I almost did not write this post because the subject feels too small. Glasses. Specifically, the coating on glasses. Who could possibly care?
But then I remembered that the posts that have been most useful to me on my own journey were not the ones about grand philosophy or sweeping frameworks. They were the ones about small, specific, fixable problems that nobody had thought to mention because the people who already knew the answers had forgotten there was a time when they did not.
This is one of those posts.
The Two White Rectangles
For the first year or so of performing at corporate events and keynotes around Austria, I wore my regular everyday glasses on stage. They were perfectly fine glasses. Fashionable, even. Good frames that fit my face. The kind of glasses you pick because they look right in the mirror at the optician’s office, under the soft overhead lighting, while you are standing still and nobody is pointing a spotlight at you.
The problem became visible — literally — when I started reviewing recordings of my performances. In a video from a corporate event in Graz, I noticed something strange. In every shot where a light was hitting me from above or from the side, my lenses turned into mirrors. Two bright rectangles of reflected light where my eyes should have been. The effect was subtle in some frames and dramatic in others, but in the worst moments, it looked like I was wearing a pair of tiny television screens on my face.
My eyes were gone. And with them, a significant percentage of my ability to connect with the audience.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Here is the thing about performing. The audience reads your face. They read it constantly, automatically, and with extraordinary sensitivity to subtle cues. Eye contact — real, visible, sustained eye contact — is one of the most powerful tools a performer has. It creates the feeling of direct personal connection. It signals confidence, warmth, trustworthiness, and control. When a performer looks at you and you can see their eyes, you feel included in the performance. You feel like the show is for you, specifically.
When the audience cannot see your eyes because your lenses are bouncing light back at them, that connection breaks. They are looking at your face and seeing a barrier instead of a window. And the worst part is that this happens inconsistently. One moment your eyes are visible, the next they are obscured by a flash of reflected light, then visible again, then gone. The effect is disorienting in a way the audience cannot articulate. They do not think, “His glasses are reflecting the stage lights.” They think, “Something about this performer feels a little distant,” or “I am having trouble connecting with him,” or they do not think anything at all — they just feel slightly less engaged than they would if they could see his eyes the whole time.
Dan Harlan makes a point in his lecture on magic as theatre that resonated with me deeply when I first encountered it: anything you wear in front of an audience is a costume. Glasses included. Hats, gloves, scarves, watches — all of it communicates. And if your glasses are communicating “you cannot see my eyes,” that is a problem worth solving.
The Simple Fix
The fix is anti-reflective coating. Sometimes called AR coating or non-reflective coating. It is a thin layer applied to the lenses that dramatically reduces the amount of light that bounces off the surface. Instead of your lenses acting as mirrors under stage lighting, they become essentially invisible. The audience sees through the glass directly to your eyes.
This is not new technology. It has been available for decades. Most opticians offer it as an upgrade when you order new lenses. The cost is modest. The difference is enormous.
I ordered a second pair of glasses — identical frames, identical prescription — with the highest-grade anti-reflective coating my optician offered. The first time I wore them on stage, at a private event in Vienna, I could see the difference immediately when I reviewed the recording. My eyes were visible in every frame. Under every lighting condition. From every angle. The glasses had effectively disappeared from my face, leaving only my eyes and my expressions.
The connection with the audience was palpably different.
What I Learned from the Comparison
I went back and watched some of my older recordings side by side with the new ones. The differences were instructive.
In the older recordings, during moments where I was making what I thought was strong eye contact with audience members, my lenses were often catching the light and creating that mirror effect. The moments I remembered as connected and warm looked, from the outside, slightly impersonal. The audience members I was looking at could not actually see me looking at them.
In the newer recordings, those same types of moments looked completely different. You could see my eyes tracking to specific people. You could see the micro-expressions around my eyes as I reacted to their reactions. You could see the warmth and the humor and the surprise that I was feeling in the moment. The glasses were still there — I could not perform without them, my vision is terrible — but they had stopped being a barrier.
This is what I mean when I say that production value lives in small choices. Nobody in the audience was going to come up to me after a show and say, “Your non-reflective coating really enhanced my experience.” But the cumulative effect of being able to see my eyes for the entire performance, without interruption, without those random flashes of reflected light, was a measurably better connection. And connection is the foundation of everything else.
The Lighting Factor
This issue becomes more acute the more professional your lighting setup is. In a casual setting — a living room, a small conference room with overhead fluorescents — the reflections might be minimal. But the moment you step into a venue with stage lighting, spotlights, or even strong directional LED panels, uncoated lenses become a real problem.
Remember that stage lighting is designed to illuminate you. That is its job. It throws a lot of light at your face from angles that are specifically chosen to make you visible to the audience. Every one of those light sources is a potential reflection on your lenses. And unlike a photograph, where a reflection is a single frozen moment, in a live performance the reflections shift and dance as you move your head. They draw attention to themselves in the worst possible way — by flickering on the most important part of your face.
I have experimented with different lighting conditions to understand the problem better. Under a single front-facing spotlight, the issue is moderate — the light comes from roughly the same direction the audience is looking, so the reflections bounce back toward the light source rather than toward the audience. But add side lighting, or overhead fixtures, or ambient lighting from the venue itself, and the reflections multiply. The worst scenario I encountered was a corporate gala in Salzburg with a combination of overhead LED panels and decorative side lighting. With my old glasses, every head movement sent a cascade of reflections across my lenses. With the anti-reflective pair, I could move freely without worrying about it.
The Deeper Principle: Eliminate Invisible Barriers
This glasses story is really about a larger principle that I keep returning to in my performance journey: the barriers between you and your audience are often invisible to you.
You do not notice the reflections on your own lenses because you are looking through them, not at them. The audience is looking at them. You do not notice the small ways your appearance creates distance because you are experiencing yourself from the inside. The audience is experiencing you from the outside.
Fitzkee wrote about this with characteristic directness. He argued that performers should give considerable attention to every aspect of their visual presentation because the audience’s impression begins before you speak your first word. Costuming, grooming, and personal appearance are not vanity — they are communication. And anything that interferes with that communication, even something as small as a reflection on a lens, is a barrier worth removing.
I have adopted a habit that I recommend to anyone who performs wearing glasses. Before every performance, I put on my glasses and stand in front of a mirror under the strongest directional light I can find. I tilt my head slowly left, right, up, down. I watch for reflections. If I can see them in the mirror, the audience will see them on stage.
With good anti-reflective coating, this test is reassuring. The lenses stay clear through every angle. Without it, you will see exactly what your audience sees: a performer whose eyes keep disappearing behind flashes of light.
Frames Matter Too
While I am on the subject: the frames themselves communicate something as well. I am not going to prescribe what kind of frames to wear — that is a personal choice tied to your face shape, your character on stage, your style. But I will say that I experimented with several different frames for my performance pair and noticed that the size and thickness of the frames affected how much of my peripheral expression was visible.
Thick, heavy frames obscured more of my eye area. Thin frames let the audience see more. This is not a major factor — we are talking about millimeters of difference — but in a context where connection depends on the audience reading your face, those millimeters add up.
I settled on a frame that is slightly thinner and slightly more open than my everyday glasses. Just enough to maximize the visible area around my eyes without looking dramatically different from my usual appearance. The goal was not to become someone else on stage. The goal was to remove one more small barrier between me and the people I was performing for.
The Takeaway
If you wear glasses and you perform, get a pair with the best anti-reflective coating you can find. This is not an aesthetic recommendation. It is a functional one. Your eyes are your primary tool for audience connection, and anything that obscures them — even intermittently, even subtly — costs you something you cannot afford to lose.
The investment is minimal. The return is disproportionate. And the fix is permanent.
It is one of those rare problems in performance where the solution is simple, affordable, and complete. Most performance problems require endless refinement. This one requires a trip to the optician and a request for non-reflective coating.
Do it before your next show. Your audience will not know what changed. They will just feel, without being able to articulate why, that you are a little more present, a little more connected, a little more there.
And that is exactly the point.