Lighting designer Heather Gilbert shares how she is coping with COVID-19 closings in this series, "When the Lights Went Out," where theatrical designers discuss what they are doing these days.
Sean Graney’s production of A Comedy of Errors was about to go into rehearsal at Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Heather Gilbert was also in meetings for Tyla Abercrumbie’s Relentless at Timeline in Chicago, “which, for a little while, we thought we might do in 2021, but it looks like we won’t be. That one breaks my heart. I really wanted to light her work.” Tracy Letts' Bug was closing at Steppenwolf that week. “I am so proud of the work we all did, and it is probably the best lighting I’ve ever done. I mostly was sad because we never got to all say goodbye. It just ended with no ceremony, no hugs, nothing.”
Instead, Gilbert found herself in Zoom rooms, teaching her Columbia College classes. “My Advanced Lighting class was supposed to be making tons of plots this spring, and I thought that it could go online easily, but the students had a hard time adjusting. There was a lot of grief that suddenly all their spring shows had turned into paper projects, and I could see that they weren’t getting much from the class work. So, I shifted that class into a deep discussion of how you move between the needs of a text and a space and the design idea, with tons of research and conversations. I brought David Cromer in, because he talks about plays so eloquently, and Joanie Schultz worked with them on the discussions of text with directors. It turned out to be amazing.”
After watching a clip of Mary-Louise Parker doing a moment from Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside, Gilbert shot lighting ideas for it back and forth with David Cromer. “Us in our dark bathrooms with clip lights covered in tin foil with holes poked in it.” That, she says, is the closest she’s been to tech since mid-March.
On a Zoom night with some of the team from The Sound Inside, “Adam Rapp was all about Babylon Berlin. He turned me onto that and I got him watching Lost. I watched a few seasons of Weeds because Mary-Louise [Parker]’s talent is like a narcotic for me.”
Gilbert has been watching plays online, including Simon Stone’s Yerma and Katie Mitchell’s Anatomy of a Suicide. She watched plays at Schaubühne, in German. And she watches dance. Hubbard Street is a favorite. Last summer, she saw Akram Khan’s Giselle in Luxembourg. Now she’s watching his work online. “The light in his pieces is so powerful,” she says.
“It is mind-blowing what we suddenly have access to,” she says. “Or did. And it saddens me that we are about to possibly lose those things as theatre are starting to close the vaults and we still can’t have our theatre back live.”
Gilbert also walks at least five miles a day, listening to podcasts and books while she does. “I just finished So You Want to Talk about Race, and I listen to the Steppenwolf podcast Half Hour, which is newer ensemble members interviewing others. I know a fair amount of them so it’s a little like my friends are telling me stories on my walks. At first, I was listening to The Daily every day to start my walks. I sort of went away from the political ones, but I bet I go back soon,” she says. She also enjoys Piece by Piece, hosted by her friend Joe Bunker, who interviews musical theater artists.
Daily talks with friends and colleagues helped her get through these times, especially before June when the Chicago-based designer headed to Michigan to be with her mother. “I liked cooking for myself, but I definitely was getting bored with it. Now I am baking cakes and talking about race with my 17-year-old niece and friend who is giving me faith in the world. I might wish that Gen Z turned their assignments in on time more often, but I will forgive them because of the work they put into it is what this country needs, and I am ready to learn from them.”
There are good things to do, but more that she misses. “I miss turning lights on and off, and I miss watching actors live in front of me,” Gilbert says. “I know that we will be back. I know that economics will be against us. I want the government to continue to support all the artists who can’t work until there is a vaccine. I want to hug my friends. I can’t wait to walk into Front Bar at Steppenwolf, sit at the bar, and ask for one of their fantastic cocktails, and then look around and see so many beautiful faces that I know and love.
“Somewhere tonight, some people are sitting around a firepit telling stories. And someone will be compelled to stand up and act a part of their story out, and theatre will be made. We will never die, or, seriously, we would have done so long ago.”
Check out what other entertainment design professionals are doing in "When the Lights Went Out."