Noele Stollmack designs lighting and sets for theaters and opera companies, traditional productions, and cutting-edge work. She has also done architectural projects and product development and serves as lighting director and lighting supervisor. Read Part One and Part Two of her story.
In the mid-1990s, as she hit her late 30s, Stollmack wanted a break from design—something she had done since she was eleven. She briefly worked in product development at ETC and at City Theatrical, experiences that helped inform her design process. As ETC’s fixture product manager, she found herself in a group of product managers who worked in the design and rental industry. She learned from engineers about the engineering behind how fixtures worked. When she designed later, she was able to determine when to take the time to obsess about the edge and quality of light that each fixture produced and when to move on to the next lamp “because it would never be perfect. It helped me function as an architectural lighting designer as well as for lighting in the theater,” she says.
But even though she was getting a good deal out of work, about 15 months into it, she realized she’d rather be using the gear than marketing it, and she went back to designing.
She took a job in Wisconsin as a production manager for an opera company. She planned to stay just a couple of years and might have returned to New York had she not met and married a Milwaukee-born man with a business in town and no interest in moving.
It helped that she discovered a thriving arts scene in the area. “You can make your living here,” she found. Although she travels for some of her work, as she would if she lived in New York, she discovered a vibrant theater scene and plenty of work in town.
“Noele came to the Milwaukee market around the turn of the century and immediately started working as a designer with some pretty high-profile clients,” says electrician/lighting director Robyn Schultz. “She made her presence felt in the room pretty quickly. She knows what she wants, she has a pretty good idea of how to do it, and she is willing to admit when she doesn’t.”
Brent Hazelton, the Artistic Director of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, has worked with Stollmack at the Milwaukee Rep as well. “She’s a wonderful collaborator. She’s super inventive and a really terrific storyteller,” he says, adding that he appreciates her dramaturgical sensibility. “Her standard is the highest in the room as it relates to her own work. She works it and works it and works it until its where she wants it to be. I’ve never heard her say ‘no’ to anything.”
The two struggled with an outdoor scene that begins the second act of The Whipping Man—a man, in a Civil War trench, is writing a letter. Hazelton recalls that their impulse was to isolate the actor in the moody scene and make the rest of the stage disappear. “We couldn’t get the right angle or the right tone. We were battering our heads away at this for four hours,” he says, “and then she decided that when in doubt, do the complete opposite. She lit up every instrument she had and sculpted from there. She hung a bunch of stuff she might or might not use and figured out how to make a real virtue of that moment. It was bright, colorful, and remarkably textured. We were immediately in a different place, a different emotional landscape from anything else we had seen. It was the opposite of what we thought we were working for and the absolute right choice. It’s one of my favorite collaborative moments.
“While Noele is incredibly technically precise, her solutions always start from story, Hazelton continues. “They’re always emotional. She asks, ‘What do you want people to feel? What is the story here?’ It is always an artistic conversation. She’s the real deal in every way. We’re so lucky to have a world class LD who has chosen to make her home in Milwaukee.”
Paula Suozzi, executive stage director of the Metropolitan Opera, also values Stollmack’s dramaturgical abilities. “She uses technology to her advantage and keeps adapting. She isn’t afraid of what’s next,” notes Suozzi. “And she’s a storyteller.”
Stollmack designed both scenery and lighting (and occasionally projections) for Suozzi at several opera houses and some theaters. “Noele creates scenery to work in conjunction with the lights, so it feels like one design,” Suozzi reflects. The two didn’t know each other the first time they were brought together at the Florentine Opera, and they clicked at once. “She’s very direct, and I’m very direct. We really hit it off.” The two were as comfortable working on small budget productions as large budget ones. (They’ve done both together.) “We talk about an idea, and she will take it all the way,” says Suozzi. “She won’t give up. She’s not willing to take the easy way out.”
Although Stollmack impresses directors with her scenic designs, she says she’s more comfortable designing lights. Collaborations with sensitive scenic designers are ideal. “Lighting designers are only as good as their scenic designers,” Stollmack reflects.
“Noele doesn’t just put the light there. She sculpts with light,” says set designer Liliana Duque Piñeiro, who worked with Stollmack on La Cage Aux Folles at the Skylight Music Theatre in Milwaukee and on a new opera, Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun, at the Santa Fe Opera in 2019. “John De Los Santos is the link between the two of us. He’s one of the few directors who likes me to be there during cue to cue in techs. Noele was very open. She would enable me to give feedback.”
“Her palette is so rich,” Duque Piñeiro adds. “It’s almost like a watercolor painting, with layer upon layer of color, not just two colors mixed together. It’s subtle,” she says, noting that her appreciation comes from watching Stollmack work cue to cue. An audience member, she suggests, would experience the effect without guessing what went into creating it. Duque Piñeiro says she was “blown away by how Noele transformed my set, that was mostly a creamy color, for Sweet Potato.”
Stollmack’s first project with scenic designer Vincent Mountain was Lanford Wilson’s Redwood Curtain, one of several collaborations at the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Michigan. Mountain’s design featured tree trunks that were 12' tall and went right up against the low-ceilinged upstage area creating a very challenging lighting situation for Stollmack, since there were no existing lighting positions on the ceiling.
“She did such a beautiful job lighting that,” Mountain recalls. “It was kind of stunning.” Mountain said he’d come up with an idea he wasn’t certain he could pull off, creating the illusion of height in a forest of redwoods on a stage with a low ceiling, that would depend entirely on the lighting. “Noele embraces the physical challenges the set provides. Some designers have a certain way of lighting, and if the set is in the way, they don’t know what to do. She glued mirrors into the ceiling and bounced light from them to create the effect of rays of light streaming through the tree limbs above.”
Stollmack and Mountain also worked together at the Florentine Opera. “Three Decembers is not a piece I expected to like as much as I did,” Stollmack says, adding that she’s “not a huge lover of contemporary composers.” Mountain designed a set that worked in a tricky space with no wing space and angled walls that are typically covered with black curtains.
Mountain didn’t want to incorporate the curtains into the set, something that would make “some LDs freak out.” But working with Stollmack made him confident he could use the white walls as a bounce to backlight the rest of the set, which was made up of theatrical flats, covered with translucent muslin. “She comes up with clever, non-traditional approaches. She is really good at trying to understand what the idea is, what the intention is, and that helps drive ideas forward. Sometimes you won’t get that collaboration from LDs as early as you’d like.”
Mountain adds, “She’s also no nonsense. She just likes to talk about the work. If you haven’t thoroughly thought through an idea, she’ll call you on it.”
“I use the space to inform the scenery,” Stollmack reflects. “How do we bring that space into the story that we’re telling?”