Arts Professional Story: Keith Parham

Keith Parham's career has all the hallmarks of the classic Chicago theatre success story: an East Lansing, Michigan, native, he moved to Chicago to attend DePaul's Theatre School, cut his teeth in the city's storefront and regional theatres, rode the wave of a prominent hit (Next Theatre's 2007 musical adaptation of The Adding Machine) to a run in New York and a raft of awards, and is now enjoying the sometimes frenetic life of artist-in-demand. What makes Keith's story unusual is his role: lighting designer. Often the unsung heroes of some of theatre's most memorable moments, lighting designers are, ironically, rarely in the spotlight. We sat down with Keith to discuss his training, his career, and how he views his job as a designer and theatre artist.
 
Everybody in theatre has a story about trying to explain what it is we do, but I'd bet lighting designers have it worse than most.

I think the majority of people who work in theatre don’t “see” lighting. There are a lot of directors who can’t conceptualize what you’re talking about; they can’t picture it in their head. All they can see is whether or not they can see people’s faces, so the reaction is “I can’t see them” or  “I can see them.”

What’s difficult is people can’t quite conceive of what they’re looking at. They know whether they like it or not, but they don’t actually know what’s going on. They don’t ever look at it and take it apart from a lighting perspective—“There’s this happening, and this happening, and there’s this color, and this is how it’s moving”—so they can’t conceive of what’s in front of them, which really means they can’t conceive of what could be different. They can’t line two productions up like you could with, like, a set. And that's theatre [people]! Non-theatre people, I just tell them, “I turn the lights on and off.”

You got started really young, and by the time you went to DePaul you had been working with lights and designing for community theatres and educational productions for close to a decade. Was The Theatre School a process of filling in gaps?

DePaul redefined everything for me. I knew how to hang a light, I knew how to run a lightboard. I didn’t really know anything about design. DePaul taught me a lot: how to think about a script, break apart a script, answer and ask questions that most people don’t know how to ask. The first question [I was] asked in my design class was, “What color is sunlight?” There were six or seven of us— it was our second year, our first lighting design class—and we’re all sitting there with drool coming out of our mouths.

DePaul taught me to look for those kinds of questions. Our fourth year a group did a production of Trojan Women in a very college-minded way. We said, What happens if we contemporize it and make it about World War II and we make it about Nazis, but the women are housed in a warehouse and they’re not allowed to leave? But then one of the teachers turned around and asked us, Well, what did this warehouse used to be? None of us had thought about it, and suddenly we realized how important it was because it said everything about their society. It taught me how to ask those questions—questions which I still ask and which stump directors I’m working with sometimes.

You didn’t know anyone when you moved to Chicago, but you got your start working as a theatre electrician [part of a production team that works with the lighting designer to hang and focus lighting instruments]. How did you get in the door?

You just start calling. You figure out who the Master Electricians are, who are the people giving out the jobs, and you just start making phone calls. Then you show up and you push a Genie for days on end and sit there bored out of your mind. But if you’re open to it, you can actually learn a lot that way. My second year I got hired as an electrician at the Goodman, and they kept hiring me. That’s what’s great about Chicago: You can work as an electrician, but [a prominent national or international designer like] Jim Ingalls is designing or Don Holder is designing.

There’s a lot of work here. For electrician work, you’ve got Royal George, Steppenwolf, Goodman, Chiacgo Shakes, Drury Lane, Marriott, Lookingglass, other little gigs at storefronts that can pay for one or two people. You can work; you’ve just got to get to know the right people. And once you get to know the right people, you’ve got to have the right attitude. And then you either sink or swim. There are good electricians in town and not-so-great electricians. A good electrician is somebody who understands what the designer wants. I can walk in and forward-think what has to happen, and I understand why I’m hanging the light the way I’m hanging it, so I move fast.

You said assistant designing was another crucial step in your career. How did you get your first ALD gig?

The first show I worked on at the Goodman was The House of Martin Guerre, and Jim Ingalls was the designer. Jim’s based out of New York, does most of his work in Europe. He’s Peter Sellars’ main designer so he does all of Peter Sellars’ work like Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China.

I ran the follow spot on that show. I went up to him—at, you know, [age] 19 or 20—and said, “Can I see your paperwork? Can we talk about how to be a designer?” And he was very nice. He said, “Sure.”

And then I didn’t see him for two years. Our senior year in DePaul, we do an internship. It can be anything you want, but you have to create it. With a little bit of prodding from some people at the Goodman, I got his number from them and I called him. I left him a message. To this day, I’ve never had to write that phone number down because that call was so terrifying. That number is burned in my brain. [Laughs.] He was in Paris and he called back and he said, “Of course I remember you! Yes, let’s do it!”

I was a horrible assistant. I just didn’t know what an assistant needed to do. Now I know: It’s different in every case, but you keep track of the paperwork, you keep track of the notes, you’re in charge of everything. But he’s the most organized person in the world, and I’m not! [Laughs]. He was extremely understanding.

He taught me a ton about things I’m really not good at. Like paperwork. Working with Jim, I learned a ton about organization. And about how to read a room: how to sit in tech and understand what the director needs in this case, and what that person needs in that case. To walk in a room and get the vibe really quickly about who needs what, and what they’re like, and how to respond to those things. And Jim  does realistic lighting better than any person I’ve ever seen. He’s a master at it. It’s beautiful, and most people don’t see it—its complexity and how difficult it is. He taught me a lot about that. For me naturalistic shows are very difficult, and I learned a ton about how to do it just from sitting and watching him.

So that first gig, combined with the network you had working as an electrician, led to further work.

When you’re working as an assistant, you really get to know a lot of people. Once I was in the door as an assistant [at Goodman and Steppenwolf] they kept hiring me. For seven or eight years I was doing four out of the five shows in both spaces at both theatres. Then I did a couple of shows at Chicago Shakespeare and a couple of other places. I spent a lot of time sitting next to a lot of people.
 
How has your own process developed?

At a certain point, I quit assisting to go out and start working as a designer. I had been working at Steppenwolf and Goodman, then I walked out of these jobs with this great resume, but I had no contacts as far as getting myself hired. I spent quite a few months sending resumes out and I got hired at a couple of places and started getting to know people. But it wasn’t until Adding Machine hit here, that doors started opening for me and I started working consistently enough [as a designer] that, now, I’m feeling much more in command of what I do. I've worked on as many as 11 shows in a five-month period, which is a ton for a lighting designer. To work that consistently, and every day you’re in a theatre making those decisions, those muscles are just pumped. I’m much more comfortable right now with what I’m doing.

Do you have a philosophy of design?

My design philosophy is: All design should be underneath the actors. The actors tell the story. We support them in telling the story. We don’t tell them how to tell the story, and we don’t tell the audience how to feel. I can’t express sorrow, the actor expresses sorrow. “I’m trying to convey a feeling” is not a good place for a designer. What you should be doing is creating the space where the actor is creating their emotion.

Do you do a lot of research? I’ve worked with a lot of designers coming from a very academic background who come in with boards with photos pasted on…

I’m going to get in so much trouble for this. I was taught to do drawings and go get photos and bring them in, and talk about the photos you bring in, and to get black-and-white elevations of the set and draw on them. I don’t do any of that. I don’t do one single piece of research.

So what do you do?

I come in and react to rehearsals, to the set and the space. Certainly, before that, I read the play, I have a viewpoint on the play. I talk to the director to make sure we’re from the same viewpoint. But I don't really do much until I'm in tech rehearsals [usually the last week or two before the show opens]. The difference between lighting and scenery, for instance—the set has to be built before a certain point in the process. But everything can change, lighting-wise: We can hang another light, we can add an entire wash of color. Apparently, I've already become famous as, “the one who comes in and rehangs [replaces all the instruments] for your entire show during tech.” To me a light plot [the technical plan for where various lighting instruments are to be hung for a particular show] is not a finished product, its a road map to get us started, a leaping-off place. I'm giving myself a bunch of tools to sculpt a show.

You've been designing at some high-profile places since Adding Machine, yet you've said time and time again your artistic home is TUTA [a storefront company brought to Chicago in 2001 by Zeljko Djukic and his wife Natasha Vuchurovich Djukic]. What is it about Zeljko and TUTA’s work that appeals to you so much?

I truly believe that theatre is an art form, not an entertainment form. I feel like the majority of theatre in this country is entertainment-based. I don’t blame this on the audience. I think it’s our problem: The audience only comes to expect what we give them. Personally, I feel the challenge to drive that idea.

[Theatre] becomes diluted, it becomes more and more like movies every year. We can’t do what a movie can do. But what we can do is have a live interaction every night with the audience. And I believe that conversation should be special every night, and we can’t feel like we know more about what we’re doing than the audience, because the audience is 50 percent of the equation. Even in places where the audience is included—"Hey, we’re going to challenge you, we’re excited about you!”—we pander to them on one hand because we want them to like us, and then on the other hand we talk down to them, to the point where all they can ask is, “How did you memorize those lines?”

I believe the audience knows as much about it as we do, and it’s important that they’re comfortable talking to us about it in a live setting. It’s important to have debate. You should create theatre from a place of, “I believe these things,” and you get into a rehearsal space and you create them in a very open way. And you don’t ever answer the questions for the audience. “I’m not going to tell you how to feel, you need to feel what you feel and then we’ll have a conversation about it.” [Zeljko] believes very strongly in that, and that’s the core of what I’m about. I want them to hate or love whatever I’m working on, and I want to sit and have a really fierce conversation about it.
 
Keith Parham is an award-winning lighting designer whose work has been seen in Chicago at theatres including the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Lookingglass, TimeLine, Next, European Repertory, Rivendell and Theatre Wit, as well as the Chicago Opera Theater and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A company member of TUTA, he has designed nearly every production with that company since 2002.