Patricia J. Collins ’54

Patricia J. Collins ’54, of Branford, Conn.; Mar. 21, of pancreatic cancer. She was a Tony Award–winning lighting designer. After graduating from Brown, she spent a year at Yale Drama School. She worked as a stage manager at the Joffrey Ballet, then as an assistant to Jean Rosenthal, who was a top Broadway lighting designer at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn. She worked as a stage manager, among other jobs, in the 1960s when Joseph Papp, the founder and director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, hired her to design the lighting for productions of The Threepenny Opera (Lincoln Center Revival) in 1976. She won her Tony for Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport in 1986, and was the lighting designer for more than 30 other Broadway productions, among them Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Doubt, which earned her a Tony nomination. In a 2002 revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This at the Union Square Theater, she transformed figures onstage into what Ben Brantley of The New York Times called “ambiguous silhouettes.” She also worked at regional theaters throughout the United States and with opera companies in New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, London, Paris, and Munich. She is survived by her partner, Dr. Virginia Stuermer.