Groundbreaking Women in Theater: Lighting Designer Beverly Emmons

Only four of the 29 shows now playing on Broadway have female lighting designers. But it was a woman who invented lighting design as a theatrical profession, according to Beverly Emmons, who has designed more than 30 Broadway shows.

Emmons says that in the 1940s Jean Rosenthal elevated lighting design from one of the scenic designer's responsibilities to its own entity. Before there was a specialist known as a lighting designer, Emmons says, "electricians would have an instinct for the aesthetic ideas; they would arrange some lights; and the director would comment, or the scenic designer would take a hand in it."

Like Rosenthal, Emmons has designed lighting for dance as well as theater. She has worked for various ballet companies and such choreographers as Martha Graham, Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown. Her lighting for opera has been seen at La Scala and the Met, among other venues. Recent theater work includes John Patrick Shanley's Sailor's Song off-Broadway last fall; the Yeardley Smith solo act More; and two 2003 productions at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. Two shows lit by Emmons open this month—The Monkey King at the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis (with whom she's been associated for several years) and MCC's What of the Night, starring Jane Alexander, which is scheduled to begin performances March 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

Though lighting design remains a male-dominated profession, Emmons is one of several women—including Peggy Clark, Tharon Musser, Nananne Porcher, Natasha Katz and Peggy Eisenhauer—who have risen to the top of the field. Emmons believes she was the first to have a family as well as her career. "The theater business is very demanding of one's time and energy, and one has to really focus on the artists that you're working with," says Emmons, who is married with a 24-year-old daughter. "A lighting designer's work doesn't exist unless it hits something, so what's going on is pretty ephemeral. And what we do is express and reinforce and reveal to the audience the underlying meanings of the piece, a lot of which are nonverbal. You have to totally concentrate on that and tune in on a very personal level to the people you're working with.

"On Broadway you work 16-hour days for three, six, eight weeks. It's all-consuming," she continues. "The home fires have to stay going. I had a great nanny, and my husband [a photographer] could be home, because his work didn't take him all around. So that provided a through line and a stable base, which is essential."

Emmons—whose last Broadway show was the Annie Get Your Gun revival—has been nominated for a Tony seven times, from The Elephant Man to Jekyll & Hyde. She designed the lighting for Amadeus in 1980 but was credited as associate LD; the Tony was given to John Bury, who had designed the original production in London and who, she smilingly points out, "neglected to thank me." Emmons has won an Obie, a Lumen Award (for Einstein on the Beach) and two Bessies, for her dance lighting.

She was just a few months out of college when she became an assistant to lighting designer Jules Fisher in the mid '60s, and worked with him for about five years, on such shows as You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, Hair, Butterflies Are Free and Jesus Christ Superstar. For part of that time, Emmons was also lighting designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which had hired her (on a professor's recommendation) before she even graduated. She also served as Cunningham's stage manager and company manager. Production management had, in fact, been her original job interest, and through it she discovered lighting design. But even before that, she entertained dreams of being a performer.

"I was interested in dance, studied dance at Sarah Lawrence College and worked at the American Dance Festival backstage in the summer. The best modern dance companies of the era came through for years, and the lighting designers who came with them were Jean Rosenthal and Tom Skelton, some of the best designers in the business," Emmons remembers. "As I became aware of the limited number of dance companies in which people worked regularly [as dancers], I got interested in what's now called production management... As I got into production management, or stage management, it occurred to me that I also could do lighting."

Rather than limiting her, starting out in dance opened up avenues in theater. "My work for Merce Cunningham vetted me for those who thought of themselves as avant-garde, and so through that I worked with Joe Chaikin, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs."