PORTLAND, Maine — Update: Chris Akerlind is doing the lighting for Portland Stage Co. performance of "A Christmas Carol." He talks to Rob Caldwell about the challenges of lighting a play to be recorded and how he's spent his time during the pandemic.
By the time he arrived in college Chris Akerlind had a pretty good idea that he wanted to work in theatre design. There was, however, as is often the case for twenty-year-old students pursuing a dream, an obstacle. “Though I can draw,” Akerlind says, “I can’t draw well enough to express myself as a set designer.”
Being the practical sort, he changed course and began to study not set design, but lighting design. “It didn’t require drawing to describe what the light of a production was going to be,” he recalls. “What it did require was an articulate ability to talk about light, which is notoriously difficult to talk about—a bit like music in a way because you can’t touch it, you can’t grab it.”
As career decisions go, it was a good one. Akerlind, who has lived in Portland since the 1980s, stands at the pinnacle of his profession, nominated for seven Tony awards, winner of two. His work over more than three decades has taken him around the world on more than 600 productions, from comedies to musicals, dramas to operas. Playing with light, capturing the right mix of color and shade and texture, still fascinates him.
“Scenery doesn’t feel quite magical,” he muses, “because it’s made of nuts and bolts and wood and steel and Styrofoam. Light has a very, very magical quality, a transformational quality. And I just think I was turned on by that.”