FEATURED PRESS:

• SANCTUARY CITY •

  by Martyna Majok & directed by Rebecca Frecknall
  New York Theatre Workshop, Lucille Lortel Theater

  PRESS EXCERPTS:

  • Vinson Cunningham, for The New Yorker
    ”The play happens on an empty stage, and the setting—usually B’s apartment—is demarcated more by Isabella Byrd’s minimal but affecting lighting than by furniture or other props. All the drama is located in these two lost bodies. At the outset, they shuffle through short, impressionistic scenes, moving back and forth through time, across various years in the early two-thousands, showing how routine their sleepovers have become—and, in the same way, how intricately their griefs and worries grow, swelling beneath a surface of seeming sameness. G works at a restaurant—we glide through a montage and learn what kinds of meals she brings home for them to share. The constant temporal shifts require deft choreography and sharp transitions, and the director, Rebecca Frecknall, provides them amply, spinning B and G into a dance whose rhythms and gestures the audience quickly learns to read.”
    …
    “Sanctuary City” takes place in the years immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11—with just a few artful strokes, it makes clear the link between the war on terror and an increasingly hellish time for immigrants. “September” is one of those looming abstractions, like “America.” Majok’s achievement is to make this recent history feel ancient. What we really want to know is what the future holds for love. ♦

  • Jesse Green, for The New York Times ~ Critic’s Pick
    ”Even so, I have rarely seen a play that so effectively embodies the way external forces — in this case, immigration policies in the United States — distort the inner lives of actual humans. What love is, and can ever mean, is lost in the muddle between the heart and the law.
    … Frecknall’s staging — with a huge assist from Isabella Byrd’s lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound — is just as breakneck, as if it had shed its clothing to run faster through the woods. The pared-down, nonliteral effects produce great laughs but also great emotion, as when B and G sleep standing up, merely repositioning their arms and twisting their torsos to show us how they are turning.” ♦

HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING

by Will Arbery & directed by Danya Taymor.
Playwrights Horizons, Main Stage.

• The New Yorker - October 21, 2019 issue, by Vinson Cunningham
  “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” the new play by Will Arbery, directed by Danya Taymor, opens on a stage so dark that your eyes grope for an anchor. They seize slowly into focus, and you start to see a Doppler map of finely parsed grays. At farthest stage right, there’s the back door of a house and a tiny patio. Off to the left, past a dead campfire and some chairs, is the true dark of the woods. By the door, it’s just light enough to see the figure of a man sitting improbably still, holding a rifle.
  In the moments before he shoots the gun—a real one (with blanks), startling and resonant in the small Playwrights Horizons theatre—the onstage scene looks like a rural Hopper. The silence around the man almost speaks, and its intimations of impending loss are awful. …
  … As the party rambles on and the guests flit in and out of the house, a warm, yellow stream of light comes from the door, heightening the drama of shadow and light. Everybody’s face is half lit. (Isabella Byrd offers a masterpiece of lighting design, rich with portent and glinting significance.) People step out of shadows, having heard things not meant for their ears. Hopper becomes Caravaggio, and “Heroes,” a formally lovely, subtly horrifying play about the death rattle of ideologies and the thin line between devotion and delusion, echoes the interplay between those two painters of profound psychological depth. Each of the characters is in some ways terribly alone, like Hopper’s city zombies, vacant about the eyes, but each one’s heart, poked into flame by conversation, is, like the doubting disciple in Caravaggio’s “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas,” reaching out for something solid to match the intensity of his or her hopes and ideas.”
  “ … To catch the nuances in their differences—and to imagine what these nuances might mean for the future of people like these, and therefore for the future of our country—is a bit like the corneal adjustment required in the first moment of the play: you’ve got to distinguish dark from dark, and perceive a thousand darknesses in between.”
  

• New York Magazine // Vulture, by Sara Holdren
  “It has us leaning forward from the first moment, doubly so because Isabella Byrd’s lighting design is wonderfully dark. An asymmetrical cone of back porch light is all the characters have to work in — when they venture out into the reaches of Justin’s backyard, they dissolve into shadow. Even in the light, you’ve got to strain a little to see them. It’s naturalism that’s also something more: Darkness does surround these people, and their efforts to dig their heels in and hold onto what they’ve been taught is the light only makes the shadows thicken. “I feel like a disease, Dr. Presson,” admits the untethered Kevin, drunk enough to swerve into dangerous territory, somehow both fundamentally innocent and blindly self-pitying in his confession. But if nothing else, honest about the darkness.”

PRESS AMIDST THE DEEP PANDEMIC:

• In an essay for the New York Times, Esmé Weijun Wang reflects on how COVID made theatre accessible, referencing back to our team’s work on Will’s HEREOS...

  • “Many people have become allergic to Zoom as a result of overuse, but as a tool, Zoom and its ilk are able to control what the viewer sees in a way different from typical stagecraft. When streaming Will Arbery’s play about conservative Catholicism, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a Pulitzer finalist, I am allowed an intimacy with the characters that even able-bodied, front-row ticket holders would not ordinarily be able to witness, as the performers come in and out of darkened Zoom squares from their apartments. When Justin says, “I just think proximity to L.G.B.T. is a threat to Christian children and families,” his face is lit in part by a dangerous light that isn’t simply the glow of my laptop screen. Every microexpression and ounce of fidgety wariness that his friend Kevin expresses in turn (“But why can’t we meet it, engage with it — ”) is up close as well. They aren’t in each other’s spaces, but over Zoom, they are in mine. Each square’s unique lighting conceals their apartments, emphasizing the actors; I might as well be with them in the wooded darkness.”

• NYMag’s Vulture interviewed Jeremy O.Harris on Producing Plays, in which he gave Isabella a mention…

  • ”…Also, neither of these things would be possible without significant designers onboard. Isabella Byrd [who lit Heroes both at Playwrights and on Zoom] was my lighting designer on Daddy with Danya; she does some of the best light design ever. So if you tell me that she is going to be doing the design of the lights for the Zoom reading, I know it’s not just gonna be a Zoom reading. I know it’s going to feel like a production in a way that other things haven’t. So that was a big deciding factor as well: Oh wait, I’m paying the designers because they’re actually going to design it? That’s lit.”

• Isabella was a member of the 2020 Panel determining the winners of Clubbed Thumb’s Biennial Commission.

• Live Design and City Theatrical Designer Interview: Short thoughts on darkness in Heroes, coming up in the industry, nerdy tech references, and hopeful notions about the future.

• Urban Excavations, led by Martha Wade-Steketee, published a two part edited conversation from back in August 2019. (What a different world…) Part 1 - and Part 2.

• in 1: the podcast has been holding “Quarantine Happy Hours” with groups of designers, from across the biz. Cory sits down with Anna Louizos, Wilson Chin, Alejo Vietti, Isabella Byrd, Clint Ramos, Tyler Micoleau and in1 all star Jen Schriever!  Check it out.

• A very fun shoutout came from colleague Jen Schriever in an interview for backstage.com, when she answered the following question…

  • Have you ever seen a play or musical that you did not work on but the lighting was such that it made you wish you had been the one to design it?

    “ I think that all the time. I saw Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” and Isabella Byrd’s lighting made me angry. Like, it was so good! … I was thrilled by it. I was just seething with pride and jealousy. I texted Isabella right after and was like, “You!”

• DADDY, by Jeremy O. Harris, directed by Danya Taymor. DADDY starred Ronald Peet and Alan Cumming. A co-production with The Vineyard Theatre and The New Group, staged on the Linney Theatre at Signature Theatre Center, poolside.

  • “… whenever the ensemble members are in the pool, which has been lighted like a movie star by Isabella Byrd… Were there an award for best-supporting body of water in a play, this highly expressive pool would be a shoo-in.” - NYTimes

    “Matt Saunders’ pulsating blue pool dominates the set … Adding to this visual affect is Isabella Byrd’s exquisite lighting that reflects not only the mood but the inner feelings of the play.” TmSqChronicle

    “Some breathtaking design work has gone into the sleek production of Jeremy O. Harris’ ‘Daddy,’ … Lighting designer Isabella Byrd has washed the entire scene in luscious shades of sun-washed blue.” Variety

• A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theater) in San Francisco, produced SEASCAPE by Edward Albee, directed by Pam MacKinnon, with Set and Costume by David Zinn.

• “The brilliant set design by David Zinn …. is enhanced by Isabella Byrds’s skill in capturing that rare light of the Atlantic seacoast.” - 48Hills.com