McCandless and his Harvard acquaintance George Pierce Baker, served as some of the first faculty to teach at the Yale School of Drama.

[1] During his time at Yale, McCandless published some of the first books to lay out a method and approach to the art of lighting design.

In his early work as a theatrical consultant, McCandless designed specific house lights for the Center Theatre in New York's Radio City.

His legacy is still felt by many lighting designers today, as his method and approach to the art are still the backbone of many educational theatre programs.

This method of pairing a warm lantern with a cool lantern simulates sunrise in an outdoor environment, as in real life, giving the production a naturalistic (notion of realism on stage invented by Constantin Stanislavski) feel, thereby producing intimacy of the play with the audience.

This coupled with the depth created, enhances the facial features of the actors, enabling them to convey emotion more effectively than before.

For example, if a scene was set in the middle of the day, the warm and cool lanterns would be equally bright, so the shadows created would be filled equally by warm and cool light, giving the actor's face a balanced look similar to that of standing outside in the middle of the day.

To be totally realistic in this representation of daylight, four lanterns should be used to cover one area of the stage, in two pairs at 45 degree angles, so on each side of the actor's face both a warm and a cool light would be present.

This was also an advantage during the end of a scene or the curtain call on a musical production, where the greatest possible amount of light was often desired and shadows were of little interest.