Category: Backstage

Yesterday evening we did our first full tech run with all elements present—well, nearly so, since we didn’t have either of the two boys who are doubling Bert. I have a rather natty seersucker suit for a costume (and it’s apparently a venerable piece among the Players); my project for the weekend is learning how to tie my bow tie. I need to get my hair trimmed: I will run up to my salon in Bethesda on Tuesday at lunch, a day when I really don’t have the slack to spare. Every tech week has its special challenge, and this one’s turns out to be dealing with Chip and his dancing all over the deck taking publicity pictures while the scene is running. Beth is pushing against my instincts for what sort of colors my scene in Act 3 should have. The principals are doing great work. It’ll be a pretty good show.

We did a stumble-through of Act I of All My Sons outdoors in the Saturday sun, which is appropriate as that act takes place on a hot weekend morning. Then we moved indoors to get through most of Act II. I/we haven’t worked much on the top of Act III, which is actually OK because I haven’t learned the words yet.

One of the advantages of working with Providence is that the company has generous access to the performance space in the James Lee Community Center for rehearsals and set building. Indeed, we start building set, in place, next weekend, five weeks in advance of opening. Every performance space has its good points and bad. The stage at the Lee is a conventional proscenium, I’m guessing twenty feet by fifteen; but the wing space is extremely shallow (about three to four feet) and there is no fly space: all the curtains only travel. Dressing and green rooms are off left; since the white cyc lies nearly flat against the upstage wall, I don’t yet know how actors get into place for stage right entrances. Something else I noticed: there’s no fire curtain.

“You know, Moisés, how much has really changed in Manhattan in the last 10 years?”

Moisés Kaufman goes back to Laramie, ten years after.

It’s been about 10 days since we closed Incorruptible, the last show of the season. In the brief interval before the one acts festival opens the 2008-09 season, the Stage honored actors and designers for the just-closed season, and Leta picked up the directing award. Good on ya, mate.

Lessons learned from this project:

• I need to me more specific about what and when to accomplish during dry tech time. We got everything done, and by the time actors arrived for wet tech, things went more or less smoothly. But beforehand, there was a little too much milling around before I got down to asking lights “So what cues do you have for me?” Perhaps the trick is to schedule separate time slots for props, sound, and lights.
• Props always kill me. I was much better prepared this time, especially once I got the table maps set up. But we did have some last-minute scurrying. The last thing I did Wednesday night before preview Thursday was weighting and tying the body bags.
• Following practice at RCP, I use numbers to cue lights and letters to cue sound. It’s not quite as necessary at the Stage, because I don’t have to pass cues to lights: I’m running the board myself. Next time around, I would skip some letters that sound too much alike: we had two cues at the end of show where a lot is happening designated M and N, and sometimes my sound op was confused. Also, I figured out that sometimes it makes sense to letter more than one effect—like a fade-down followed by the next music track on a CD—as just one cue.
• I’m going to recommend to the Stage that they invest in a wireless headset system. It’s not important within the booth, but it would assist communicating with (a) the director during wet tech and (b) box office staff on show nights. We spend too much time literally running back and forth from the house to the booth.
• I have an old PDA with a voice recorder that I used to use when I was acting. It would have been handy to have it around for this show.
• A small video camera trained on the lobby doors. I can’t see this area from the booth, so I can’t see latecomers making their way to their seats just as I drop the house lights, nor can I ever be sure that the doorkeeper has closed the lobby door.

I also need to make sure that the Stage board gets these recommendations.

Leta (via Lori) turned up a Top 10 list of saints incorruptible.

We can see the end of the tunnel. Sonya brought in the remaining props yesterday evening; all we have left to do is to pack the body bags and to dress up the letters. Andy and Andrea simplified the intermission changeover, so Leta and I got through it in seven minutes. The light board is new to me, and I like it better: compared to the previous one, it’s a lot easier to jump back into a cue when you have wandered off somewhere you don’t want to be. (As happened yesterday when I double-bumped the GO to start the second act.) Overall, last night’s run was pretty clean; a little more polishing and cleanup and we’ll be ready for a preview audience on Thursday. I’m not yet sure who my sound operator will be tonight, but we can deal. Neil put together a kit of pictures for the press (link updated 18 August 2008).

We moved rehearsal props and set pieces into the theater now that the show before us, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, has closed. The cast got through their first run of Act 1, scene 2 off book, and everyone stayed focused and on task. No small accomplishment, what with two different crews doing construction (mainly deconstruction) work upstairs. Bang! Every time the crews move on to something else, we get a new leak or see daylight through the ceiling. It wouldn’t surprise me to come in one evening and see parts of the lighting grid on the floor.

Meanwhile Andy was making his own noise, working in the shop adjacent to build our set. And I’m trying to feed the cast lines in two different voices, a flutey one for John (Br. Felix) who was scheduled to be out, and a more commanding prompter’s voice, when needed.

The rush hour commute from Sterling to Silver Spring hasn’t been bothering me too much. I’ve started keeping track of how long the drive takes, to confirm my general observation that the congestion gets worse with each passing day of the week. So I more or less know what to expect, and I can be pleasantly surprised when I can get there in only a hour. (?!) The Traffic View of Google Maps helps a lot, too.

The running gag in Incorruptible is that Jack, the layman, always misidentifies the source of a Bible quotation—he mistakes St. Paul for the Pentateuch, that sort of thing. The joke culminates with a particularly venomous curse from Agatha, drawn from Psalms 58:6-8. As Hollinger has it:

AGATHA. …”O God, break the teeth in their mouths…. Like grass let them be trodden down and wither. Let them be like the snail which dissolves into slime, like the untimely birth that never sees the sun!”

Jack guesses Leviticus.

Hollinger helps us out a lot here. Most of the translations of verse 7 employ an image of blunted arrows, rather than that of reaped or withered grass. The King James version of this passage, for instance, is more roundabout:

Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD. Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.

I found this commentary on Ps. 58 particularly helpful. That image of the dissolving snail is rather fine.

We’ve blocked Act 1 and have worked it a couple of times through. Lots of familiar faces in this cast (Robin, Craig, Ted, Kathie, Sally), but I’m particularly pleased to be working with some people new to me, John, Jose, and Vincent. This should be a very funny show, so long as everything keeps fizzing along quickly enough that the viewer doesn’t realize that some of the gags are venerable. I tell people that Leta has chosen to direct a door-slamming sex farce (Leta dislikes door-slamming sex farces) without any doors (Andy has designed this cool colonnade for the up right wall) and very little sex. Incorruptible is actually a black comedy about grave-robbing monks in the Middle Ages, but it has a silver kernel of faith inside it, and that faith is vindicated.

We struck King Lear yesterday evening. All in all, a good run, one that met my expectations.

The scanty houses middle weekend (16 Sunday, 11 stalwarts on Friday) built to some better numbers for our closing weekend, including a declared sell-out Saturday (CLS ordinarily sets up two rows of chairs, seating about 50).

We continued to make costume and blocking adjustments through Saturday. Too bad that we never found a safer place for the wheelchair (for IV.iv) that every night I had to wrangle out of a fire exit stairwell.

A few days ago I was noted the passing remark that a typical shift in the NHL is 45 seconds. That’s about the amount of time that it takes to deliver 15 lines of Shakespeare. So I skated my two shifts, plus a bit. I’m actually most satisfied with my tiny bit as the Messenger in Act IV who brings word of the advancing British army.

It turned out that the daylight streaming through the Sunday afternoon windows was not as distracting as the exterior building security lights shining through the evenings. It just never gets dark in that space.

In my long layover between I.i (the division of the kingdom and the betrothal) and III.vii (the blinding of Gloucester) each night I would help Chris by making up his back for when Edgar goes underground as Poor Tom. We went through a few containers of brown and black character color in the nine-show run. Chris tried dark street makeup foundation, but was dissatisfied with the results: too blendy.

I noted before that the church is a multipurpose facility, and that’s really apparent on Friday nights when the AA/NA meetings are held downstairs. I tried to convince myself that the gabble of voices rising through the ventilation system suggested unseen denizens of the palace, but my resolve faltered when I smelled coffee onstage.

Fortunately we had a lot of hands for strike, and we were on our way to food, drink, and celebration in under an hour.

The boys I went to school with used to be able to identify every car as it passed by: Thomas Flyer, Firestone-Columbus, Stevens Duryea, Rambler, Winton, White Steamer, etc. I never could. The only car I was really interested in was one that the Get-Ready Man, as we called him, rode around town in: a big Red Devil with a door in the back. The Get-Ready Man was a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world. “GET READY! GET READ-Y!” he would bellow. “THE WORLLLD IS COMING TO AN END!” His startling exhortations would come up, like summer thunder, at the most unexpected times and in the most surprising places. I remember once during Mantell’s production of “King Lear” at the Colonial Theatre, that the Get-Ready Man added his bawlings to the squealing of Edgar and the ranting of the King and the mouthing of the Fool, rising from somewhere in the balcony to join in. The theatre was in absolute darkness and there were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning offstage. Neither father nor I, who were there, ever completely got over the scene [III.iv], which went something like this:

Edgar: Tom’s a-cold.—O, do de, do de, do de!—Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking… the foul fiend vexes!

(Thunder off.

Lear: What! Have his daughters brought him to this pass?—
Get-Ready Man: Get ready! Get ready!
Edgar: Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill:—Halloo, halloo, loo, loo!

(Lightning flashes.

Get-Ready Man: The Worllld is com-ing to an End!
Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen!
Edgar: Take heed o’ the foul fiend: obey thy paren—
Get-Ready Man: Get Rea-dy!
Edgar: Tom’s a-cold!
Get-Ready Man: The Worr-uld is coming to an end!…

They found him finally, and ejected him, still shouting. The Theatre, in our time, has known few such moments.

—James Thurber, “The Car We Had to Push”