lighting | Ashland Theatre

Michael Maag is the lighting and projection department manager at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Maag has been fascinated with theatrical lighting and design since high school. After achieving a bachelor’s degree in technical theater, he traveled as an actor, a stunt man and fight coordinator, designed lights for theaters and planetariums, and then came to OSF to pursue the love of his life. We chatted in his office behind the stage of the Elizabethan theater.

EH: How do you design lighting for a play?

MM: When reading a play, the first thing that you start with is time, place, motion, where we are, when we are, how we’re moving from place to place. Then there is the overall idea — what is the piece about? What is the underlying meaning of this piece? Why are we doing this play? It’s not only what the playwright has as the underlying meaning of the work, why they wrote the play, but why this director is doing it, what their concept is, and why is it that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival chose to do this play at this time. All of that gets layered in. Then the job is to take the concept and to find a way with light to reinforce and to help tell the story. If we’re doing the “Scottish play” (“Macbeth”), and the play is all about blood, we want to establish lighting that helps make that blood stand out. So, we’ll have stark white, cool light that is in stark contrast to the deep red that is on the other side of the color spectrum, until we need the bloody scenes, and then we light it with red to emphasize it. So that we’re always getting your eye ready for what is going to happen.

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Oregon Cabaret Theater’s founding director, Craig Hudson, has been its resident scenic and lighting designer for the past 26 years. A former professor of theater arts at Southern Oregon University, Hudson divides his time between his design projects at OCT and the Red Tree House, a bed and breakfast he designed and built in Mexico City.

For those of you who haven’t visited OCT, it’s a gracious, polished, welcoming environment that serves up tasty dinner theater. Audiences are consistently satisfied, and so is the OCT staff, some of whom have been there since the theater’s inception. Hudson and I met for coffee at the Rogue Valley Roasting Co. on Ashland’s East Main Street.

CH: I’d always wanted to have a theater. When I was at grad school at Penn State, I was talking to friends who collected memorabilia from old Philadelphia theaters. I said, “Someday I want to have my own theater; if you ever see a big main chandelier for sale, let me know.” They knew of one. So I carted around this huge chandelier looking for a place to put it. That’s the chandelier in the Oregon Cabaret Theatre.

EH: How did you find this fantastic space?

CH: One day a friend said, “You have to come and look at this building.” Somebody had kicked in the back door of this old church. And I thought, my God, this would be a great theater.

EH: Do you have a favorite set that you’ve designed?

CH: We used to do a lot of dinner theater at SOU. We did a very good “Tom Jones.” People were eating in what was the auditorium. We’d put platforms over the seats. The ceiling was tented. We built a whole balcony. Actors could go down stage, up through the audience, up staircases, around, and back down on the stage. It was really fun. The food service was integrated into the show. The audience was brought into the space, and everything happened around them. It was one of those total experiences. It was magical, the minute you walked in.

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