MASTERS OF LIGHT, DARKNESS SHAPE GOOD THEATER

Seated on a plush, satin-covered bed in a cheaply furnished Burbank boudoir, a mother reminisces dreamily with her son about her lost youth as a Hollywood extra, as the set gradually takes on a lush, peach-colored glow.

It was a scene from “Charley Bacon and His Family,” a recent play at South Coast Repertory, and the light effects were guided carefully by Peter Maradudin--and his computer.

“Computers give us a freedom to organize our ideas in a way we never could before,” said Maradudin, 28, a Yale School of Drama graduate whose first major lighting credit was the 1984 Broadway hit “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

“They give us control over how quickly we can change the look of a scene, how precisely we can control where the audience looks and the variety and subtlety of the lighting effects we can achieve,” said the resident of Laguna Niguel, who has fast become a rising star in his profession.

By contrast, Tom Ruzika--at 37 perhaps Orange County’s most senior lighting designer, having done 40 SCR shows to Maradudin’s nine--taught himself lighting in the 1960s, inspired by a few pioneers in a field whose artistic horizons were expanding.

“When you’re looking at Peter and me, you’re seeing two different generations in a young field,” said the bearded, bespectacled Ruzika, whose most recent credit at SCR was the lighting for last month’s production of Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy.”

“I didn’t go through a lighting program like they have now at Yale or NYU (New York University). There weren’t any. When I started, the idea was mainly to get some lights (on the actors) so you could see them. Now the possibilities are almost limitless.”

They are just two among several lighting designers whose varied work at SCR reflects the impact of technology on one of the essential specialties in theater.

The power of light and darkness to shape an audience’s experience is as old as the campfires that lit the faces of primitive storytellers, say the lighting designers. Long before the computer, Eugene O’Neill called for a “resentful glare” in stage directions to his play “Mourning Becomes Electra.” George Bernard Shaw asked for a “fine spring morning beside a river” for Joan of Arc to walk through in his play “St. Joan.”

To create the desired effects, lighting has evolved through the years from candles to gaslight, then to the electric bulb. In the 1930s, lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal used angle, color and shape of light to overcome the limits of “dimmers”--banks of lights laboriously guided by backstage technicians. Nowadays, contemporary lighting equipment is suspended amid the catwalks and scenery above the stage.

It was an encounter with Rosenthal when a 16-year-old Ruzika sneaked backstage during a Pasadena Playhouse run of a show called “Rosalinda” that prompted him to seriously consider a career in theatrical lighting.

“I was looking at some lighting plans on a table,” Ruzika, who now lives in Silverado Canyon, recalled in a recent interview. “This neat lady came up to me and said, ‘Would you like to take a closer look at it?’ . . . The fact of how friendly she was here in this sea of chaos, of people trying to put up this musical, showed me there was a human element to lighting. Somehow, she pushed it beyond the technical. I didn’t even realize that (she) was Jean Rosenthal until much later.

“Everything was so exact. She knew where everything would go and how it would work. She made a great impression on me.”

Ruzika, who abandoned his plan to become a professional organist, still talks about theatrical light as a kind of “visual music.”

Now, his hands work at a different kind of keyboard--a computer keyboard at SCR that orders up a setting sun or shadows cast by leaves. It can summon a faint spotlight to highlight a single face in a crowd scene, take exactly eight seconds to crescendo to a glaring brightness, then yield to another spotlight pointing at the same actor from a different angle.

“Ruzika was really the first lighting designer we had,” said Martin Benson, artistic director for SCR. “At the time, we had 12 dimmers and each one could control three lights. . . . At one time, you would have five or six people running the different dimmers.”

Lighting design today is “so subtle now as to not even be noticed by the audience, even though it has a great effect on them,” said Benson, who directed “Charlie Bacon and His Family.”

Benson credited Maradudin with giving “Charlie Bacon” the necessary “fluidity” that made “one scene . . . lead into another very easily, very smoothly.”

A director usually has the last word on a dramatic production, but Benson said he and many other directors will let a trusted lighting designer freely interpret their ideas about a play into light. Those approaches may vary considerably.

“I tend to work more in clear light,” Maradudin said. “I think of myself as going for elegant understatement by using plain light and shadow.” The peach glow in the opening scene of “Charlie Bacon,” he said, was one of the rare times he resorted to colored light.

His goal, Maradudin said, is to serve the playwright, never to use exciting effects for their own sake.

Ruzika agreed but added that he is somewhat less of a purist than Maradudin. “I do like to use color. I think ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (this season’s production at SCR) was a good example of a pretty show. What I really like is stark, dramatic contrasts of light and dark, but you don’t get that many opportunities for it.”

Lighting a play usually begins with a script, some general outline of a director’s concept and a theater blueprint. These are translated into a “cue sheet,” which maps out the sequence and duration of each lighting change, and a “lighting plot,” which illustrates for electricians the pattern in which lights should be hung above the stage.

Like actors, lighting designers refine their work with each rehearsal, up to opening night. When that night comes, if they did a good job, most audience members aren’t aware of them--something that is just fine with both men.

“I like working with actors . . . most of the time,” Ruzika said with a shy laugh. “But I don’t have the personality for (being on stage); I like being behind the scenes.”

Maradudin, who has considered becoming a stage director, said, “I have never looked for the glamour part. When I played (Little League) baseball, I always wanted to be the catcher. But the catcher is the one who controls the game.”