“Find your light” is not just a metaphor or turn of phrase. Onstage, your performance can be made far more impactful if you know how to make the light work in your favor—and there is a trick for doing so. Natasha Katz, the six-time Tony Award–winning lighting designer who’s back on the boards this season with the revivals of both “All My Sons” and “Burn This,” revealed the tangible way you can tell if you’re finding your light—and it is a trick that happens to be employed by Annette Bening.
How would you describe the role of a lighting designer?
I do believe that our job is the same job as everybody else’s: We really are there to help tell the story. What that means with lighting is, our job on a very basic level is to tell the audience where to look. We have the power to let the audience see what we want them to see, what the director wants them to see, what the playwright wants them to see, what the actor wants them to see. We’re really like film editors, in a way: We can say this is where you’re supposed to look, this is where the scene is. Then above all, the most important thing about lighting design is that we help capture the emotional underpinnings of everything, how the character is feeling, counterpoints to the characters, of the emotional undercurrent of the scene. What we can do as lightning designers is make that feeling come true for the audience.
You’ve worked on musicals and this year worked on two plays; are the two feats different?
The core is the same. For both, it is all about storytelling. A lot of the differences with musicals is really that the music drives so much of it, and lighting can mirror musicality. That’s why they say sound delights so often because it’s so hand-and-glove.
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As a lighting designer, do you work with actors directly?
As lighting designer, the actor is the most important person. The director is the one with the vision and with whatever the playwright is trying to do, but the first and foremost thing is making sure the actor—within the context of the play—looks beautiful. If there is nothing else we can do as the lighting designer, it’s to make the actor look incredible. We talk about actors finding their light all the time, but this group [for “All My Sons”] is amazing. They just move their head three inches and all of a sudden Annette Benning is glowing in the light—she’s one of the best I’ve ever seen at finding her light, which must come from film.
Do you have any advice in general for actors to “find their light”?
It’s so important to learn that craft, to understand, to be aware of when a light is on their face and when a light is not on their face. I think the only way to learn that is really by doing that. They have to be hyper aware of feeling it on their face. I just watched this documentary called “Four Dames Having Tea” with Maggie Smith and Judy Dench, and Maggie Smith tells a great story of when Lawrence Olivier walked into a scene, they would make the lights brighter so the audience would feel this enormous presence coming in. And she said she would feel so dwarfed that she would walk around and try and just feel heat on her face so that she knew she could just get part of the light that was on Lawrence Olivier, so that the audience would notice her. For an actor it’s not about upstaging somebody—it’s being a part of the conversation.
Do you have any advice for women, specifically, who want to get into a technical field such as lighting?
When I started, lighting design was a profession of women and now it’s changed to mostly being men. I just don’t know why. So that being said, there is no question that there is room for female lighting designers. It’s just been co-opted somehow. The advice that I would give is, just keep trying. I’ve told this story about the few times I’ve taught students, it’s mostly the men who write me emails afterwards about getting internships. Something is happening in the schools, I don’t know where it’s coming from, from a society point of view, where the women aren’t being quite as proactive about getting jobs and that is really important. Continue writing emails, no matter the rejection. Write to the designer, depending on what job you want. There will be room if you just keep at it.
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