Newport This Week

this week’s Conversation wth David Roy

Middletown Native Lights Up Worlds of Fashion, Theater


Fashion show for Marc Jacobs featuring a sun 30 feet in diameter created from sodium vapor lamps. (Photo by Max Breslow Photography)

Fashion show for Marc Jacobs featuring a sun 30 feet in diameter created from sodium vapor lamps. (Photo by Max Breslow Photography)

David Roy saw the light 25 years ago.

The Middletown native discov­ered the joy of lighting design while doing tech for the Middle­town High Drama Club.

“We were sort of granted agency to color outside the lines as it were, and that independent creative pro­cess spoke to me at first,” he said.

After graduating in 1998, he headed for URI, where he obtained bachelor’s degrees in music and fine arts in technical theater. He was committed to employing both.

Now a lighting designer based in New York, Roy joined IMCD Lighting in 2010, and took over as head of de­sign in 2013. He has maintained an extensive career in theater lighting design in New York and Rhode Is­land.

At the renowned Gamm Theatre in Warwick, he has lit a dozen pro­ductions, including, “Assassins,” his last show two years ago, which was shut down by the pandemic in the middle of its run. Roy will be lighting The Gamm Theatre’s upcoming production of “Ironbound” by Martyna Majok, which opens March 17.

 

You have musical and lighting skills. Was it push-pull for you?

I studied music first, mostly be­cause when I got to school the music program had a rigid struc­ture and the theater department didn’t. As it turns out, in music school your ears are trained before your skills and . . . I realized that I was spending more of my time in the theater than the practice room, and performance wasn’t for me. I did translate this to a short career in sound design, and actually had some recognition in that field be­fore I switched full time to lighting design.

What was the first show you lit?

The first one that I really remember being proud of was “Speed the Plow.” It was a student produc­tion at URI, and I was characteris­tically overly ambitious. But the limitations created by the nature of it being a student production helped distill the decisions down, and I remember being satisfied with the end result.

Were you hooked?

I was hooked from the start. The tricky part was figuring out how to do something else on the side that would pay the bills while I worked on shows. It’s incredibly difficult to make a living as a designer in the performing arts, or in the per­forming arts at all.

Probably for my first 20 shows, I spent my entire design fee in­creasing the budget for the show so that I could get something closer to what I wanted. Other really fantastic shows include “Black Maria” at the Providence Black Rep company. We used all the resources, and then some, but ended up with a series of beautiful and evocative vignettes that really helped push the story forward.

Of the many shows at The Gamm, do you have a favorite?

I liked my work on “Assassins,” and wish more people were able to see it before COVID shut it down. [Mentor] Chris Parry used to say that each different light source is like a different paintbrush in your kit, and “Assassins” really let me have a lot of different kinds of brushes.

Do directors lay out a schematic and you hang lights, or is there more to it?

Typically, I have a meeting with the director, and we go over the script and talk about the set. Usually, the set designer is brought on board first and they have at least a rough idea about the major elements.

We talk more about concept and story. What is the story that we are trying to tell? What do we want the audience to experience? How do we create an environment for the show to happen in?

Depending on the director, there may be many more follow-up discussions about how to accom­plish certain moments, and then I take the concepts and ideas and come up with a lighting schematic.

My work is in determining where the light will come from in a scene, how bright it will be, how it will fall across the space. I also consider what the color and intensity of that light will communicate about where we are, what’s important, and maybe where we are going.

Tell me something about back­stage. You are watching a show and suddenly, uh oh!

The best stories are from consoles melting down. All lights have been controlled by computer control boards for decades. They have been fabulous in enabling all kinds of amazing light shows you . . . see today, but they are still computers, and sometimes they break.

We run all our shows with . . . two computers in sync the whole time, and if one of them has a problem, the other takes over. But still, things can and do go wrong.

There’s the time the console crashed and then started replaying every single keystroke it had ever received from the beginning; the time on opening night when the consoles crashed and we had to bring in a third console during the show; the time the electrical ser­vice started melting down, also on an opening night.

Tell us about your lighting company.

The company got its start by lighting fashion shows. The job has changed over time as the industry has changed and technology has changed. It used to be that we needed a ton of light in order to allow thousands of photos to be shot and be sharp and in focus. With the advent of digital pho­tography and the sophistication of cameras on smartphones, the industry shifted, and the social media photos are just as important as what’s on the cover of Vogue.

Now, the lighting can be a lot more flexible and less prescriptive, which also gives room to be more creative.

What’s the most spectacular New York job you have done?

In sheer spectacle, I’d probably have to say the time we used Olafur Eliasson’s work at the Tate Modern to inspire a fashion show for Marc Jacobs at the armory. We ended up making a sun, probably 30 feet in diameter, out of sodium vapor lamps. We had to buy every single available sodium vapor lamp on a shelf in the entire country to do it.

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