My First College Lighting Design

When I returned to college for my sophomore year I was eager to get back to work on more plays and dance concerts.

In November of 1975 I would design the lighting for my first play in college, actually two one acts.

The plays were Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Happy Ending.

Day of Absence was unusual in that all of the actors were Black and played their parts in White Face.

Back in 1975 African-Americans still called themselves Black, and my use of the term is to fit my tales into the proper period vernacular and for clarity sake.

The Black actors were all playing the Whites in a town where all of the Blacks disappeared one day and nothing gets done and everyone panics.

I am not sure how it would play today but it worked back then.

At the time it did not seem to me, a White kid from Long Island, that working on plays with African-American themes and mixed raced was unusual, special, or that we were trying to educate the audience, but I guess we did.

Just last week while looking for something else I found a copy of the light I drew for the two plays 35 years ago.

The light plot has 42 stage lights for both plays.

It was on this show that I used my first moving light, although it was not planed.

After one performance a friend told me that they enjoyed my lighting of the play and especially liked the sunset.

I thanked him but I had no idea what he was talking about.

It seems that the light that I had focused on the window was loose and slowly moved down during the play giving a very nice sunset effect more then ten years before the first motion lights were available on the market.

While I was at UB we also did two plays by South African playwright Athol Fugard; The Blood Knot and Bosemen and Lena.

Because of the subject matter of his plays I had always assumed that he was a Black man.

Several years later at the University of Michigan I got to meet Mr. Fugard and was very surprised when I walked into the room and saw a gray-haired White man sitting there.

I felt like a fool and was glad that I had never said anything to anybody about my thinking he was Black.

I still had a lot to learn about Theatre and still do to this day.