By Anna Genna
Noella Thu — the all-mighty ruler of the lightboard and our current Stage Manager. Noella, a junior, is the sort of person that comes around once in a blue moon. Not only are they incredibly adept at technical theatre, but also a delightful person to be around. And while I could wax on and on about how talented Noella is in every aspect possible, this article is to focus on their artistic skills as a lighting designer.
Noella has designed lights for 3 mainstage shows in the department: A Wrinkle In Time, Into The Woods, and Sherlock Holmes, as well as an adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Birds, which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They have also designed for Rockstar 2023, a theatre department classic.
When I asked about influences on their work, one of the first things to come up was other shows, particularly the touring shows the theatre department is able to see as field trips, though she states, “I have to scale them down because obviously we don’t have nearly as many resources as a Broadway show”. Another major influence is the rep plot, which is “the permanent lighting plot that doesn’t (or shouldn’t) get changed between shows”. Based on the McCandless plot, named after the father of modern lighting design, Stanley McCandless, this plot divides the stage into “areas”, which has 2 frontlights pointing at it, one colored cool and the other warm.
Speaking of frontlights, a notable moment in Noella’s work thus far was Sherlock Holmes. For those who didn’t see it, Sherlock Holmes was performed in “the round”, where the audience is seated on all four sides of the stage, rather than the one side that most are used to. While this provides a very different experience for the audience, it also provides much more work for our lighting designers. “Instead of frontlight for 1 side, we had to have frontlight for 4 because of the nature of the audience sitting all around the stage.” Since lighting is also used to set mood, time, and more, Noella had to consider how to get that across from all angles: “Programming was interesting because usually I only see the stage from one side, but I needed to consider what the lights would look like from all sides.”
Now lighting isn’t all Gaslight Greens and Skeleton Exoctic Sangria here. There is always something that will come along to cause trouble. During tech week for Into The Woods, a week where actors and techs alike get the show completely on its feet, with every aspect of the show being refined and used, there were school-wide power outages. While the actors rehearsed using daylight, Noella could not use the lightboard to program in the lighting cues. So, they and the technical director at the time, James Harper, obtained a generator, charged it at the main office, and brought it to the theatre. The generator powered the lightboard for long enough to transfer the show files to a USB, which they then took to James’ house to program cues blindly. Using numbers that~ were associated with certain lighting instruments, as well as memory of the stage’s layout, they wrote the cues hoping they were accurate. And because Noella is a genius, about 80% of the cues were.
Another struggle, a very passionate one for Noella, is hats. I feel the hatred towards hats can only be expressed in Noella’s own words: “I HATE HATS. Genuinely. They’re my worst enemy. I hate them so much. No actors should be wearing hats. Think about it! What is the purpose of a hat? To keep sunlight off your face, right? To protect your eyes from having to bear the blinding light that comes from our distant star. Well! It does the same thing for the blinding light that comes from my lighting instruments! The job of a hat is to keep light off your face. That’s literally what it was made for. The job of the lighting department is to put light on your face. Do you see the problem? Do you see it?? How am I supposed to light your face when you are wearing something created for preventing light from shining on your face! Make it make sense!” This is only half of the very intense paragraph about hats that I received, and I am a little frightened by their disdain for hats.
If Noella were a witch, and I am not entirely certain that they aren’t, their familiar would be the lightboard. “For those of you who don’t know (and I wouldn’t expect you to know) the light board is a piece of technology the theatre department uses to program lighting cues for shows. It has its own programming language (can I call it that? I think I can) and custom keys, which streamline the cue writing process…” Even if the lightboard is your worst enemy, like it is mine, Noella has crafted a “magic sheet” which helps the average person to become friends with the lightboard and understand it.
There is so much more I could say about Noella (she was very thorough in answering the questions I asked), we ought to wrap up. As Noella says best: “The company is doing amazing work on our current show, “Footloose” (Come see it! Tickets are on sale on westmonttheatre.com)”.
