Photo Carol Rosegg
The world premiere of a new play always needs a fair amount of tender loving care, as is the case with Transport, a new script by Thomas Keneally, the renowned author of Schindler’s List. Keneally based Transport on a sad, but true, story about his wife’s grandmother, who was sent in chains on a prison ship from Ireland to Australia in 1846. She was one of the poor, undesirable young women deported to the penal colonies as partners for the men exiled there, literally to breed with the convicts.
Running through April 7 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City, this debut production of Transport was directed by Tony Walton, who also designed the set, with costumes by Linda Fisher, sound design by Carl Casella, projection design by Yana Biryukova, and lighting by Richard Pilbrow and Michael Gottlieb.
SMALL RIG, BIG LOOKS
Working in tandem, the lighting designers provided an essential layer of the care needed to bring the play to life. “Tony Walton brought me onto the project,” says Pilbrow, who, along with Gottlieb, has designed other productions in the small venue inhabited by the Irish Rep. “It is a tiny space with 11'-6" ceilings, yet on the stage is a two-story ship designed by Tony Walton—a very abstract and evocative set—and it works,” Pilbrow elaborates. “But when the captain is on the poop deck, his head almost touches the ceiling.”
Photo Carol Rosegg
In co-designing the lighting with Michael Gottlieb, Pilbrow quips, “He does the technical stuff, and I do the dreamy bits.” The action all takes place on the ship at sea, setting sail from Cork Harbour on a Christmas day, with conditions ranging from warm sunrises to dark storms. “We light the people in a very three-dimensional way,” Pilbrow notes. With just 72 channels of dimming, many of the lights are paired and ganged together due to the lack of channels. “We used some great break-up gobos to help weave a richly colored three-dimensional atmosphere.”
The color palette is varied, embracing blazing hot tropical colors and under-the-deck oil-lamp light, as well as storms and gloomy weather. “The palette goes through shades of green blue to cool blue to golden amber,” says Pilbrow, who notes the look of the storms is created by using an ETC Revolution with moving gobos and quite a bit of lighting behind the cyc and around the stage, including High End Systems Data Flash and Martin Atomic strobes.
The collaboration between the two LDs was organic. “In this instance, we both attended rehearsals and talked with Tony about his vision and desires,” recalls Gottlieb. “We talked about what elements we would want, and then I set out to make the plot in the ‘Richard Pilbrow’ style. Typically this implies strong diagonals and a pretty unique approach to mixing strong directional colors against one another to create a wide variety by modulation. We bounced each version of the plot back and forth, working as co-editors to deal with the limited space, budget, and ultimately distilling ideas down to their most essential.”
Once in the theatre, they shared duties as well. “I wore the headset,” explains Gottlieb, “while Richard would confer with Tony, walk around to get a different view, and generally comment and prune as we went. It’s definitely a different lighting design than either of us might produce working alone. It’s a great treat to work with another designer; the other set of eyes makes the activity much less solitary and has the best benefits of an athlete working with a coach, an author with an editor, or an opera singer working with a conductor.”
For the full story, including the lighting plot, download the March iPad issue of Live Design.