Day Forty-Three: Oklahoma

This is a long post…but it was a VERY long day.

We went on tour today.

Yippppeee!

The theatre company I am working for gets very large grants to take the shows that we do on the road to smaller communities in the area.  They have been doing this for years and it’s a pain in everyone’s ass.  It’s a lot of work, with very little payoff…at least for the crew, and the hours suck.  On top of all of that, we are performing in theatres that are less that adequate for what we are trying to do.   Which made for a very fun day today.

It started at 7:00 when I finally pulled my butt out of bed to go take my standard 30 second shower.   This wouldn’t have been such a big deal but I was unable to sleep last night.  I went to bed at 1:00ish and at 4:00 a.m. was still very much awake.  If you do that math that’s at best three hours of sleep.  My butt has been dragging all day.  I got downstairs at 7:30 only to find out I was 15 minutes late.  Whoops, no one told me about the change in time.  We added a few more things to the 24 foot Budget truck that was in the parking lot and we were on our way.

First stop?  Quick Trip.  You can’t officially start your day without a Diet Coke.  I would have really loved a good cup of coffee, but as I’ve mentioned the last three or four times I’ve had coffee it’s made me nauseous so I haven’t had it in a while.  The tech director and I filled our cups and were on our way.  The trip was about 35 or 40 minutes outside the city.  There was very little traffic and we made it in no time.  And there we were in front of the _________ High School.  The building was clearly built in 1903 and the prospect of what lay ahead was frightening.

We finally found someone to open the doors for us.  And when I say someone, I mean a real character.  He was a local who had been hired to open doors for us and help us as much as he could.  He was about 68 years old, and smelled as though he’d been smoking since sun up.  He had the thickest accent I’ve heard since I’ve been here and was full of fun stories.  He used to run the National Weather Station in the area until it was closed by Bush.  It’s hard for someone his age to get a job especially since the heart attack.  He’s getting an operation next week for the aneurysm that’s about to explode in his chest.  His son is going to see the Broadway show that’s in town this week.   I could go on.  I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for him or ask him to go away.  He kept popping into the control booth at the most inopportune times to talk.

So we get inside the theatre.  The first thing to greet us.  A massively huge wall of heat.  The air conditioning is broken.  It had to be 130 degrees inside the theatre and we hadn’t started working yet.  Some men were coming to fix it, but they weren’t sure they could get to it today.  In the meantime we had a show to load in and we couldn’t breathe inside the building.  And of course the temperature in Oklahoma only got worse as the day progressed.  It was very much a hot and humid day, just like it should have been.  By the time we finished tonight, I think I’d lost 15 pounds and I had done the least physical labor.  The audience was having no part of it.  I could only see the balcony from where I was stationed but at least 20 or so people left at the intermission because the temperature was unbearable.

And so we got to work.  Sort of.  The stage in this theatre is about half as big as the stage we are accustomed to working on.  We have a 40 foot stage at the performing arts center and the stage at the high school is 30 feet.  It’s also about half as deep.  On top of that there’s no fly space (the area above the stage where scenery is stored and then flown in during a specific scene) therefore it was impossible to use use at least 3/4 of the scenery we had brought with us.  We were able to use the backdrop and a couple of other pieces and that was it.  So suddenly are large musical’s set consist of some benches, 12 chairs and a rocker.  Just so you know, when things become problems visually in the theatre,  guess who they look to, to fix it?   That’s right.  Lighting.  I could magically create the gymnasium, the front porch, the gazebo all with lights.  That’s why I’m being paid the big bucks.  Right?

In a “real” theatre, with “real” equipment,  “real” money, and “real” time I could do all of those things.  However to have this become my problem when we now have 7 hours till the house opens and the audience is admitted, and there’s very little equipment, and no money.  That’s another story all together.

The lighting package consisted of state of the art equipment that was bought in 1987.  I’m not exaggerating here.  All of the equipment was at least 20 years old.  And I’ll buy someone dinner if they actually can prove to me THEY are using the computer they bought 20 years ago.   That’s what I thought.  It took my crew and me almost an hour just to figure out how to turn the lights on.  And don’t forget I have a degree in this.  Once we figured it out, we discovered that you couldn’t actually program the memory of the board.  The show would have to be programmed the old fashion way.  Manually.

We also discovered that the lamps in at least half the lights we were using were blown.  The high school drama teacher (HSDT) had explained to us that the administration wouldn’t buy him replacement bulbs.  There were also a bunch of lights hanging on a pipe that was virtually impossible to get to.  The  HSDT told us he didn’t touch those lights since it was impossible to get to them.  We also asked about why the house was so dark when the house lights (the lights that light the audience) we on.  The HSDT teacher said there was no way to get into the air to replace them so as they burned out they were just being left that way.  There’s more but I could spend an entire post just on the HSDT.  It scares me that people like him are teaching young people about theatre.

So my crew and I figured out how to get to the lights that were impossible to get to.  Unfortunately we discovered that the lights when turned on only produced a beam of light that was only about 4 feet across when it got to the stage.  (Call this the wrong equipment in the wrong place.)  This made them useless to us.  However, since HSDT didn’t use these lights, all the light bulbs in them worked.  So with the help of my crew, we scavenged the light bulbs out of the instruments that worked, but that were useless to us, to use them in the lights that were useful but didn’t work.  This took almost an hour, but I don’t think I could have lit the show without them.

Without going into the technical information, we also discovered they didn’t have the hardware to actually make all the plugs electrified that we were plugging the lights into.  So we had to be ingenious to figure out, what dimmer (the control, like in your dining room that allows you to make the light be at different intensities) could be where, to make the lights work.  There were 125 plugs.  But only 48 dimmers.  You do the math.

Finally, all the lights work and we began focusing them. (Pointing them where they go on the stage.)   In the performing arts center we usually perform in, there are about 280 lighting instruments.  This is a medium size show.  A Broadway show can have upwards of 500.  Today I lit a two act musical, with at least 15 different scenes, with dance numbers, etc. with about 40 lights.  And it actually looked okay.  But as they say: you do what you can, with what you have.

All of this was done in about three hours.   At 2:00 the actors hit the stage and we began a spacing rehearsal.  And what is that?  Well it’s basically figuring out how to make 30 adult cast members plus  8 kids  fit on a stage that’s significantly smaller than what we are accustomed to.  We basically went through the play moment by moment figuring out where people would be.  While the actors were doing this, I was figuring out what lights would be on in each scene and trying to make a list.  Unfortunately, we only did the big numbers because the two person scenes looked the same.  That meant I’d just have to wing it when I got to the show.

And this is what we were doing when the actress who plays the mother tripped on a piece of scenery coming on to stage and went crashing to the floor.  I didn’t see any of this since I was in the light booth.  What I did see was the crew member come running on to stage asking the stage manager to call 911, and telling the place that medical attention was needed pronto.  Of course everyone rushed to the stage (not me) to help.  Seems she had ripped a huge cut in her arm and also hit her nose which was now bleeding profusely.  The stage manager told me later that when she got to the stage to assess the situation there was blood everywhere.  She maintained control of every thing while the assistant stage manager sent the other actors to the green room (the place actors hang out when they are not on stage).  About 6 or 7 minutes after this occurred the EMS people arrived.  OH MY GOD!!!  I have never seen such butch women.  They looked like linebackers.  And to make their appearance worthy of mentioning.  One of them had the most beautiful mullet I have ever seen.  It was bleached blond and perfect.  I was laughing out loud as soon as I saw it…but I digress… Back to my story.  They helped the actress out of the building and to a car that was going to take her to the hospital.  She ended up getting six stitches in her arm and a bandage on her nose.  And she still made it back for the 7:00 curtain and performed perfectly.

And now we are at the show.  In every theatre there is a control booth.  Usually it’s in the back in a room that is away from the audience usually shielded by glass or plastic.  It’s the place where the light board and sound board are kept and where the people who are running those things sit during the show.  Often the stage manager will sit in the booth to call a show.  And why is all of this important?  Well, the theatre had a booth.  At the back of the balcony on the second floor.  But wait.  The best part.  It wasn’t separated from the audience.  I was standing at the light board and could have reached out and patted the woman in the back row on the head.  And why is this important.  Well the stage manager has to talk to call the show.  And about 15 minutes into the show, the audience in front of us was turning around asking us to be quiet.  It’s a little hard to call a show when you can’t talk.  Eventually, we just decided to say “Fuck It” and did what we have to do.  But I’m sure some people left a little pissed off.  Maybe that’s why they left at intermission and it had nothing to do with the heat.

And after the show.  We loaded everything back into the truck.  In the million degree heat.  We finished about 11:30 and headed home.  And now I sit here typing, thinking about the fact that I’ve been told tomorrow will be even more of an adventure than today was because the space and equipment are even more antiquated.  I can hardly wait.