WHAT’S ON…

FEATURED PRESS:

2023 Awards Season News:

Winner of 2023 Outstanding Lighting Design
Epiphany at Lincoln Center Theater

Nomination : Drama Desk Awards, Outstanding Lighting Design
Epiphany at Lincoln Center Theater

Nomination: Colorado Theatre Guild’s Henry Awards, Lighting Design Tier 1
The 39 Steps at Denver Center for the Performing Arts

Nominations: 2023 Henry Hewes Design Awards
Lighting Design: Epiphany
Lighting Design: The Good John Proctor

NOTABLE PRESS:

2023:

2022:

• DEAD MAN’S CELLPHONE at The Alley Theatre, in Houston, Texas. Written by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Brandon Weinbrenner. Performance are from April 15 - May 8th.

• “DADDY” A Melodrama - Jeremy O. Harris’s first penned play is refashioned and remounted at London’s Almeida Theatre. Directed by Danya Taymor, with designers Matt Saunders, Lee Kinney, Montana Levi-Blanco and Peter Todd.

AWARDS News:

SANCTUARY CITY

• 2022 Lucille Lortel Award - Outstanding Lighting Design

• 2022 Drama Desk Awards - nomination for Outstanding Lighting for a Play

CABARET

• 2022 Olivier nominations were led by 11 nods to CABARET, Best Lighting Design included!

• WhatsOnStage Awards, a people’s choice London-based award, nominated Isabella for her work.
  

HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING

• The Henry Hewes Awards announced the 2020 recipients, and the design for HEROES was honored! Collaborator Justin Ellington is also an honoree for his work on the production, as well as beloved colleagues who designed Fefu and Her Friends!

• The creative team and ensemble of HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING were awarded a Special Citation OBIE AWARD during the 2020 digital ceremony!

• The Outer Critics Circle elected to name honorees, foregoing traditional nominations. The lighting design for HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING was included!

• The 2020 Lortel Award for Outstanding Lighting Design went to HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING!

• The 2020 Drama Desk nominations were announced including a nod for the lighting design for HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING.
  

The Connecticut Critics Circle (CCC) announced honors for the 2019-2020 season, which was shortened mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The lighting design for MLIMA’S TALE and JANE EYRE were both honored.

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!”

• 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.

PRESS EXCERPTS:

• 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.”

DIGITAL IN 2020:

2019 AWARDS AND FEATURES:

• The 2019 Henry Hewes Awards announced a handsome batch of nominations. The lighting design for PLANO and “DADDY” A Melodrama were considered.

• The lighting design for SUCH THINGS AS VAMPIRES at People’s Light was nominated for a 2019 Barrymore Award by Theatre Philadelphia. See the full list of nominees.

• Emily Stamets’s podcast Find Your Light episode 22 features a discussion about the San Diego production of The Tale of Despereaux, process, and much more.

• in 1: the lives of theatrical designers, hosted by Cory Pattak, features an extended conversation with Isabella about all sorts of career and industry stuff.

• On May 20th the 2019 OBIE AWARDS honored the Lighting Design for Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

PRE~PANDEMIC :

• JANE EYRE at Hartford Stage. The novel by Charlotte Brontë has been adapted and directed by Elizabeth Williamson.

• WENDY & PETER PAN at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC, directed by Alan Paul.

• LOVE IN HATE NATION, a new musical written by Joe Iconis (Broadway’s Be More Chill) had its world premiere presentation at Two River Theatre in November. Directed by John Simpkins.

• JORDAN, written by Brenda Withers and directed by Jess Chayes at Northern Stage.

  • The Times Argus: “If it weren’t just so good, Northern Stage’s physical production would be called slick. Sara C. Walsh’s simple set morphed effortlessly from scene to scene, with the help of truly creative (but indescribable) lighting by Isabella Byrd.”

• MLIMA’S TALE by Lynn Nottage and directed by Mark Lamos. Second premiere production at Westport Country Playhouse.

• NOISES OFF at the Cape Playhouse to finish out the summer. Directed by Jeffry Denman, and starred Jen Cody and SNL’s Heidi Gardner.

• PigPen Theatre Company presented the world premiere of THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX at The Old Globe, directed by PigPen and Marc Bruni. (Created with Lydia Fine and Nick Lehane, and choreography by Jennifer Jancuska.)

• TELL ME I’M NOT CRAZY took the Nikos Stage at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Written by Sharyn Rothstein and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel.

• Manhattan Theatre Club presented Bess Wohl's CONTINUITY, a play in six takes. It was directed by Tony winner Rachel Chavkin, on MTC’s Stage II.

  • “What’s so brave and so harrowing about Wohl’s project is that it is unsparing with itself: It questions not only art’s utility in the face of something as massive and dire as the warming of the planet, but also the very ethics of its existence.“ Sara Holdren, Vulture

• ClubbedThumb remounted PLANO, by Will Arbery and directed by Taylor Reynolds. At the Connelly Theater… ”Tonight, and later, and earlier, three sisters (no, not those ones) are stricken with a series of strange plagues. Let’s talk about family nightmares. I mean, uh, memories."

  • “Director Taylor Reynolds presides over a production that does Arbery proud: Daniel Zimmerman’s set looks normal, but the more you look at the simple wooden house in Isabella Byrd's slanting light, the more you mistrust its geometries.'“ Helen Shaw, TimeOut New York

  • “With its mysterious plagues and its slug infestations, its multiplying men and its cornered, fighting women, its sense that the drab, weird, grossly unfair universe is always on the edge of an apocalypse that never comes, Plano is a fiercely smart contemporary dream play — to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, a ‘realism of a larger reality.’ “ Sara Holdren, Vulture NYMag

• OLAY! A Road to Glow, the Musical, a live musical event for OLAY Skin Care, after the hit YouTube episodes.

• 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

2018 highlights

• The lighting design for The Light Shining in Buckinghamshire was honored with a nomination by the 2018 Henry Hewes Awards.
  Find a full list of the 2018 nominees in Lighting&Sound America. The awards are hosted by the American Theatre Wing.

• Prospect Theater debuted a new musical, THE HELLO GIRLS, at 59E59, directed by Cara Reichel.

• Marymount Manhattan College presented the Fall Dance Rep, New works by Earl Mosley, Gabrielle Lamb, Pedro Ruiz, Nancy Lushington, Katie Langan, and Catherine Cabeen.

• THE THANKSGIVING PLAY | Playwrights Horizons
  By Larissa FastHorse, and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel

• ORLANDO | Fordham University
  By Sarah Ruhl, directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe.

• SUCH THINGS AS VAMPIRES | People's Light presented the devised punk-folk rock Dracula inoculation , directed by Stuart Carden.

• THE SLOW ROOM | Annie Dorsen
  An experimental performance at Performance Space New York.

• MEMBER OF THE WEDDING | Williamstown Theatre Festival
  Directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, starring Roslyn Ruff and Tavi Gevinson.

• ARTNEY JACKSON | Williamstown Theatre Festival
  by James Anthony Tyler, on the Nikos Stage, directed by Laura Savia.

• MADONNA col BAMBINO } Ars Nova ANTFest, and remounted at the IceFactory'18 at The New Ohio.
  Written by Sarah Einspanier and directed by Caitlin Sullivan.

• The original production of PLANO at ClubbedThumb by Will Arbery, directed by Taylor Reynolds at The Wild Project.

• LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR AND GRILL | Portland Center Stage, directed by Bill Fennelly, with rave reviews. (link.)

• THE LIGHTING SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE | New York Theatre Workshop, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Rachel Chavkin

• 42ND HUMANA FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN PLAYS, Bingham Stage | Actors Theatre of Louisville, 3 plays in rep and in the round: GOD SAID THIS, DO YOU FEEL ANGER, and YOU ACROSS FROM ME.

• March 2018 concluded a collaboration with director, Noah Baumbach, production designer Jade Healy, and DP Robbie Ryan on Noah's film Marriage Story.