Bradley King
Lighting Designer
Yes, Bradley King is a Tony and Drama Desk Award-winner (and past Jeopardy! contestant) with a long list of theatrical design credits to his name but he is foremost a storyteller who uses light as a means of communication. The first thing you must do as a designer, he says, is know the story. A strong advocate for social and racial justice in the theater, Bradley has thrown himself into full-time parenting (and medieval calligraphy!) while waiting for performances to resume.
Meet Bradley -
These are extraordinary times and people are coping in different ways. Many people have started a new hobby or are otherwise doing something they normally wouldn’t have time for. What have you been doing to stay sane/positive through this?
Throwing myself into full-time parenting has been a welcome way to stay focused. I have a six-year-old who just started virtual first grade and a three-year-old who is unbelievably curious about the world. But I also want to acknowledge how lucky my family is: my wife’s job is keeping us financially afloat and I can devote my time to our kids. We’re doubly lucky to have help from my parents, including lots of homeschool help from my mother who is a retired teacher. So many other families in the US are being forced to make horrific decisions about being able to feed their families versus care for them. It breaks my heart.
On a completely different note, I have taken up medieval calligraphy and manuscript illumination. How’s that for an obscure hobby?
How has your work been affected and are you working on any projects at the moment?
I think everyone knows that live performance in the US has come to a complete standstill and has been shut down for months. The US House of Representatives passed the HEROES act in May, which would have extended our unemployment benefits and given desperately needed aid to the arts sector. The Republican-led Senate has maliciously refused to act on it. It is critical that anyone reading this interview who can vote in the election do so.
Do you have a feel for when Broadway may be able to get back to work and what that might look like?
It was just announced yesterday that the shutdown will continue through at least May 31, 2021. Cases are beginning to rise again. I don’t think anyone knows what will happen come the winter. Even with a desperately needed change in leadership, I don’t see a way performances come back before there’s widespread containment and a vaccine. There is no way to make socially distant Broadway economically feasible, so we need to follow the South Korea model of aggressive test, trace, isolate, and diligence about mask wearing.
The Black Lives Matter movement and racial protest has also been a significant issue in this unprecedented time. Does our lighting industry have a role to play in that?
Yes! Also – it’s not racial protest – it’s protest against RACISM. I think that’s a critical semantic difference to note. Everyone in a position of privilege, which means every white person in theater, needs to examine how we are contributing to systems of oppression, racism, and anti-Blackness in particular. Then we need to ACT on those problems. The problems are systemic, and they require collective action. I’m involved in a BIPOC-led group discussing ways to move forward with tangible ways to make progress, and one of the most important things I’ve learned is that the path forward will be led by those most affected by oppression. It requires stepping back, listening, and then amplifying those voices.
I read that you grew up in Baltimore. What was your youth like and what did you want to be when you grew up?
My childhood was pretty idyllic. I had a loving home, parents who cared deeply about me, financial stability, and excellent schooling. All of those things contributed to getting where I am today, and I try to keep that baked-in head start in mind when I think about my own artistic practice.
As far as what I wanted to be when I grew up; it ranged from Firefighter to Pediatric Neurosurgeon to actor to director. I bounced around a lot.
Do you remember when you first became enamored with theatre?
9th grade: I had an infectiously charismatic theater teacher named Mike Himmelfarb who breathed new life into a completely inert arts program at my school. He was one of the largest and earliest influences on my career path and my love of live performance.
Why did you choose lighting?
When I went to NYU Undergraduate Drama to study acting and directing, I really thought I was going to be a director. But in my third year of training, every one of my classmates needed design teams for their projects. I had done some lighting “design” in high school (which really meant I knew the difference between a leko and a Fresnel) and so I ended up designing seven plays that semester. I realized pretty quickly that it was something I loved doing. I also had an incredible early mentor in Lenore Doxsee who taught me so much about color in particular. She helped me get both an internship at Glimmerglass Opera (now Glimmerglass Festival) as well as one at Seattle Rep, which were both hugely important in launching my early-career work.
You have an MFA in design but you also have a BFA in theatrical directing, both from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Have you directed plays and has that background helped you in lighting design?
I haven’t really directed since college, but I do think that experience has helped enormously. Talking about lighting design is notoriously difficult; you can’t visualize it like a set model or a costume rendering, and computer visualization are absolute lies. But being able to talk about dramaturgy, storytelling, how we’re going to use which tools to tell what story, those are all incredibly important skills to have as a theater designer, and my training as a director laid a pretty solid base to start those conversations.
Theatre lighting design has been your main focus but you’ve designed lighting in a number of different areas - corporate events and themed entertainment for example. Do you look on yourself as a ‘theatre lighting designer’ or more generally as a ‘lighting designer’? Or maybe something else.
I’m a storyteller who uses light as a medium. That can take many forms: plays, musicals, opera, dance, a party for Microsoft or Target, but it all comes back to storytelling. As long as there’s a story to be told and someone to listen to it (live), I’m interested.
When you initially sit down to design lighting for a show, what is the first thing you think about or the first step you take?
Related to the above, the first thing you must do as a designer is know the story you’re trying to tell. If it’s a play, you need to read the script. If it’s a musical, you need to know the music. So it starts with reading or listening to whatever “text” (sometimes not a literal text) exists. Then, because lighting ONLY exists in collaboration with other design elements, we need to talk as a team about what we’re doing and what story we’re trying to tell. I love for those early conversations with the director and other designers to not be about specifics; I want to know what the story is and WHY we’re telling it. Why MUST this story be told? That informs so much of the process.
When do the tools of your trade enter your head? Is that something you think about right away or does that come later?
You don’t know what tools you need until you know what you’re trying to build, so it comes later. Once I have a solid grasp of what we’re doing, once I have a good idea of the text or the music, and once we know what kind of world we’re going to be living in, then I start to think about what tools I need to help construct it.
You used Elation’s Artiste series of LED moving heads to fulfill a number of roles on Little Shop of Horrors at The Westside Theatre before the pandemic shut it down. Have automated, multi-functional luminaires aided/changed the design process at all? Have they changed your approach to lighting?
They totally have! They’ve injected an incalculable amount of flexibility into the staging process, because directors can completely re-do the staging for a complex number and not have to wait until the next day for the rig to catch up. Color was always the easiest thing to change, but now it can happen instantaneously. Specials can be adjusted without a ladder. But also, an infinite number of choices can be dangerous. If you’re not careful, your palette can turn to mud. So while I rely on automated fixtures heavily, I also try to be rigorous about my choices. WHY is this light moving live? WHY am I changing the color here?
LED is becoming ubiquitous in lighting. What can LED still not do well?
Two things: as long as LEDs still have “peaks” at various wavelengths, they will never render colors as well as tungsten, especially complex colors like skin tones. There’s a reason EVERYONE looks good in white tungsten light – the infinite spectrum is emitted. And especially at the far edges, like the deep reds and blues, LED is still falling short. The second thing is red-shift. Tungsten gets redder as it dims, like all heat-based light sources. That red-shift is baked into our DNA as humans: it’s exactly what the sun does as it sets each night. LED can’t replicate this color shift, like the beautiful red-orange glow of an A-lamp at 15% dimmer. I rely on that color temperature change HEAVILY in a lot of my design work, and it’s a major reason why I still prefer tungsten sources for a lot of tools.
You won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for lighting for Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (2017) and Hadestown (2019) and have an impressive list of other design successes to your credit. From design day one to the final curtain on closing night, what is your favorite part of the process?
Definitely first preview. You get your final design element: the audience! You learn SO MUCH in those first few previews.
What do you see as the hottest trend in theatrical lighting?
Everyone is trying to make a brighter LED fixture, but I’m most excited about ETC’s Augmented software. In the same way they brought complex moving light programming to the masses, I think this has the potential to bring effective 3D tools to a large number of people. The ability to have moving lights reference physical points in space as oppose to pan/tilt information has HUGE timesaving implications, especially in the touring market.
Is there something you’d like to accomplish in this industry that you haven’t already?
Broadway is currently the only theatrical market that pays a living wage to designers. I want to see the same happen Off-Broadway and regionally. I want designers to have Paid Family Leave benefits. I want everyone paid as an employee. There’s so much advocacy work to be done for racial justice. It’s not for me to “accomplish” so much as it is doing what I can to support, advocate, and amplify others.
What do you like to do when you’re not doing lighting?
I used to love travel but that’s out for the moment. Right now it’s play with my kiddos, cook and bake, and illuminate!
What’s something about Bradley King that people might find surprising?
Tough one – I feel like a pretty open book. It’s a little known fact that I was on Jeopardy seven or eight years ago (I did not win, but I also didn’t embarrass myself).
