It isn’t immediately obvious why Morton Arboretum would make “Illumination,” its holiday lights experience, drive-thru for the first time this year.
CDC guidelines suggest that outdoor, socially distanced activities are relatively safe in the COVID-19 pandemic. And the three other big end-of-year bulb displays — at Lincoln Park Zoo, Brookfield Zoo and Chicago Botanic Garden — are all sticking with the boots-on-the-ground model.
But the Lisle tree park’s decision to have people stay in their cars this year, when “Illumination” debuts Nov. 20, boils down to two things: a hedge against the uncertainty of a winter season with the virus still coursing through American communities, and perhaps getting worse thanks to folks being forced indoors; and a simple matter of giving the people what they said they want.
As the institution began planning the eighth season of “Illumination,” largely while the park was closed following the statewide mid-March shutdown, “we decided we would send a survey out to past ‘Illumination’ visitors,” said Preston Bautista, vice president of learning and engagement. “We found nearly 80 percent indicated a preference for a driving experience.”
It may not be possible to parse out how much of that is due to pandemic concerns and how much due to Americans, when offered the chance to stay in their cars on a chilly winter night versus bundling up and trudging around in the great altogether, being highly likely to choose the option with bucket seats.
But the fact is that, unlike the other area holiday lights presenters, Morton has the infrastructure — winding roads through a huge campus — to be able to deliver a vehicular experience.
“I’m excited,” Bautista said. “This has been a year of reinvention. We’ve reinvented summer camp. We’ve expanded digital programming. So why not reinvent ‘Illumination,’ too? It’s been that kind of a year.”
The other key factors were certainty and safety, said John Featherstone, the independent lighting designer who stages “Illumination” every year, a display that has been artful placement of lights much more than sheer bulb count.
“I think this is a statement on how seriously the arboretum takes guest safety,” Featherstone said. “The path of the pandemic has been hard to predict. We wanted to make sure we could do a show we knew we could execute, one where the guests felt safe and comfortable.”
So the cars will offer people “your own little private bubble,” he said, while the visual experience will now be laid out along a roughly two-mile road, compared to previous years’ mile-long walk. Additionally, the driving experience will welcome in some visitors for whom the outdoor walk was too strenuous.
In designing for automobile-based viewing, there will be “the almost mandatory entry tunnel to the driving experience,” Featherstone said, a sort multi-colored LED wraparound in the renderings.
And the designer needs to think about broader, wider vistas, he noted, because they’ll be seen through car windows in “that near-cinematic aspect ratio.”
In the past, “Illumination’s” discrete individual settings — lights playing along to symphonic music on a hillside, chandeliers overhead in a more densely wooded area — have featured music to match each area.
This year, there’ll be a more general holiday soundtrack that you can tune to on your AM radio, or you can play your own music.
“We’re trying to make some lemonade from lemons, maybe welcome some people who haven’t been able to experience it before,” said Featherstone. “Viewed through the lens of a hypothetical binary choice, of course we want people walking,” getting closer to the trees that are supposed to be the dramatically lit stars of this particular show.
But 2020 has had a knack for limiting choice and so a frosty walk in the woods will become, for this year at least, a slow drive through them during which you are supposed to be distracted by the sights along the side of the road.
Morton is requiring that tickets be purchased in advance, and they are $49 per car on peak nights, $39 on standard nights, with member prices coming in at $10 less. More details, plus ticket-puchase links, are on the website. Member tickets are already on sale, and the general public can start buying them Oct. 8.
Depending on how many people you squeeze in your car, this is roughly comparable to last year’s per-person pricing, which ranged from $13 to $23 for adults and $7 to $15 for children.
Twitter @StevenKJohnson