New York-based scenic and lighting designer David S. Goldstein possesses a powerful passion for theater, and for him, his disciplines are perpetually married as he feels that they help to tell and sculpt the story that actors are portraying onstage, be it a musical or a straight play. “It’s not a prevalent practice in the United State, for a single designer to do lighting and sets,” observes Goldstein. “It is very prevalent for one designer to do set and costumes. In the United Kingdom, it’s the opposite — it’s very prevalent for one designer to do sets and lights and one to do costumes. ”
Since graduating with a BFA in design and production from York University in Toronto in 2009, the ambitious 27 year-old designer has spent the last four years in New York, which has led to theater gigs in West Virginia for a summer, along with shows in Pennsylvania, Albany, South Carolina, as well as New York, his hometown of Los Angeles, and back in Toronto. He often practices both disciplines at once but also has worked on many shows as either scenic or lighting designer. Ultimately for him, the set creates the world of the show, while the lighting sets the mood, the tone, and the feeling of that world. He loves being able to combine them.
A Holistic Vision
“When I read a script, I have an image of the set,” he explains. “I design a set for lights, and I design lights based on the world and the tone and the mood and everything that the actors are trying to express. The lighting is just a silent supporting actor that supports how everyone is supposed to feel. They cut together. When I design a show, [I think] how does the show move? How do we get from place to place, and how do lights tell a story? I can’t design one without the other. ”
The designer admits that in having dual disciplines, it is always a challenge when he is taking on only one of them because he likes to be very collaborative. As he designs a set for a show with lighting in mind even if he will not be handling that aspect, so he likes to have conversations with the LD early on. Sometimes others do not share his collaborative spirit.
“On one of my NYMF [New York Musical Theater Festival] shows this summer, I was not happy with the lighting and couldn’t do anything about it because the lighting designer was not receptive to my notes,” reveals Goldstein. “It was a hard story, because everybody was unhappy. The director wasn’t happy and the creators weren’t happy because it just wasn’t what we talked about for five weeks. Because I’m a lighting designer myself, I designed it with the lighting in mind, and if you’re not doing the lighting that supports the story the way the set supports the story, it looks bleak, and is a challenge. So when I’m lighting a show that’s not my set, I like to start a conversation at the beginning about what does the show look like and what does the world look like. The more communication, the better. ”
Goldstein is a NYMF veteran, having worked on past incarnations of the annual event. Even though NYMF shows can be daunting — various productions share the same stages, are required to fit their sets and wardrobe into a four-by-four-foot space backstage or underneath seating platforms, have tight spaces for band performers in the wings, and are given one day of tech time literally before their opening performance — Goldstein relishes the challenges. In fact, this past July he worked on four NYMF shows simultaneously: designing lights for Cloned!, sets for Deployed, sets and lights for Der Gelbe Stern (The Yellow Star), and sets for Rescue Rue. One imagines that quartet must have been a handful to juggle.
“Especially with NYMF, it’s not difficult, because as long as your tech weeks are spread out, you can do as many shows as you can squeeze on your plate,” says Goldstein. “I’m just a designer. I don’t have to build the set, I don’t have to paint the set. It’s all meetings, attending rehearsal, and collaboration. I love meeting with directors, I love asking challenging questions. I don’t care if you need a table at stage left, I really want to know why does this character say this line and how does it support the world that we’re in, and what world is that. When you’re doing two or three shows, it’s great at NYMF with the lighting, because you have very, very little to do, except for the day of load-in. They give you a rep plot, and you can add a couple of specials, but they do the whole hang for you. You go in and program the show. ”
He cites the door-slamming sci-fi farce Cloned! as an example of a NYMF show where he sat throughout the whole tech day. He never programs in advance for NYMF. “Some lighting designers do, but I don’t find it helpful, because you can’t see it on stage,” he says. “I take the whole eight hours [of tech] to slowly build the show, and I can move pretty quickly on the light board and get 300 lighting cues in a day. They’ll be clean, the fades will be nice, and they’ll all be purposeful and help tell the story. ”
Goldstein reports that the NYMF lighting grid is similar every year. He says “they give you a really wonderful rep plot” comprised of an ION console for programming, a system of about six CXI scroller top lights, a system of six CXI scroller side lights, hi-fives from both sides, gobos from both sides, down gobos, three different IQs, a couple of follow spots, ground rows, footlights, and shin busters. All the lights are Source Fours with perhaps some strip lights, Frenels, and Pars, “but it is a pretty simple plot that gives you a lot of versatility. For me, the art of lighting design is in the why, not in the how or what. As lighting designers, we’re all given the same tools to work with. There may be some new lighting fixtures, but they all do the same thing. They turn on. I can use the same LED fixture on my show in a 99-seat theater that they use on Broadway in a large space. It’s all the same equipment. It’s about why do we make the choices we make. Why is the light coming from this angle and this color in this scene, and why does it come on that quickly?”
The challenges for NYMF shows are not simply technical, they are creative. Cloned! was a fast-paced production that required him to keep up with the performers. “The actors had four weeks to rehearse their movement, and I had one day to program it and make it move fast,” says Goldstein. “That was a challenge for me, keeping the show going. There’s so much in musicals that lighting can help with in terms of how the music swells, how does the light react, how does the light help tell the story the music’s telling? You can light a musical really, really wrong if you’re not hitting beats and moments and the feeling that the music is giving you, and some of those things get lost. But if you accentuate a drum kick with a light that pops, you hear it and you feel it. With a story that moves as quickly as Cloned! did, I wanted the lights do the same. ”
Creative Friction
Sometimes creative conflicts come into play, as they did for him when he worked on another NYMF show called Deployed. He observes that as set designer he had his own ideas, the director had her own ideas, and the composer/lyricist/writer “had a vision for what the show looked like in his head before he had a director on board. I don’t want to say he had a design already, but he had this idea of a design that just wasn’t telling the story in the way that I thought it needed to be told. So selling the creator of the show on a different idea was probably the biggest challenge because the director was on board with me the whole time, and she and I had a wonderful collaborative relationship, but selling him on why we don’t need his idea and why he hired me was the hardest thing. Once he bought on and enjoyed it, he was very, very happy in the end with what it looked like. He just never imagined it the way I did. ”
On top of the current off-Broadway show My Sweet, Sweet Spirit, for which he did sets and lighting, Goldstein’s first commercial Off-Broadway show is Stalking The Bogeyman, which began previews last month and is based on the real-life story of journalist David Holthouse, who was brutally raped by a family friend at age seven and sworn to secrecy via threats. When he discovers his childhood Bogeyman has moved into his new hometown of Denver 25 years later, he realizes the only way to keep children there safe is to kill him. The play chronicles his stalking of his intended victim over a year’s time, plotting his death, and revisiting the damage done to him.
“It’s very powerful,” declares Goldstein. “It’s a very small, intimate show. I’m doing the set design, and I’m very, very excited about the world we’re creating. We are creating the world of the stalking map and the world of the mind of David Holthouse and these 25 years worth of memories and secrets that he has kept, and that is what the set is going to explore and imply. The show is massive — lots of shelves, lots of walls, using the full height of the grid, using the full width of the stage, not really masking anything off. It’s a big old room, and there’s lots of set dressing. It’s very exciting. ”
While he is doing sets for Stalking The Bogeyman, “there’s a way that my set is telling a story and there are specific lighting needs for my set,” says Goldstein. “I have upwards of 23 to 24 practicals on stage, there are 16 or 17 front lit squares on the set that are shelves with dressing on them that are intended to be front lit to tell us where we are, and on the walls themselves there is probably a good 40 to 48 circuits strictly of set lighting, practicals, and front lights. Strictly set lighting, there are probably a good 50 practicals. I look forward to seeing the added layer of how he [the LD] lights the actors and tells the story with lights as opposed to just supporting the set, and that is something that I have to wait until I get to the theater to see.”
For the Sake of the Show
While he stresses very specific ideas that he likes to work with, Goldstein says he has come to acknowledge that there is less room for ego in theater, particularly on the designer side, and more necessity for understanding and collaboration. “The biggest thing I’ve learned living in New York as a designer is that it’s not about where the idea came from, it’s about what’s best for the show,” shares Goldstein. “It doesn’t matter if someone else has an idea for my set, if it’s really what’s best for the show it doesn’t not make it my set. It’s still my design, but I’m open to other people’s interpretations.” Conversely, as an LD, if he really likes the world that a set designer creates, he is more than happy to just light it and bring the right level of tone and mood to the piece.
“I love getting actors on a set,” continues Goldstein. “For Stalking The Bogeyman, there is a lot of set dressing on all these walls. There are some very specific elements that I wanted. I wanted to be able to light up the dressing for this scene, and I wanted to be able to light up these different shelves at different moments, which is great. We used that as a starting point, but as soon as we got to rehearsal, the stage manager said, ‘The actors want this, the actors want this, the actors want this.’ Which really helps us fill out the world and make it real for everyone. I’m open to that discussion. We’re creating art. We’re not curing cancer, but we are changing people’s lives and we have to look at it that way.”
