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When viewing any of the great theaters this city has to offer, imagine if it were completely dark. Thom Weaver, of 10th and Annin streets, is responsible for making sure audiences know “what to look at and how to look at it,” he said.
Weaver, a lighting designer, creates the mood and atmosphere for the city’s great pieces by illuminating the sets and the action as it unfolds.
“My job is about creating the tone or the era the play is set in and emotionally creating a theme and place,” Weaver said. “Especially with something like ‘Cyrano,’ where we have one set that has to be nine different places.”
Weaver’s design can be seen on the stage at Old City’s Arden Theatre Co. through April 15, where a new staging of Edmond Rostand’s French love story “Cyrano,” directed by Weaver’s brother-in-law Aaron Posner, is being staged.
“Lighting most affects and ephemerally creates a time and place: Sunrise or sunset in the garden, or night, so my prime role on ‘Cyrano’ is to turn a solitary set and give you a sense of the constantly changing places,” the 34-year-old said. “And given the richness of the poetry of ‘Cyrano,’ the richness in the light, as well, is a goal.”
When the lighting was set for the Arden production, Weaver began designing for Azuka Theatre’s world premiere of “Hope Street and Other Lonely Places,” a Philadelphia-set story about heroine addiction that premiered last week and runs through April 1 at Center City’s First Baptist Church.
“The challenges of doing a new play is that the writer is there making changes and my work and the actors’ work and the kind of changes the director makes, affect the writer’s changes,” Weaver, who also did the set design for “Hope Street,” said. “You sort of do it in reverse: You approach ‘Cyrano’ like it’s never been done before and ‘Hope Street’ like it’s a classic 100-year-old play.”
The longtime lighting designer has more recently began working in set design, with ‘Hope Street’ the sixth production he has worked on. Also on his plate is being the artistic director of Flashpoint Theatre Co., a role he has held for two years.
“As the artistic director of a theater company, it’s a similar challenge: Any given day I don’t know what I’m going to encounter,” he said. “I count on the experience and teaching that have equipped me to look at those challenges since I never know what they are going to be.”
Growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., Weaver was raised by a theater family, in which both his grandparents were vaudeville performers in the Philadelphia area. With parents that taught at South Jersey high schools and a sister, Erin, who was an actress, Weaver always saw theater as a family affair.
“It was the family business, so I grew up in it. So it was that or baseball,” he said. “We were four generations of theater artists.”
By the age of 17, he was working in local Philly houses as a lighting assistant.
“It was a fairly small theater community; the Arden had just opened and there wasn’t this array of small- and medium-size companies as there is now,” Weaver said. “Since then, the community has just been growing and growing.”
Weaver attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied lighting and scenic design. Upon graduation in 2000, he immediately went to work in New York City.
“I tried acting a little, but I kind of just enjoyed the holistic approach to theater that designing is. I can think about the entirety of the play, not just an individual character,” he said. “It was a weird world where I kind of felt like I understood that language, it just made sense to me for some reason.”
Eventually Weaver decided there was more language to learn, and he matriculated at the Yale School of Drama for a three-year master’s program in lighting design. Shortly after he received his degree in ’07, he returned to Philly.
“I stayed in New York another year, but by that time I really was growing to miss Philadelphia, and missing Philadelphia and disliking New York at that point,” he said. “I spent a long time there and I was really dissatisfied by the way that theater worked in New York. It was upsetting and not very interesting and I decided to get out of there.”
Four years ago he settled in his current apartment, which was a former flower shop and, before that, a deli, so Weaver has a short-order window in his place.
“It was relatively simple [to fit into the Philadelphia community]. I had relationships here and the community was extremely welcoming right away,” he said. “I would never refer to it as easy, getting work, because getting work is never easy.”
Returning to the area also allowed for Weaver to work with Erin on a production.
“My sister lived here, not too far away in Bella Vista so I didn’t look anywhere else,” Weaver, who has been nominated for five Barrymore awards and a Helen Hayes Award, said.
Three years ago the brother-and-sister team took part in a production in Washington, D.C., where his sister and Posner now reside. Posner comes back to the area often, as he is the co-founder of the Arden, and the two fall into synch immediately.
“Aaron and I have done so many shows together at this point a lot of our communication is unspoken,” Weaver, who estimates they have collaborated about 15 times, said. “He knows when I don’t like something and I know when he doesn’t, we don’t have to say it.”
With scenic design recently filling out his résumé, Weaver is concentrating on becoming the best at the many roles he already has on his plate.
“Right now my focus is on being a better artistic director,” Weaver said. “I was never trained for that, that on any given day, I’m asked four questions that I don’t know the answers to. The big focus is on doing as good a job as I can running the company right now.” SPR
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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