When Jerald Raymond Pierce reviewed plays in Chicago some years ago, his fellow audience members “probably thought I was a little off, because I’d spend a good few minutes before the show started or during intermission just staring straight up, looking at the instruments being used and trying to think about what the lighting designer did to create the looks onstage.” His fascination with theatre’s behind-the-scenes world, which has also led to work as a stage manager, made him a perfect fit to write about theatres’ slow but growing changeover to LED lights—a trend Pierce says may “change the world of lighting design forever. Being a part of that, even tangentially, is pretty cool.”

“Many people joke that Cincinnati is a ‘small big city,’” says critic and reporter Jackie Mulay, who contributed this month’s profile of Know Theatre artistic director Andrew Hungerford, a lighting designer and director with a degree in astrophysics who has taken the small Queen City company in adventurous new directions. She found that profiling Hungerford inevitably became a portrait of a scene. As Mulay puts it, “This community is so interconnected and supportive of each other’s endeavors, and each person brings their own fantastically unique story to the stage. It was such a joy to have the opportunity to more deeply engage the Cincinnati theatre community.”