For the Love of Shadow Theater

Larry Reed: 1944-2026

It is with profound sadness that ShadowLight Productions shares that our founder and Artistic Director, Larry Reed, passed away peacefully at his home on January 30, 2026.

Charles Lawson Reed III—“Larry” to his many friends—brought ShadowLight Productions to life in 1972, creating a body of work that bridged traditional Balinese shadow theater with contemporary performance and stagecraft. As a director, filmmaker, teacher, and shadow master, he devoted his life to storytelling across cultures, collaborating with artists and communities around the world and creating works that expanded what shadow theater could be in the present day.

Larry’s creative life in the performing arts began when he was a small child cast in his first play, and grew over his high school years at Pomfret School in Connecticut. After Larry attended Yale, he joined the U.S. Peace Corps Theater Program where he was sent to Costa Rica and served as Assistant Director of the National Theater from 1966–68. He then headed to San Francisco to study film at the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, 1970), becoming a core member of Anna Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop and performing in the critically important Ceremony of Us (1969).

In 1970, seeking to study a non-Western language and culture, Larry made his first visit to Bali, where he encountered wayang shadow theater, an intensely transformative experience. Returning to California, he studied Balinese art, music, and dance at the Center for World Music. His first teacher, I Nyoman Sumandhi, invited him to return to Bali to study with his father, the respected dalang, or shadow master, I Nyoman Rajeg. Larry would study wayang intensively with Pak Rajeg for fifteen years, learning all aspects of this ancient artform— language, music, technique, and storytelling.

Larry founded Shadow Play Theater Company— later ShadowLight Productions—to bring traditional wayang to U.S. audiences. In hundreds of performances, accompanied by a traditional gamelan gender ensemble, he told stories from the Mahabharata in ancient Javanese court language, playing heroes, demons, maidens, and the servant-clown characters who translated for local audiences and improvised slapstick comedy.

In 1979, Larry filmed Shadow Master with filmmaker and friend John Knoop, a “dramatic documentary” about a family of dancers and shadow masters in Bali. Made before the onslaught of mass tourism, the film was shot with members of the local community as actors and co-creators. It later aired on PBS and the Discovery Channel.

In the early 1990s, Larry entered the most productive and widely recognized period of his career as he began synthesizing traditional shadow theater with contemporary techniques to create a new kind of cinematic shadow theater for which ShadowLight Productions is known. Working with point-source lighting and a 30-foot-wide screen, he combined handheld puppets with 3D shadow masks, along with oversized slides projected as sets, and an innovative use of lighting and stagecraft.

Over the decades that followed, Larry would direct more than twenty original ShadowLight productions, with performers and collaborators far too many to name. His cinematic style gained recognition through early works such as In Xanadu (1993–97), which received a UNIMA Citation for Excellence (1993), puppetry’s highest award; Wild Party (1995), which incorporated elements of jazz, film noir, and beat poetry; and Wayang Listrik (Electric Shadows, 1998), which influenced Indonesian performance traditions, helping shape the Wayang Listrik genre.

Reed’s work was guided by a mission to carry culture forward. Coyote’s Journey (2000) played a role in preserving the language and culture of the Karuk Tribe of California. He collaborated with playwright Octavio Solis to create Seven Visions of Encarnacion (2003), a search for cultural identity in a California mission, and Ghosts of the River (2009), which told stories of migration across the Rio Grande.

Reed also continued to regularly perform traditional wayang to live audiences, including hybrid performances of The Tempest, a work he returned to about once a decade throughout his career. His most recent production, Chagall In His Own Words: An Invocation, premiered in Fall 2025. Meanwhile, ShadowLight’s education program introduced young people in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond to writing and performing shadow theater. Reed was also working on his extensive archives and recording an oral history.

Reed’s work grew from deep study and exchange, with a respect for living traditions and a sense of responsibility to the people and cultures he learned from. He used shadow theater as a platform to lift up stories and artists too often excluded from Western theaters. He was a humanist—generous, funny, and deeply well-read. He loved learning languages, spending time with friends and family, cooking and eating, and learning to play the clarinet. He changed the lives of countless musicians, dancers, artists, and performers—especially those working in puppetry and related forms. His ways of working continue in the community he created.

If you would like to do something to honor Larry, his family suggests making a donation to ShadowLight, which will support our legacy project development and other programs.

This is an initial announcement; we will share more in the coming weeks.

Contact:

Caryl Kientz, Managing Director

caryl@shadowlight.org

We are a shadow theatre production company creating live theatre, film, and other media to preserve and expand the joys of shadow play. Proudly creating in San Francisco since 1972.

We strive to help preserve indigenous shadow theatre traditions, explore the possibilities of the medium by creating innovative interdisciplinary, multicultural works, and use it as a tool for cross-cultural understanding.

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