get you a job. So concentrate on the image and how it moves us in the.

Steve Cuden: In the spectators, things that really touch people in their heart, and they can feel something.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Chris Akerlind, this has been an absolutely wonderful hour plus on Storybee today, and I can’t thank you enough for your time, your interest, and your wisdom in all this is. And your energy. My goodness, thank you very much for spending this time with me today and telling the audience all about the world of light.

Christopher Akerlind: Yeah, cool. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s story beat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. Story beat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, im Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.