Illuminating the Stage: A Conversation with Ben Stanton and Lucy Mackinnon

Ben Stanton and Lucy Mackinnon are two of the most inventive and sought-after designers working in theater today.

Stanton is a lighting designer with more than 100 credits on Broadway, off-Broadway, and across the world; this season alone, his projects include(d) Table 17, Maybe Happy Ending, All Nighter, Becoming Eve, We Had a World, and the Encores! Wonderful Town. Mackinnon is a trailblazer in video and projection design throughout the United States, represented most recently by All In: Comedy About Love, The Bedwetter, The Thing About Jellyfish, and Vladimir. Their most recent collaboration was The Notebook, and they both earned Tony nominations for their work on the Jefferson Mays solo A Christmas Carol from 2023.

While their professional paths have taken them all over, Stanton and Mackinnon also share a personal bond — they are married and raising a family while navigating the demands of the theater industry. Both have found ways to balance their high-profile careers with the challenges of parenting, a unique aspect of their journey in the world of theater.

In this conversation, Stanton and Mackinnon discuss their collaborative process, the evolving role of lighting and projection in live theater, and the intricate balance between their careers and family life.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

You’ve done five Broadway shows together, The Notebook being the most recent. What is it like to work togehter?
Lucy Mackinnon: We always closely collaborate because projections and lighting are naturally going to work together and be cued together. In The Notebook, video was working as an extension of the lighting design, filling in places that Ben couldn’t get to with water reflections and leaves and textures.

I don’t always think of lighting and video going together, and oftentimes, awards like the Tonys group video in with scenic design.
Lucy: Well, there are times when I feel like what I’m doing is much more closely connected to scenery, because we’re projecting aspects of locations and we’re filling in information for the audience about where people are. However, in the way that lighting sets the pace for scenes and responds to music and syncs with sound, projections do the same thing.

Ben Stanton: The Notebook is a good example in the sense that the set was not designed for video. But what we learned in Chicago was that water was a metaphor for memory. I could, as a lighting designer, put light into the water on stage and create some reflections, but I couldn’t do it everywhere, just because of physics. Lucy can be so much more artful in painting the set with water reflection. It was just projected light that was much more sophisticated than the light that I can project.

Lucy: When we did A Christmas Carol a couple of seasons back, most of the set was made of LED panels. There wasn’t any color in the set at all; it was created through video. We were using video but hoping people thought it was physical scenery by making content that was painterly and using a lot of shadows so you couldn’t see where it started or ended. In that case, we were doing something with video that was very much like scenic design. With Notebook, we were trying to pretend the projections were light and hoping that no one saw the difference.

I’m always taking cues from any lighting designer about my levels, color, tempo, duration. We’re thinking about the appearance of content in the way that the lighting designer is thinking about the appearance of light. But projection is its own thing and it’s used in so many different ways that it’s being redefined all the time.

Ben: And it’s a relatively new presence in live performance, particularly on Broadway shows. I talk about this a lot when I’m teaching. When I came up, there was already a set of standards for lighting design. The art form was pioneered by Tharon Musser and Jennifer Tipton. Video has arrived in the last decade, in a way. There were versions of it before, but it became so much more common. It’s interesting to watch the art form evolve and see how people are using it.

In terms of that, Ben, tell me your overarching goal for Maybe Happy Ending.
Ben: One of the things lighting designers have the power to do is connect the audience to the performer. It’s about how we shape the stage and light a scene. We tell the audience where to look. Because it’s such an immersive, technological show, I saw my job as making sure that even in this beautiful, geometric work, the audience was connected to the actors.

Everyone on the team was working towards that goal, but lighting was the tool to equalize the value of the performer to the technology. I wanted to do my best to lift our cast out of the large technological world and make sure that they were still the focus.

The set and the immersive nature of the video design provided very few literal lighting positions. I had little slots of light upstage and downstage of the video panels. There were whole regions of the stage where we couldn’t put any lights because there was video there. And it was worth it because it’s very effective. But it was challenging to figure out. I rely a lot on angle of light, but in this case, the angles were limited.

And Lucy, a project like All In had a very New Yorker-style feeling. What was your precis for that project?
Lucy: Alex Timbers wanted All In to be an experience that our amazing actors and band would enjoy doing, and that the people who went to see the show would have fun with. He wanted it to be a marriage of the New Yorker and SNL, this cultural party that was as much a love letter to New York City as it was about love and relationships and children.

We had a set that was reminiscent of a loft. During the stories, we had these narrative illustrations that were playful and connected to all the different beats, and during the musical moments, Alex wanted us to play with hand-drawn animations that activate the set. I worked with this wonderful New Yorker cartoonist, Emily Flake, to decide what the illustrations were going to be. There was a lot of workshopping that went into that before we ever got to tech, and then we built hand-drawn animations to play during the musical breaks.

Every show is different. I tend to build a lot more things in 3D now. With All In, we wanted it to feel really rough and handled, so everything was made by hand. That was a completely different process, which I almost never do. But that’s what makes video design fun. You have all these different ways of working.

You’re in and out of New York working on shows, you have young kids. How do you balance the art and the family?
Lucy: We try not to be super busy at the same time. I was out of town last month for The Thing About Jellyfish in Berkeley and I was doing The Bedwetter down in DC.

Ben: And I think the day after you got home, I focused the first my three off-Broadway shows. We don’t really have that much control over our schedules. We try our best and it’s a challenge, but we love working in this business.

I don’t think people really understand how taxing the theater schedule is on parents. I didn’t until I had a kid.
Lucy: It is really challenging.

Ben: Theater is not really built for caregivers. The hours are at odds with school and childcare hours, and that’s all true. But people have been doing it forever. And what’s cool is that even though there are sacrifices and challenges to doing this work with a young family, we can it share with them as they get older. I don’t think I ever really understood what my parents did for work, but my kids can actually see what we do.

I was able to take our nine-year-old to Maybe Happy Ending during previews, and he loved it. He thought it was the funniest show he’d ever seen, and he goes to school and talks about it.

Lucy: Henry gets swept up in the energy of live theater. We can’t take him to everything, but anything that is at least ok for a kid under 10 to see, we try to get him there. We haven’t really started taking his younger brother yet.

Ben: It also helps them understand why we’re out six nights a week for the last three weeks, right? When they were younger, we were just gone, and even if one of us was there, it was like, “Where’s the other one?” Now, they’re starting to understand that we have weird jobs, and they’re starting to be ok with the schedule.