Allow Her to Illuminate

The moon glowed blue-white-silver in a crisp, black sky. Lighting designer Kathi O’Donohue caught sight of it while chatting outside a Venice theater, and the colors knocked her out.

“When I see something like that, I think, ‘How can I re-create that onstage?’ ” she said.

O’Donohue’s ability to reproduce such visions--using bright lights, sheets of colored gel and patterns cut out of thin metal plates--has made her one of the most sought-after designers in Los Angeles. Her work--most of it done on shoestring budgets for small theaters--is often singled out in reviews and has captured several of local theater’s biggest prizes, including a career achievement award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle earlier this year and, last month, her second Ovation Award from the producers’ alliance Theatre LA. Currently, her designs can be seen in six productions around town: the two-part, 10-play cycle “The Greeks” at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles, “You Can’t Take It With You” and “The Fantasticks” by Actors Co-op in Hollywood, “The Path of Love” at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, “Crashing Heaven” at the Court Theatre in Los Angeles and “Scent of Rain” at the Tiffany Theater in West Hollywood.

Ever obsessed with detail and often at work on more than one show at a time, O’Donohue clocks long hours, shuttling across town from assignment to assignment. She sometimes works seven days a week, on the go from early morning, before anyone else arrives at a theater, until the dead of night, after the director, actors and other designers have burnt out.

“I can do that for a while,” the 47-year-old designer explains during a rare evening at home in the warren of small rooms that she rents at the back of a big, old house in Venice, “because I live on orange juice and Oreos. That’s what keeps me going. And then I collapse when it’s all done.”

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Barefoot and dressed in a flannel shirt and black jeans, O’Donohue reclines her wiry, 5-foot-4 1/2-inch frame across a couch. The wall above her is papered with award certificates, and the new Ovation trophy, for the Fountain Theatre’s production of “Summer and Smoke,” stands atop a bookshelf near the front door (it doubles as a photo holder; a favorite snapshot of her with three of her nephews has been slipped between the figurine’s head and upraised arms).

The lighting--from two naked lightbulbs dangling overhead--is alarmingly stark, but swags of colored Christmas lights somehow lend a sense of enchantment to this room filled with hand-me-down furniture. “For a lighting designer, this is the worst-lit house . . . ,” she says, her voice trailing off apologetically.

O’Donohue, who lives alone, doesn’t have a lot of time to focus on home lighting. She designed 29 shows in 1999 and about 35 in 1998, her busiest year to date.

“As a designer, I feel like I’m a painter,” she says. “The theater is like the easel, and then you put this canvas of the text and the set and the costumes and the actors on it--and I paint the lights and the shadows on this moving canvas.

“I light from an emotional point of view, versus a technical one.”

Lighting helps to tell a story, she explains, by suggesting such details as season, time of day, environment (is the light from an unseen window filtered through cheap blinds or expensive, lacy curtains?) and mood (is the scene sunny or dreary?).

A show’s director is the final arbiter of its look, and the lighting must complement the other design elements, as well as coordinate with actors’ movements. Beyond that, however, O’Donohue says she usually is given latitude to be creative.

She is partial to rich, saturated colors, and she likes to play around with texture and dimensionality by throwing the shadows of branches or other patterns across the set and the actors.

Several key scenes in the Tennessee Williams play “Summer and Smoke,” for example, took place in a park watched over by a statue of an angel, where a lovelorn woman seeks solace. O’Donohue’s design suggested light filtering through a canopy of trees. “I used lots of different combinations, and lots of different colors,” O’Donohue says. “If you think about it, the shadows really aren’t reds and oranges and purples and greens and blues--but the leaves are. If you look up through the branches and the leaves, you see the little cutouts of the sky in between. It’s reverse image; it’s just to suggest.

“Some plays should just be flat--there shouldn’t be anything between you and the actors,” she adds, “but other times, the air should be alive.”

Tracy Middendorf, who portrayed the central character in “Summer and Smoke,” says such effects subtly help to draw actors and audiences into the play. “We [actors] use our imagination to create the character and to live in that world, and the lighting helps create that world.”

Simon Levy, who directed “Summer and Smoke,” adds that O’Donohue is sensitive to a production’s pragmatic needs as well as its emotional impact, “and combines them into an artistic whole that literally creates another character onstage.”

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Rather than mapping her designs on paper and handing them along for someone else to install, O’Donohue prefers to hang the lights herself, experimenting and fine-tuning as she goes. “It’s so personal to me,” she says. “I’d rather do it myself.”

The work requires endless trips up and down ladders, carrying lights--which weigh 10 or 20 pounds apiece--or coils of thick electrical cable--weighing perhaps 30 pounds.

Ron Sossi, the Odyssey’s artistic director and director of “The Greeks,” appreciates her dedication. “She really understands it as her personal, creative mission and responsibility to make the lights work. She’s always in there adjusting, refocusing and rehanging, and bringing [the lighting] to a place where it really pleases her.”

O’Donohue supports herself by design and consulting alone--a precarious existence, since producers at small theaters generally can afford to pay her only $100 to $1,200 for a show--for 50 to 100 hours or more of work. “Thank God for credit cards,” she quips.

“I don’t know how any designer makes a living,” the Odyssey’s Sossi commiserates. “To even make a modicum, you really have to overextend yourself” by accepting as many assignments as possible.

The overlapping jobs, combined with the changeable opening dates of some small productions, occasionally leave O’Donohue stretched too thin. “It sometimes causes problems,” Sossi says, “but it’s worth the problems to have her designing.”

While growing up in Pomona, O’Donohue became interested in theater because of her mother’s involvement with a community theater group. In her preteens, young O’Donohue was already acting with the group and tackling small tasks behind the scenes. By her teens, she was working in the technical booth, operating lights and sound.

In the mid-’70s, she ventured into the Los Angeles theater scene, acting, running lights and, eventually, earning a union card as a stage manager. Through acting, as well as improvisational theater studies, she became acquainted with members of the War Babies improv group. A couple of them, who were directing plays on the side, asked her to try designing lights.

And so, in 1986, she designed her first show, “La Brea Tar Pits,” followed shortly by “Saul: According to Saul.”

O’Donohue had gained an understanding of lighting’s nuances from night after night of operating light boards, executing other designers’ plans. To further educate herself, she studied lighting catalogs, trying to figure out how to use the equipment pictured there. Above all, she learned by doing.

“I didn’t go to school for any of this,” she says. “I [sometimes] think about taking a class, but I never have the time.”

So far, she has designed more than 140 shows, including Paul Linke’s “Time Flies When You’re Alive”; Jude Narita’s “Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei”; and director Michael Michetti’s 1997 staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” set in colonial India, for which O’Donohue won her first Ovation Award.

She rarely spends time in the tech booth, operating lights, anymore. Opening night is, in a sense, her closing night. She leaves her design in the crew’s hands and moves on to the next show.

“This is my life, my relationship, my religion,” O’Donohue says. “Theater has become all-consuming.” With a laugh, she adds: “But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?”