THE ‘RIDDELL’ OF LIGHTING

The lights play on a flurry of activity on the stage of the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts. As the hammering and wiring continue, the lighting designer, Richard Riddell, responds to a criticism of the circular shadows that have fallen around the bases of two trees on the generously wooded and freshly watered mulch and peat moss set.

“Take out 61,” he says.

Out go the lights that caused the shadows around the trees.

It is tech week, the week when the technical aspects of a show--the lights, the sound, the set--are all coordinated with the actors and director.

It also is only eight days before the opening night of Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods” (which begins Sunday).

As he calls for the numbers denoting different lighting combinations, Riddell pores over his lighting board, a monitor with a sequence of numbers filling and changing on the screen.

“All of these lights were focused,” he says. “But we couldn’t do the fine adjustments until the set was put up.”

The set was up in the morning. Now, as the afternoon progresses, he continues to make changes based on the notes of director Des McAnuff and their observations of the actors, music and sound.

The changes often continue right up until opening night.

Riddell sums up his work: “There are 200 ways of controlling the lights. . . . I figure out what I want to do, then I figure out how to make the (lighting) board do what I want it to do.”

Riddell has a way of making his job sound easy. In his lean, long-limbed, relaxed presence, casually dressed in jeans and sneakers, one can quickly forget that this is the same man who, at age 36, has as of July 1 officially left behind the chairmanship of the UC San Diego Theater Department and a position as associate director of the La Jolla Playhouse to become associate director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and director of the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.

“There just was nobody else in his class,” Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, said of Riddell. “I wouldn’t consider anyone else.

“He is an excellent educator and administrator. . . . To have that combination in an artist is very rare.”

Riddell’s artistry is something that McAnuff also appreciates highly. He calls Riddell a man with “poetic vision.”

While McAnuff doesn’t look forward to losing him, ironically, it is he who set the wheels in motion for Riddell’s departure--by giving him his first lighting job for the playhouse in its production of “Big River.”

That was in 1984. Riddell, who had earned a doctorate in theater from Stanford, had been a faculty member at UC San Diego since 1978. He had done lighting for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the English National Opera and the Guthrie Theater as well as for director Alan Schneider and playwright Samuel Beckett.

But it was McAnuff’s original musical, “Big River,” originally staged at the American Repertory Theatre, that brought Riddell to the attention of Brustein.

Riddell didn’t do the lighting for that production, but he did for the later La Jolla Playhouse and Broadway ones.

One of the first changes he made, in concert with McAnuff, was to replace the original black background with an oval screen that can appear as solid or be bled through, under certain lighting, to show a period picture of the Mississippi River.

At one point, when Huck Finn describes how he snuck back home to see his funeral, a light suggesting a spyglass moves over the screen, revealing the outlines of the mourners.

Riddell says New York audiences still find the effects in that long-running play “stunning.”

The musical won him a 1985 Tony Award, one of the seven Tonys won by the show, as well as the Drama Desk and Joseph Maharam awards for lighting design.

It was an “extremely grand moment,” he says. It soon led to an increased variety of work, including two plays at the American Repertory Theatre, one of which was directed by Brustein, and nine more shows at the playhouse, the most recent ones being “The Matchmaker” and “A Walk in the Woods.”

Many walked away impressed with the visual effects in “The Matchmaker,” but Riddell shrugs off his contribution to the show, pooh-poohing “tricks” such as the bleed-through screens as “old” and deferring the credit to Michael Yeargan, whose elaborate sets made the lighting as easy as “falling off a log” by giving him so many interesting surfaces to work on.

Much harder, he says, is “A Walk in the Woods,” which, on the surface, seems like a far simpler exercise--a two-person play that takes place on a single set--the woods--over the course of four seasons.

That, of course, means he has to suggest the seasons, finding the right combination of lights for each one. And how will he create yet another critical illusion, hiding the source of the light? In “The Matchmaker,” he set the lights to look as if they were coming out of the lamps and lighting fixtures on stage.

But this set is outside. “Where’s the sun? It all falls on the shoulders of the lighting director,” he says. “That’s a heavy responsibility.”

And even as he creates the atmosphere of the outdoors, he has to be careful not to distract attention from the actors.

Subtle lighting, he says, requires much more skill than the flashy kind.

“The lighting that interests me the most is the lighting that people don’t see,” he said.

Now, while his wife and two young sons wait for him to return to their new home in Lexington, Mass., Riddell works on the final scene of “A Walk in the Woods.”

As actors Michael Constantine and Lawrence Pressman go over their dialogue for perhaps the 10th time, Riddell tries out different shades of rose for McAnuff.

McAnuff nods at the stage appreciatively. “I like this. I like the sunset glow. . . . A shade more before we fade would be nice.”

Riddell is still fiddling. “Yes, I was just working on that.”

McAnuff: “Rosy, rosy . . . perfect!”

Riddell looks at his work critically. “One more second on the last fade,” Riddell suggests.

McAnuff smiles, nods and asks for changes of his own. Then they try it one more time.