Heather Gilbert was double-nominated in the Tony Award category of Best Lighting of a Play for Bug and The Fear Of 13. Other Broadway credits include Good Night And Good Luck, Parade, and The Sound Inside, all of which garnered Tony nominations. She won a Drama Desk Award for her designs for The Sound Inside.
Regionally, her work has been seen at the Guthrie, Berkeley Rep, the Fifth Avenue Theatre, Studio Theatre in DC, Magic Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Huntington Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Kansas City Rep, Alley Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Court Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, Writers Theatre, Chicago Children's Theatre, and many more. Other international credits include Pedro Paramo with Teatro Buendia in Montreal and A Perfect Ganesh at Singapore Repertory Theatre.
She is a proud member of the United Scenic Artists, and a member of Design Action, an intergenerational coalition of BIPOC and white designers working to end racial inequities in the North American theater.
Heather Gilbert shares her thoughts on the lighting of Bug:
Production: Bug by Tracy Letts
December 16, 2025 - March 8 2026
Manhattan Theatre Club, Samuel J Friedman Theatre
Director: David Cromer
Collaborators:
Scenic Designer: Takeshi Kata
Costume Designer: Sarah Laux
Sound Designer: Josh Schmidt
Live Design: What was your intent with the design, and where did your inspiration come from?
Heather Gilbert: Bug is a brilliant play, written by arguably the best playwright of our time, Tracy Letts. All I wanted to do was create the world of this play so authentically that our actors could work inside a place of truthfulness. It is no small play for lighting, all set inside a hotel room – designed perfectly by Takeshi Kata – with light ranging from an Oklahoma sunset to Tracy’s stage direction “lights up on a dark room” to bug lights on a tinfoil room and finally exploding the entire room to nothingness.
We started the play with what I call the Practical Ballet (and Tracy calls the Prologue), with Carrie Coon as Agnes, moving silently and mundanely through her hotel room, putting her tips from waitressing that day away, getting a glass of wine, washing dishes. Throughout it all, she would turn lights on and off—some were controlled through the lighting console and some by Carrie herself. I have always loved how that couple of minutes really set up the world that she lived in, that she actually turned on the sconce next to her bed. Few directors will introduce a character so fully through their relationship to light, but David Cromer sure will. And from that moment on, my job was to follow Agnes through her arc from lonely waitress to a devastated mother, grasping for connection and answers. It’s a hell of a journey that she takes, and lighting is with her the whole way.
LD: What gear did you rely on for your design choices?
HG: This show was first produced at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2020, closing when Covid shut the theaters down, and then again in 2021 when we opened back up.
Steppenwolf has a shiny new theatre with all kinds of fancy gear – LEDs, movers, all brand new. This was not made in that space. I had a handful of LEDs but it was mostly made with good old fashioned ETC Source 4 ellipsoidals, which honestly have a quality and color temperature that feels right for this play. So moving it to the Friedman meant that, while we were moving to mostly LEDs and a handful of moving lights, we needed to stay true to the color temperatures of the HPL as much as possible.
We used Mac Encore Warms and ETC Lustrs to achieve that goal. I just love how the Encore Warms feel like tungsten light—and my genius programmer, Jeff Englander, creates gorgeous color palettes for all the old gels we loved so well.
LD: What was the biggest challenge?
HG: Probably lighting tinfoil. The final scene of the play takes place in the hotel room, but now covered completely in tinfoil. People ask me now how to light tinfoil, and I say “by not lighting the tinfoil.” That foil set – and how the actors look inside it – looks different from every angle in the theater. I am completely ok, thrilled eve, with giving the audience different perspectives on the world of the play based on seating, but this was a new level of that, with the color feeling entirely different based on how the foil interacted. We relit this a few times (maybe more than a few?), trying various levels of saturation to enhance the purple bug lights, and to make the room feel dark and heightened. When you have to support Carrie Coon’s incredible range of emotion in this scene, you make sure you are doing it right.
LD: What do you think made this design so successful?
HG: Mostly I think it worked so well because I love the dark – and this play wants dark. I am not afraid of the dark onstage, and David Cromer and I work well in the dark together. We are willing to be in a single lightbulb when a play asks for that or to create an Oklahoma sunset with the depths of color and angle that well placed moving lights can do. Whatever the play needs, I will find the tools that will make those looks, and we are pretty relentless in that goal.
But I also think what made this design successful is that every person in that room was always 100% working for the same goal. We all knew the journey of the characters, and we all wanted to talk endlessly and listen voraciously to everyone’s thoughts on how those journeys should manifest visually and sonically. I would be in that room today if I could, running that transition again, watching Carrie and Namir Smallwood figure out how to lie exactly right on the bed in their drugged stupor. I keep suggesting that we should do the show in Korea, if anyone has any connections for me.
Lighting team:
Associate Lighting Designer: Victoria Bain
Lighting Programmer: Jeff Englander
Substitute Programmer: Wylder Cooper
Lighting Fellow: Maaz Ahmed
Production Electrician: Erik Peterson
House Electrician: Aaron Ryan
Lighting Equipment: Christie Lights
Rental Rep: Brad Gray