Find your light

I stage managed an Off-Broadway play once that was essentially a vanity project transfer of a community theater project.  The actors weren't very good (think of a community theater in a small town where it's the same actors in every play, so they come to think of themselves as acting royalty and pat themselves on the back and are very self-congratulatory, without getting any objective outside perspective), which wouldn't have incurred my scorn if their acting ability hadn't had an inverse correlation with their being immature, arrogant, and unprofessional.  The worse the actor, the more he or she acted like a spoiled kid on stage and like they were the best thing to bless New York, and me, in decades.

One of the mind-boggling stumbling blocks I encountered with the cast was that several of them were unable to find their light on stage.  Light cues in theatre are designed around specific blocking, and especially when the show doesn't have a spotlight operator, it's important for actors on stage to hit their marks so that they're lit.  Otherwise, if they're a few feet out of a light pool, they might deliver the scene in the dark.  For a seasoned actor, this is more intuitive than just walking up to spike marks all over the stage.  Not every position is spiked, because an actor can usually not only retain blocking but also know when they're in darkness and when they're in light.  I would argue it doesn't even take an actor to know when they're in light.  When someone goes outside and says, "Ah, it's so good to feel the sun on my face," they're doing the same thing: they're sensing that they're in light.

On this show however, the cast could not for the life of them find their light.  Night after night they'd deliver important parts of scenes feet away from the pool of light, and my notes after the show would include the phrase "Find your light."  And then they'd tell me they couldn't find their light because they didn't know how to identify when they were in light.  I remember my ASM (assistant stage manager) and me working with two of the actors just drilling them, making them walk in and out of the light repeatedly so they could learn to identify when they were in light and when they weren't.

I also remember my ASM and me looking at each other like, "Are you kidding me? We're doing this on a union Off-Broadway show selling $60 tickets?" and having to suppress giggles at the absurdity of it.

So, to prove my point years later that it doesn't even take an actor, let alone one in a professional Off-Broadway play, to "find your light," here is my cat, in an apartment that looks out onto an alley and gets direct light for all of about 5 minutes a day, expertly finding his light: