Tony Nominee Heather Gilbert On The Sound Inside

When Heather Gilbert won the 2020 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design for The Sound Inside, she was in her mother’s living room with all her friends waiting for the announcement. Because the Wi-Fi was quite slow, she found out she had won from the director, who had a faster connection and was the first to congratulate her. Now she is nominated for the Tony Award for Best Lighting Design in a Play for the same production and she is hoping that this time the pandemic will have retreated enough for a more formal celebration. She says, “We’ve all been apart so long I just really want a real party. I want to get my hair done and wear shoes that are not about walking through weather, and drink champagne.”  Live Design talked to Gilbert about the production, which she took from Williamstown to Broadway’s Studio 54.

Live Design: What was your original conception for the lighting design?

Heather Gilbert: One of the things we wanted from the beginning was for Mary Louise Parker’s character to be alone, and as she told the story the elements would become real and we would conjure them out of the void behind her. The play started without scenery in complete darkness with a little bit of haze and we didn’t use a ton of lights, just six tiny little lights (ETC AutoYoke Source Fours) following Parker around. Fortunately, she was very consistent with where she stood once she had made the decision. Then upstage, slowly and quietly, the scenery would be revealed and If you were sitting in the right part of Studio 54 there would be a gasp because they didn’t realize that the scenery. It was designed to appear that the scenery was floating in space.

LD: Tell us about the “tiny little lights” and how you used them.
HG: We picked AutoYoke Source Fours and I would iris in on Parker wherever she went. We had scrollers on them because we wanted tungsten and certain colors you can’t make with moving lights and so we picked specific colors and then turned off the scrollers. When we moved to Studio 54 we discovered they have a huge inventory of lights and we were encourage to hang them so they didn’t have to be in storage. We figured out everything we needed as a special and used them to create rooms

We also turned off the scrollers because silence was incredibly important in this production. In fact, when it moved from Williamstown to Studio 54, which is actually partly on 53rd street, we showed up for the writers draft meeting and there were machines ripping up the street.  We were like, “Oh my God this is what is going to be happening outside while we need silence?” Fortunately, the construction work didn’t last long.

LD: What were some other changes after the move from Williamstown to Studio 54?
HG: In Williamstown the production elements were more anchored in reality, but in NY we took a few things out and made it more of a question: Is Parker’s character writing this book as it is happening or not? How much of it is real? 

In NY we had a big piece of set that moved around the stage and transformed into whole rooms, her office and kitchen etc. In Williamstown the rooms were confined in a bisected black box. At Studio 54 we had lots of height but not much depth to the stage so the rooms were defined by light. Each of them was anchored by practicals; as Parker talks to the audience rooms transform, a candle embedded in a table comes out when it transforms into a restaurant, an overhead fixture hangs down to create a kitchen. At Studio 54 we wanted the rooms to float and be less concrete than Williamstown. When the student shows up and the two characters start talking, they are in a wagon moving downstage toward the audience and into a room and we kept the rest of the stage in darkness. A doorway with normal lighting is opened again and a bathroom appears behind it by the magic of a shower curtain and some LED strips.

LD: How did you treat the student character differently from Parker’s professor?

HG: In the Studio 54 production the audience does not really know if the student wrote the book or the professor wrote the book, is he real or not? In Williamstown that never came up, but in New York people asked me all the time if he was real. The student moves a bit more than Mary Louise but we still had the shutters on fixtures on both of them very tight so that they float in this ocean of darkness at the same time but are not together. We isolated them from each, but by the end of the play we have a lighter, more open look around him.  It was very challenging because it was not part of the vocabulary of the show, how does he break out of his moment? We still used Source Fours but made them warmer and wider.

LD: What have you been doing during the pandemic and how do you think it will change theatre when things reopen again?
HG: In terms of Covid-19, I’m sure at some point we’ll be sitting close to each other without thinking twice about it but in the past year we have had time for a lot of conversation about how we want to evolve. I’ve talked to my agent about working on plays that are 50% BIPOC creatives and cast I’ve been involved with Design Action, a group of designers who got together last summer. I’m still teaching socially distanced classes at Columbia College Chicago. If I had to pick a group of people to go through a pandemic with, it would be these people. I love this generation of artists, they are such anti-capitalists and so committed to the art. I hope they can make a difference.