10 Shows & Counting: Meet Encore’s Lighting Designer, Gary Hauptman

The 12 Dancing Princesses Crew (2014)

Gary: I am honored to be the subject of this edition of The Front Row Blog. The 12 Dancing Princesses will be my 10th show for Encore so it is a fairly significant milestone.

For introduction: I am Encore’s lighting designer. I am also a theater tech for Arlington County Cultural Affairs, which is how I got acquainted with Encore. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, where I got my start in theater, and I have a couple of degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit.

My first lighting gig was immediately after high school when I volunteered to run a spotlight for a municipal ice show in Southfield, a suburb of Detroit. These were the big old clunky carbon arc style lights that required constantly adjustment to keep the arc flame from extinguishing. That was my introduction to lighting: Large scale arena shows with Olympic level athletes mixed with skating school students.

From ice shows, I moved to rock bands in nightclubs, then modern dance and ballet in all kinds of formal and informal performance spaces. I was recruited by a group from the University of Michigan’s Department of Theater & Dance and the Oakland Academy for Dramatic Arts to help them open a theater in a vacant historic warehouse in the Greek Town area of Downtown Detroit. Thus, I was the founding lighting director for Detroit’s Attic Theater.

Coming to Washington in 1989 to work for a national bar association, I lit several shows for The Arlington Players (TAP) in our Thomas Jefferson theater and at Lubber Run, which was my introduction to Arlington Cultural Affairs.

Perhaps contrary to popular perception, I do have a life outside of theater. My main hobbies are racing sailboats – on the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay, cooking (experimenting with Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook and discovering to joys of preserved lemon), in-line skating and some involvement in politics, lobbying and elections.

Encore: Can you describe your role and responsibilities as a lighting designer?
Gary: The title lighting designer really only describes a portion of my tasks and responsibilities for Encore. As a designer, my job is to develop a concept for the lighting look of the show that is consistent with and enhances the look, feel and content of the play. It must coordinate with the other production designers and be consistent with the director’s vision and with any songs and physical movement such as the blocking and choreography.

The process, of course, begins with reading the script and looking for any obvious lighting requirements such as references to locations and settings, time of day, weather and storms (I love lightening effects) references to lamps or fires. For example, in a TAP production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, there is a night scene outside the house with a car pulling up. I built an effect to simulate car headlights using a sawhorse and a pair of PAR spot lights.

I will confer with the director and choreographer for any ideas they have for lighting such as sound effects or music that should coordinate with lights. Some directors have images in mind from the start for how they want the show to look. Others may just say show me what you have and we will work out the details during tech week.

What kind of show is it? Should it appear natural and outdoors or indoors? Or is it a fantasy with magical elements? There is a big difference between lighting a family sitting at the dinner table in contrast with a clan of trolls at a fire pit preparing to cook a hobbit.

I’ll think about effects and practical fixtures that we can introduce to add texture and perhaps some visual surprises. In The Secret Case of Sherlock Holmes we used the moving lights to produce a rotating spiral effect when H.G. Wells’ time machine was moving through time. In a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, there was a night scene with a car outside the house. So I attached two floodlights to a sawhorse and the scene was played in the glare of headlights.

I like to use rear projections on the cyclorama for effects and to enhance scenery. There are catalogs of images that can be purchased for insertion into stage lights. Castles, stalks of wheat, bolts of lightning, horses, windmills, various styles of windows and doors. Another option is to project moving images – either with digital projectors or with a device that can create a moving light and shadow effect such as the look of a show storm that we used in Honk or the look of bubbles rising from the sea floor that was so effective in The Little Mermaid.

When we are able to load our sets into the theater, the lighting process moves into high gear. The Encore lighting team inserts the gels into all the lights that we will be using and we hang, cable and focus any additional lighting instruments that we require and we insert gobos into some of the lights.

Then it is time to sit at the light board and program the light cues into the system. Fortunately I usually get assistance from some of the Encore techs. There are several who have helped me hang several shows so they are becoming very skilled at the technical side of theater.

Programming the board can be a slow and meticulous process. There are shortcuts to some of the process but mostly it amounts to building the lighting of the show one light at a time. Colors, intensities, timing, areas, entrances, exits, blocking, mood, lighting effects, all have to be considered and calibrated. Plus items like house lights, announcements, intermissions, curtain warmers and curtain calls have to be considered and programmed into the board.

The Thomas Jefferson Community Theatre (aka TJ) is the largest and best equipped of the Arlington County theaters and Encore does five shows there each year. The preexisting “standard hang” has more than 160 lights, including moving lights and color scrollers, with a very good light board. The advanced technical systems gives our tech crews hands-on experience with equipment that they otherwise may not encounter without working in professional theaters.

My dual roll as Encore lighting designer and Arlington County theater technician empowers me to work with our Encore sound and lighting board operators and with the fly rail operators to ensure that the equipment is operated safely and effectively. One of my favorite parts of this job is engaging with the Encore kids to provide training and skills development.

Encore: What was your first involvement with Encore?
Gary: My initial involvement with Encore was nine years ago when I started as a county tech in the TJ theater. As a former camp counselor (Tamarack!), I have a strong interest in youth development programs so I was happy to help with the Encore shows. It’s not quite the same as a week-long canoe trip in Algonquin Park with 25 campers but tech week can be pretty challenging.

Encore: Can you share and describe your most memorable moment at Encore?
Gary: I think that one of my most memorable moments must have been working on Honk, Jr. I had been struggling with a technical challenge – how to create a convincing snow storm. It is in a pivotal scene where the ugly ducking transforms into the swan so I really wanted it to be good.

I saw War Horse at the Kennedy Center and was inspired by their use of digital screen scenery to try a projection solution for our blizzard. Our rear projected falling snow effect combined with Deborah Kline’s snow costumes and the voices of the chorus, produced a magical scene. When the audience saw it, there was a spontaneous collective sound of “oooooohhhh”. It gave me chills.

Encore: The 12 Dancing Princesses will be your 10th show, what keeps you coming back to be involved with Encore?
Gary: Why do I keep coming back to do more shows? The easy answer is that Encore keeps asking me so I must be doing something right. The main reason I re-up is because I enjoy working with the cast and crew and helping provide great theater experiences for our audiences. Number two is because I get to work with a talented production team that keeps producing solid shows on crazy tight budgets. Number three is the nature of the shows we produce: There is something freeing about doing children’s theater. I get to experiment with effects and use over-the-top colors because we do shows that depart from the normal world.

Encore: What do you enjoy most about working at Encore?
Gary: The most fun show to light was The Hobbit. Lots of shadowy spaces like the inside of Bilbo’s Home Bag End. Deep forests with elves and night scenes with cook fires. I loved going all-in with Gollum’s cave glowing in green and Smaug’s cave radiant in red. If you think about it, where would light come from inside a cave? I imagined light sources that would sit on the ground like glowing fungi for Gollum’s dank cave and hot rocks or jewels in the dragon’s lair. So I built white plastic globes on black bases with green light bulbs inside them for Gollum’s cave that were swapped for red bulbs when we went to Smaug’s cave. That kept the tech crew busy. Look for the return of the globes in The 12 Dancing Princesses.

Encore: What advice can you give to those interested in working in the technical side of theater?
Gary: The technology has gone through a revolution since I started. Equipment is far more varied and complex. The digital revolution has changed everything about lights, audio, effects, sets, scenery and even set mechanization. The best lighting and sound people are very familiar with the intricacies of control and effects technology and often are computer geeks first and design artists second. But for gear heads who have an artistic/creative side, theater tech is a great field.

Like in movie making, I expect to see more movement toward digital images for sets and effects. So my main advice is to keep up with developments in the technology. If you are interested in doing design work, I think it is important to get out and see other people’s shows. It can be tough to find time to see shows when we work in theater but it is important to get ideas and inspiration from seeing what others are doing.

Try to get your experience in all kinds of spaces and involving all kinds of technologies. You will never know when you will be confronted with new or old technology that you might be able to apply. The old gear is going to be around for a long time since it works but it will phase out and we’ll get new toys to play with.

Thanks Gary for sharing your Encore experience! Kudos to your involvement in 10 Encore shows!

Interested in working for tech next season? Be sure to check our auditions page for the fall production!