Grace C. Laubacher ’09

It’s easy to look at the empty Loeb Mainstage—a cavernous 556-seat theatre—and see only a bare, dark void. For set designer Grace C. Laubacher ’09, however, the theatre becomes a blank canvas, the medium for her art. From the skeletal, caged streets of London in “Sweeney Todd” to the scientific underworld of “The Space Between,” Laubacher has been set designer and technical director for more than 20 productions on campus.

In recognition of her extensive work, Laubacher, who is also a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club and co-founder of the Harvard Stage Designers’ Collective, has been awarded the OFA’s Council Prize in Visual Arts and the first Alan Symonds Memorial Award for work in technical theater.

“It’s exciting to have set design called a visual art form, because there’s a way in which theater is thought of as performance based even though it’s so much more than that,” Laubacher says. “So to sort of have an element of theater cross the boundary between performance and visual arts is exciting.”

Visual arts were not always Laubacher’s main focus, however. “I was a jock my freshman year of high school and played three sports,” she says. “My sophomore fall I didn’t have anything to do. I attempted to be a performer and sucked at it, so I tried out tech.” A strong program at her high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, drew her into the theater world. After that, there was no looking back. Laubacher even served as an intern for the celebrated Williamstown Theatre Festival one summer, where she learned about commercial work in the arts.

“The community of great people who were handy but also design-oriented attracted me, but I fell in love with the actual art form,” Laubacher says. “When I got to Harvard, it was a perfect way to get involved in a student group and play an integral role from an early stage.”

Building this sense of community was the motivation behind HSDC, a group that hopes to serve as a forum where students interested in stage design and technology can connect. “There’s a tendency for techies and designers to spread themselves out,” Laubacher says. “There’s no unifying impetus for them to get together and share ideas and collaborate and learn from each other, so the idea is to offer a home for those people and provide continuity.” For Laubacher, who learned most of her design skills through hands-on experience, peer mentoring is a priority.

“The most learning happens when you’re able to make mistakes and see where they lead you. I started working in the shop in the Loeb not knowing what a screw gun did and went from there,” she explains.

Laubacher’s trial-and-error philosophy allows for mistakes, guesswork, and creative intuition, as well as a great deal of collaboration. The set for “Sweeney Todd” is closest to her heart because its versatile and striking design was produced by group effort. “In a really profound way, every work of a single individual is the work of a group,” Laubacher says.

Still, it is Laubacher’s own creativity and talent that have ultimately produced effective and stunning sets. “I develop a world in which the story takes place and makes sense, spreading the search far and wide for inspiration and not staying confined to the literal world of play,” she says.

Laubacher’s latest endeavor was designing the set of “The Space Between,” a complex and multilayered show that demands an equally multi-textured stage, complete with two moving trees and a raised platform on which videos are projected. “The trees function as the origin of human knowledge, like in the story of Eden,” she says. “The physical form itself of the trees is mirrored on the shape of a mushroom cloud. A lot of it came to me really intuitively; it just felt right. It was difficult in a great way.”

Laubacher will continue to practice design at the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, part of the University of the Arts London. “The boundaries between art forms are blurring,” Laubacher says. “I want to bring design to a new level in a performance setting.”

—Staff writer Ali R. Leskowitz can be reached at aleskow@fas.harvard.edu.