They Also Serve Opera Who Stand and Wait . . .

They’re rehearsing “The Great Gatsby,” and Bob Grist is standing in the spotlight, stage center, without any idea which role he is supposed to be playing. He might be Nick Carraway, he might be Tom Buchanan, he might even be Daisy Buchanan.

But Grist doesn’t ask questions, and he doesn’t move unless the disembodied voice from the “God mike” above the stage tells him to.

“Take two steps stage left,” it says. Grist obeys. “Take one step downstage,” it says. Again he obeys.

For most of this summer afternoon and evening, Grist merely stands still--often for 20 minutes at a time as multicolored lights slowly move around him and rear projections shift behind him.

The retired schoolteacher is among a dozen “lightwalkers” for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. They stand in for the lead singers during early technical rehearsals when the lights are being focused and the light movements choreographed.

At the Lyric, the lightwalkers are recruited from the ranks of the regular supernumeraries--the people who take the stage to swell crowd scenes and play small non-singing roles. For their long days of lightwalking they’re paid about $4.50 an hour. Most, like Grist, donate that pay back to the Lyric.

“It’s probably the most tedious and boring thing you can do for opera, but you’re doing it for opera, and that’s what’s important,” says one lightwalker, Harry Hartel of Mundelein, Ill., a retired Illinois Circuit Court judge.

“We lightwalked ‘Rigoletto’ a week or so back, all of us in tuxedos,” Hartel says. “I was lying on a table for about 20 minutes, and I kept whispering to the other guys lying around me, ‘Are you still awake?’ I think the directors forgot about us, but I’m used to it. My big role as a ‘super’ was in ‘Gianni Schicci,’ where I played a corpse-- I was dead for most of the opera.”

Renate Moser, a retired Encyclopaedia Britannica video producer and German translator, battled a case of food poisoning last year for the chance to die onstage as a light-walker at a rehearsal of “Tristan und Isolde,” by her musical idol, Richard Wagner.

“I ate in the cafeteria something with mayonnaise, and suddenly, in the second act, everything goes black,” Moser recalls.

“She was so sick they had to help her from the stage, and she’s so dedicated that the whole while she kept moaning, ‘But who will be Isolde?’ ” says Lyric spokeswoman Magda Krance.

An assistant director was able to fill in until Moser recovered enough to return to the stage for Isolde’s triumphant death, which ends the opera.

On this afternoon, Grist concentrates on staying alert. The last time he dozed off on the job, he woke up in hell. It was during Arrigo Boito’s “Mefistofele.” Grist was lightwalking for star Samuel Ramey when the “God mike” told him to sit in a large chair. He sat there a bit too long.

“I admit it, I dozed off--fell sound asleep,” he says. “And when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was, except I was surrounded by all these swirling and flickering red lights, just like flames. For a moment, it was very frightening.”

Most of the lightwalkers have no performance experience, only love of opera. One exception is Ophelia Hennes, a native of Armenia who studied opera and ballet in London and danced for 13 years with the former Iranian Royal Ballet in Tehran. Hennes occasionally gets to dance a bit as a supernumerary, but she’s willing to lightwalk and has been doing it since 1992.

“Mainly it’s boring,” she says. “You’re standing still all the time, but you’re still onstage and part of a production--a more important part than people realize.”

Stage manager Caroline Moores agrees. “They’re essential,” she says. “They’re a terribly loyal bunch--and very patient.”

Moores, director Mark Lamos and Lyric lighting designer Duane Schuler are the voices in the “God mike” that tell the lightwalkers what to do for this production of “Gatsby,” composer John Harbison’s operatic version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel.

Grist’s patience is rewarded when he learns what character he is supposed to be.

The set is for a party scene on the terrace of the Gatsby mansion. Two other lightwalkers are lounging on the steps while Grist stands alone, center stage. The light crew has spent an hour or more shifting the background sky through afternoon, sunset and evening. It’s night now, and a technical trick turns the lightwalkers into silhouettes.

The green light at the end of Daisy’s pier shines suddenly brighter through the mist of a rear scrim.

For a moment--without music, words or a paying audience--Grist is Jay Gatsby.