Lucy Mackinnon and Ben Stanton: Collaborating Within and Beyond the Proscenium
Noah Golden
Collaboration is the foundation of all theater-making, but how does it work when that collaboration extends far beyond the proscenium? For lighting designer Ben Stanton and video projection designer Lucy Mackinnon, their partnership started while working together on a regional show in Washington, DC. Their collaboration continued at Williamstown Theater Festival and then in New York. Together, they’ve worked on multiple regional, off-Broadway and Tony-winning Broadway shows, including “Fun Home” and Deaf Wests’ “Spring Awakening” revival. They’ve also done concerts, including Regina Spektor’s 2019 Broadway residency. Their collaboration is represented now on Broadway with Trip Cullman’s revival of Tennessee WIlliams’ “The Rose Tattoo” starring Marisa Tomei. The two have also been married for five years and are parents to two young children. While they worked separately on many projects – Stanton designed the lights for “Junk” on Broadway and has toured with multiple musicians like Regina Spektor and Sufjan Stevens, while Mackinnon is currently in rehearsals for Alanis Morissette’s upcoming Broadway debut “Jagged Little Pill” – but two both say they always work best when working together.
To learn more about “The Rose Tattoo,” their unique collaboration and the ways video projection and lighting play off each other on stage, I spoke to Mackinnon and Stanton by phone. Our conversations are edited for length and clarity.
NG: How did you get started with lighting and video design?
Lucy Mackinnon [LM]: I started video design kind of tangentially through other things. I studied theater in high school and I was doing a lot of filmmaking. I worked for different documentary filmmakers all through college. When I came out of college, I interned with the Wooster Group as their lighting intern. I did a lot of technical work with them for a year and they do a lot of video. I began to learn video there. In terms of the technical stuff – media servers and working with animation and all that – I'm kind of self-taught. I learned through the process of assisting other designers how to do all the different work that I do today, which is a mixture of animation, photography and illustration.
Ben Stanton [BS]: My first foray into the arts was as a musician. I studied jazz drumming in high school and got a scholarship to UMass Amherst to study jazz performance. I had always enjoyed working in technical theater, but in high school it was more of a hobby than something I took seriously. After a couple of years of studying jazz performance, I started to get a little restless and I ended up being very lucky because UMass Amherst also had this really fabulous theater department. Within that, they had a wonderful lighting design professor. Her name is Penny Remsen and she ended up being a really inspiring mentor for me. I went and met with her when I was a sophomore and by the end of that year, I decided to switch majors and study with her. I came out of undergrad determined to make it my career.
NG: Ben, did being a drummer first influence how you work as a lighting designer?
BS: Oh, absolutely. It's indispensable. As a drummer, there’s a kind of improvisational, supportive instinct one has to develop. Like when you're playing jazz and someone takes a solo, as a drummer, you're not only providing the foundation for the music, but you’re also responding to, and validating that solo. As a lighting designer, I do the exact same thing. There are all these other artists working alongside me and it’s my job to validate all of their work, to make sense of it and make it feel right. Make the costume look correct, make the blocking feel organic in a particular moment on stage. There's a collaborative generosity that’s necessary to do both these jobs.
NG: Lucy, video projections in theater can translate to so many different things. Can you explain the range of work you do?
LM: It's hard to define yourself by a certain style when you're a video designer because each show requires such different techniques and aesthetic ideas. I do a lot of hand illustration on my own. I tend to make a lot of the content myself, which is slightly unusual. For some things, I call upon others or use stock footage or an After Efforts plug-in. Being a video designer requires a little bit of knowledge from a lot of places. Being versatile and having a good sense of where to find images, how to research, how to read a script, I think is the most important thing. So much of designing video is just relying on intuition and hoping that you can find the right elements.
NG: Tell me about your process with “The Rose Tattoo?”
BS: We first designed “The Rose Tattoo” at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016. [My wife and I] have done quite a few shows together with this particular artistic group, led by the director Trip Cullman and scenic designer Mark Wendland. I actually met Trip at Williamstown in ’99 when we were both interns. Mark Wendland’s set is an abstract blend of interior and exterior spaces. There’s an interior space in the center of the stage, which is Serafina’s home. This space is surrounded by sand, driftwood, telephone poles and pink flamingos. Around that are these very, very large video screens that are projecting skies and ocean, which gives us the context of where they are, which is Louisiana in the summer. Lucy’s work on these screens is stunning. Never-ending oceans and horizon lines and gorgeous skies and clouds.
LM: Because of needing a continuous loop of waves and sky, I realized I would need to shoot things myself. The video is very simple. The only complicated thing is that it's always there. It needs to be moving and animated and interesting, but it can't steal focus from the action on stage. To bring it to Broadway, I wanted to keep essentially the same design, but I re-shot everything. We used some of our family vacation time in the summer. I used random mornings and evenings to stand on rooftops in Brooklyn to film skies and clouds. I took that footage and pieced it back together to create a new set of moving backdrops. Everything is very heavily manipulated. I filmed water and skies, but always separately and later comped them together. We had a long process of sitting in tech and changing one shot of water for another or trying different configurations of clouds. I had a large, large bag of things to pull from. Then, I worked in After Effects to add color adjustments and gradients and a soft haze to the footage at different times.
BS: Because I felt that Lucy's content was really driving the direction [of the visuals], I tried to support the content and the storytelling. We worked together organically - responding to each other’s instincts and making lots of small adjustments to fuse the two design elements. My goal was to make the lighting feel as though it was literally coming right out of the video screen. We went through each scene, making sure that we were following the emotional arc of the scene as well as where we were in the day -- morning to afternoon to evening to sunrise. Every element of the design worked toward supporting Marisa’s work on stage and supporting the storytelling overall.
NG: Theater is such a collaborative art. How do you best like to collaborate with other designers and how does that change when your collaborator is your spouse?
LM: With this show, the focus is really on Serafina; the whole design is really attached to her. I think it was a natural collaboration because we all had the same focal point between the departments. We were really, really consistent with color palettes. For instance, at the top of the show, Serafina is younger and happier and married. The sky is very, very pink, her dress is very pink, the air is pink and warm. By the time we get into the third scene, when things are darker and her husband has died, everything cools off. The costumes, lighting and projections, sort of takes a different shape. So, being able to track the colors of the show was a collaboration between costume, lighting and myself.
BS: For “Rose Tattoo,” there was a very obvious division of labor. Lucy's content was epic but contained on these surfaces and then my job was to sort of make the 3D version of what Lucy was doing. But there might be another project that included video design where every surface is a video surface. In those cases, lighting and video would have to negotiate who was treating the surfaces at different moments in the piece. I like it best when lighting and video are working together. It's more interesting to me when a surface can be treated both with light and video content at the same time. I do find that when Lucy and I collaborate, the work is particularly strong because - for one thing - we take our work home. At the breakfast table, we'll be talking about the show. We're both really honest with one another. If she is doing something I don't understand, we talk about it. Even when she's not working on a project with me, she comes and she gives me notes on my work. It's really nice to have somebody that you trust looking at your work critically.
NG: You’ve worked together on so many different types of projects from plays to Regina Spektor’s recent Broadway concert. How does your process change depending on the show or genre?
BS: I'm always looking for a narrative, regardless of whether it's a corporate event or a concert or theater. The way you get to a finished product differs wildly, but in all of the cases I'm looking for a narrative. The theater hierarchy is very clear – from producer to director to the creative team. That structure is a lot different when you're talking to a recording artist who has lots and lots of ideas but has all these other business managers and promotors around them also making decisions. It’s a different process by which you have to field requests and get things done. If I’m lighting a concert, it's going to be a much more abstract narrative and the lighting can be a little bit more fluid. Oftentimes, I'm running it myself, so I can make adjustments and respond to things musically in the moment. With Regina’s Broadway residency at the Lunt Fontanne there was no script, there were just songs Regina had written. She had a lot of visual ideas and I had a long collaborative process with Regina that involved sitting with her and going through different songs and talking about theatrical effects she wanted to use. We were also looking for some connectivity from the beginning to the end of the evening so that it didn't feel structurally like a typical concert, but rather more of a theatrical event. Regina wanted to embrace the theatricality and the Broadway-ness of the residency. We used some simple scrims and drops, and we also made it snow on stage in the finale,
LM: [With the videos], Regina laid out a set of things that she wanted to be in the show, Ben had some ideas and we all collaborated to figure out where video would go, where it was appropriate, what we might do with it. But what was interesting was that Regina, besides being the artist, was also the director and then Ben was kind of working as a creative director. I really like working with live music. I just did the North American tour of the Blue Man Group, which is really just a big rock concert. That was also an interesting experience, trying to work really, really in sync with music.