Five-time Tony winner Brian MacDevitt went from high-school Frisbee player to Broadway lighting designer through mentorship and chance. He credits Bill Mincer's validation at Purchase College, the transformative success of The Book of Mormon, and a slow climb through off-Broadway work that kept him grounded.
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What do you get when you have a Broadway professional and a camera crew? Long story short, you get a lot of cool info when you get Showbiz U Luminaries. This week we talked to 5-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Brian McDevitt. His vast array of work includes Mike Nichols' Betrayal, Death of a Salesman, and The Book of Mormon. Brian also teaches lighting design at the University of Maryland and shares with us his journey of how he fell into theater right out of high school.
I was a real underachiever. I was really interested in Frisbee and, you know, social life. And one day a friend of mine said, "Hey, Brian, you want to come put up some posters?" And I found myself in a van with this, you know, 30-year-old hippie guy driving around town putting up theater posters. That's how I kind of found my way into this group called the Community Free Theater. I still to this day think it was like theater in its purest form. Because it was— everybody did everything. The community was really considered and really involved. Every— after every performance there was a talkback, and most of the audience stayed. That's where I started getting into, you know, I was doing stuff on stage and I was doing stuff backstage, and I knew— I then— I like, I did that for a few years and I worked like at the Pancake Cottage as a short order cook. I had this epiphany. I hitchhiked. Everybody Nobody went to college in the early '70s. You finished high school and you hitchhiked to California. I didn't get that far. I stopped on a farm in Iowa where some friends from the theater group were homesteading there. And they built this home and I worked with them for a couple months on the farm. And while I was on the farm, I had this epiphany. Just one day I was like, hey, if I went to school— I mean, I love doing theater so much. Why don't I go to school so I could make it a career, so I could ditch the pancake cottage? Then I applied to Purchase, and they looked at my high school transcript, and they said no thank you. So then I went to the community college on Long Island, Suffolk County Community College, and I came back to Purchase the next year with a straight-A transcript and said like, I'm not— kind of to let them know like, I'm not kidding around, like I really want to do this. So I got to school there, had a fantastic mentor who was a Broadway lighting designer. His name is Bill Mincer. His classes were really challenging, and I was getting rewarded for doing good work. So it was that kind of relationship, you know, that it was like, hey, somebody who I really respect is telling me I'm good at this. And I started thriving on it, you know, on that feedback. And it was really— we had a really healthy competition. In our class, we had a lot of lighting designers who were smart, and I wanted to be the best. You know, that was like— I come from a big family, and I want to be special. My students now, I tell them, we have a great situation at the University of Maryland where they have assistantships, and you can actually graduate debt-free with an MFA there. And— but I tell them, take the loan out, borrow $50,000, and and use that for the first 3 years. That's what I did. I worked on, you know, a moving truck and— but it was kind of jobs that I didn't have to say— I didn't have to quit to go off and do a show for 2 weeks. So it really fed that work. You know, you're building this base of a pyramid as your career grows. So when you get to a certain show, a big show, by the time I got to Broadway, I didn't— I had a cavalier attitude about it because I was like, I'm really happy with all the shows I'm doing off-Broadway, so if this doesn't work out, I'm okay because I wouldn't fall too far in that pyramid. Other students at that time were coming from like Yale and getting a Broadway show like an August Wilson play, so they were like going right to the top. So many of them I haven't heard of since, you know, that they didn't have that slow grow kind of thing that my career had. So it's a long— it takes a long time and patience. And the biggest thing was I was thrilled to be in any theater. I was thrilled. I was like, I can't believe I'm doing— I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I'm doing what I love to do with all these people who love to be here. Well, Book of Mormon is that manna from heaven. I gotta say, I'm a kind of funny guy. I have a good sense of humor, and I exhibit it in the room when I'm there, and I'm like kind of cavalier, and you know, that's part of the fun. And I never tried to make one joke in that room with them. I was like, no way. Drake has like blinders on when he walks through the room, and everybody's like trying to be like chummy and have repartee, but I realize that if he starts in this part of the room and he's got an idea, he's not thinking about anything until he gets to the stage and has and shares that idea. To do something that is so funny and I believe in so deeply as a, as a work of art, and then to have that be as successful, which has, you know, changed mine and my family's life because we profit from the profit of it. That is just like, I don't know what happened to me to make that happen. You know, it's just like I'm so lucky. I mean, there's a lot of things that I, you know, got deeply depressed when I thought I was doing the Seussical, and I was invited by the set designer and the director to do the Seussical, which was the hottest thing on the street in the workshop stages of it, and I suffered. I felt horrible. I felt like a terrible, you know, just like, you know, a bad breakup, you know. And it turns out I dodged a big bullet because it was a real painful process for everybody involved. And the people who started out on the show were fired and replaced, with the exception of the lighting designer. I don't know, I always feel like I want— now I'm kind of old and jaded and I like the challenges. Like, go ahead, give me a ceiling and give me, you know, no way to put light. I'll figure out a way to— I want to step up to, you know, whatever the show is. Don't stop doing it. Just do everything you can get your hands on. And I feel that, well, if you bring— if you're passionate about it and you bring that passion to the room, it's infectious. If you're a person— people will watch you in that room because you are so in love with being there without being pushy. It just becomes an infectious thing and people will ask you to do the next show and the next show. And when you invest in it that way, it shows and eventually shows in your work.
