SAN DIEGO THEATER DESIGNER FINDS THERE IS A SCIENCE TO IT

It’s a long way from marine biology, but Kent Dorsey likes to compare the problem-solving inherent in theater design to that of his one-time career.

Dorsey, resident lighting designer for the Old Globe Theatre since 1979, majored in marine biology at UC San Diego before discovering the challenge of designing for the legitimate stage. “A lot of people have no conception how many little detail decisions must be made” in designing for the theater, Dorsey said. “It’s the same kind of thought process used in science, only more open.”

Dorsey discovered theater design when he was required to take humanities courses as part of his college general education requirements.

“In a strange way it’s very related to the hard sciences, but more creative. You’re not constrained into fitting into somebody’s research grant. You can make a creative statement and hopefully touch somebody on the other side. But it’s all problem solving.”

Dorsey’s biggest problem may have been creating the lighting and set designs for Eric Overmyer’s play, “On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning,” playing through March 9 at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Conceived for a proscenium theater, “On the Verge” contains 21 scenes that have been directed by Craig Noel for the Carter’s theater-in-the-round configuration. In the course of the play the small, nearly square stage becomes an ice field in the Himalayas, a desert, a jungle and a swamp, as well as Nicki’s, a 1950s Havana-style nightclub.

“This show is definitely pushing the upper limits of what this theater can do,” Dorsey said. “The space is so small. We have to fly things in and out. It’s so complicated that the design had to be done by the same person.”

The play, a time-travel fantasy, is about three 19th-Century women adventurers who journey to the future. A large electric turntable, which takes up most of the floor space, has been installed “so they won’t be walking around in circles all night.”

Above the stage in a maze of set pieces such as a suspension bridge. Dorsey has tucked 170 lighting instruments that, along with sound effects, assist in evoking changes in terrain.

Dorsey thinks of the Carter’s stage as a chameleon. “Every time a new set goes in, the entire feeling of the theater changes for me. Depending on what you do, the theater seems to shrink or grow and stretch. Most of the things in here are fairly realistic plays. For those plays you can really set it up like a living room. You don’t have to cheat furniture out like on a proscenium stage.”

The Carter’s arena setup takes more lighting instruments than a proscenium theater because actors must be clearly viewed simultaneously from four sides. Dorsey, who designs about 12 shows a year, uses 120 lighting instruments for most plays, and 150 for two plays presented in a revolving summer repertory.

Aiming and focusing the 170 lights for “On the Verge” through all the suspended set pieces was a Rubik’s Cube puzzle Dorsey solved through such devices as using tiny mirrors. Transparent colored gels are used for lighting effects. The designer employed “a cold, crisp blue” for the ice field scenes. “The ice field is probably a lot more blue than it would be,” Dorsey said, but when tied to the blizzard-like sound effects, a scene is evoked. Green lighting using a dappled shadow pattern conjures up the jungle scenes.

“A lot of lighting design is stopping and paying attention to what is happening at a sunset,” Dorsey observed. “What’s happening when you’re skiing down a mountainside? What color are the shadows?”

When Dorsey found that he would rather solve problems in the theater than in the ocean, he transferred to the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem and took a graduate degree in design at Temple University in Philadelphia. Besides the Globe, where Dorsey won the first San Diego Theatre Critics Award in lighting design for “Othello,” he has designed shows for the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles and the Denver Center Theatre Company.

This spring he will design Peter Maxwell Davies opera, “The Lighthouse” for the San Diego Opera.