The Sound Stage Career of LATC’s Jon Gottlieb

Heard any good plays lately?

If you’ve attended one of Jon Gottlieb’s projects, the answer is undoubtedly yes. Gottlieb is the head of sound design at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where he’s currently represented in “Inspector General” and the soon-to-open “Kingfish.” It’s also a post he juggles with free-lance assignments: “Grand Junction” at the Coast Playhouse and “Desperadoes” at the Celebration, plus the upcoming “Steel Magnolias” at the Pasadena Playhouse, “The Dressing Room” at the Matrix and “Blame It on the Movies II” at the Coast Playhouse.

“The same way a lighting and set designer are responsible for the way a play looks, a sound designer is responsible for the auditory atmosphere--any sound effects or music that are required,” said Gottlieb, sitting at his LATC mixing console. He’s aided by state-of-the-art equipment and a library of sound effects to choose from. One catalogue lists 3,000 such effects, including “Car, diesel,” “Car, Ford,” “Car, garage door,” “Car, glass breaking” and “Car, engine idling.” Gottlieb jots down the number and position, pops the disc in a player and voila : car, idling.

“A lot of this is having access to as much as you can,” he said. “At my music studio (Jon Sound) in the Valley, I’ve got about 15,000 effects--on a combination of discs, records and tapes I’ve made.” Extensive supplies are only part of the picture. “You also have to know how to mike musicals: how to deal with wireless microphones, mike the performers, mike the band. It’s like wearing a completely different hat, because you stop being the sound designer-recording engineer and become a mixing engineer.”

The thoroughness pays off. This year, Gottlieb, 31, won his third Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle award--for “Bent” at the Coast Playhouse. “A lot of ‘Bent’ was placing you there and, in the scene changes, bringing through the horror of what was to come next,” he said of his design. “We also heard montages of people being placed onto the trains taking them off to the concentration camps. Then in the second act (set at Dachau), there was the chilliness of the whistle that ran these men’s lives. It took us about four days to find the exact whistle we wanted.”

Proud as he is of his contribution, the Chicago-born Gottlieb knows the average theatergoer may not be particularly aware of his work.

“I like to think that what I do is as important as any other member of the design team. But it’s a ‘Catch-22’ in that if you do your job really well, nobody notices you.” He insists his ego doesn’t suffer: “You have to realize you’re just an element. If you get in the way of the piece, you’re doing it a disservice. The most important part of the play is not the door slamming; it’s got to blend in with everything else. Above all, this is an artistic ability. Anybody can record a door slamming or pick a piece of music or make a car start. But to be able to view the whole thing as a creative entity commingling with other elements. . . . “

In addition to his Critics’ Circle awards (the others were for “Journey’s End,” 1982, and “Nanawatai,” 1985), Gottlieb’s resume lists 118 credits, 18 Drama-Logue awards, eight L.A. Weekly awards, four NAACP awards and an L.A. Weekly award for career achievement.

“I’m lucky that I got into sound design at the right time--when it was growing--and I was able to carve a niche for myself,” he said modestly. “The market for sound designers 10 years ago was almost non-existent. It wasn’t thought of as something you needed; it was hardly thought of as a design element.” For him, the introduction came as an acting major at USC: “As an undergrad in theater, you had to do crew assignments. I hate sweeping the shop floor or building scenery or painting. So I got myself onto the sound crew, because I knew how to turn a tape deck from my radio show (at the University of Wisconsin).”

He speaks of his work with obvious affection. “Nanawatai,” William Mastrosimone’s play about a Soviet platoon in Afghanistan, “was a good example of what sound design can do, because basically what you saw on stage was this superstructure thing that didn’t look like a tank (but represented one.) I needed to create a sound for it that was as menacing as possible. It ended up being a mixture of tanks and grinding machines. Later we added beast sounds: lions, wailing cats. It gave it a high, whining, almost naturalistic sound.”

“Sarcophagus” (LATC, 1987) was another standout. Gottlieb devised a progressive rumbling sound to simulate a nuclear accident, but the theater had to add a verbal disclaimer after a real earthquake shook Southern California in October. As for LATC’s recently closed “Caretaker”: “We put in a lot of wind, rain, and the ever-popular Pinter drip-in-the-bucket. We had whole meetings about that drip. You end up being a psychologist, trying to get inside the director’s head. Sound is amorphous, and a lot of times people don’t know what they want. They say, ‘I need this to sort of waft in. . . .’ ”

If he didn’t design? “I’d like to get into directing and producing,” Gottlieb said. “Not that I’m disgruntled; there are just other places I want to move on to.” A smile. “Anywhere that I don’t have to hurt myself with a hammer.”