Day Forty-Seven: Oklahoma

At 8:34 last night the curtain came down on the last show of the season. At 9:37 the scenery had been struck, the truck loaded. We exited the theatre and were on our way. The 2007 summer theatre season for me in Oklahoma was done. I still can’t believe it’s been almost seven weeks since I got here. For the most part I’ve had a great time. Yes, it was stressful at times, and I know you guys have heard me complain about one or two things since I got here. But I am genuinely glad that I did this. I met some amazing people and I’m going to miss them a lot. Luckily there hasn’t been a lot of discussion of staying in touch etc. etc. We all seem to realize that it probably won’t happen. It was a brief moment in time that our lives came together and we shared a very magical event. And then it was over and that was that.

Okay, enough with the melodrama.

There’s not much to report from the last show. It was an out of town show in a little city about 3 hours away. We left yesterday morning at 7:00 after our customary stop at QT, and got there at 10:30. The theatre was built in 1955 and had all the features of architecture of the time period. The house was sort of a turquoise blue. I’m sure you can imagine what I’m talking about. The stage itself was okay, sort of. The lighting equipment looked as though it hadn’t been new since Kennedy was president. And there was very little of it. I did the show with about 40 lights, but none of them really what I needed. It was also sort of an interesting space because the theatre was run by a union crew. They were much more competent than the crew here but we aren’t really sure why they are union since I don’t think the space is used much. The problem with the union crew is that we have to wait for them to do things for us. At the other tour spaces, we went in made ourselves at home and did our thing. Yesterday we had to wait for them to do our thing. Which is fine, it just made it hard to get the lighting looks that I wanted.

For the most part the show went off well. I was a little stressed about it because I was stage managing last night. The stage manager for that show had a wedding to attend and so was out of town over the weekend. Since I was the only person who really knew the show it was decided that I would call the show. That basically means I call the light cues. So at the beginning of a scene I say light cue “GO” and the board op makes it happen. To make matters worse yesterday, since we were on tour and I am the designer I was also re-designing the show for the new space. So I was having to communicate to the board op not only to “GO”, but prepping him as to what it should exactly look like. I tried doing this during the rehearsal yesterday afternoon and was driving myself and everyone else crazy. After the rehearsal I talked to the incompetent ME who was also the board op and told him he was going to have to figure out the looks for the show. I’d talk him through it as much as possible but it was going to be on his shoulders because I couldn’t do both. He agreed.

And that is what we did. For the most part the show went off without a hitch. The actor’s were really on and the show was great. As for the lighting, the ME made some choices I wouldn’t have made but for the most part it was fine. It’s clear that he’s not a lighting designer either. But he did his best and pulled through and for that I was grateful. After the season we’ve had together it was nice to end on a good note.

The one and only other thing to mention about last nights show was that there were about 200 military boys in attendance. And I should probably mention that they were HOT. And looked as if they’d come straight from home room. But did I mention they were HOT. They were all in uniform and were marched into the space like they had drilled for it. They were on the best behavior. But trust me when I say a Victor Herbert operetta is probably not their idea of a fun night. But they were gracious and laughed a lot and gave a standing ovation at the end. And once again…did I mention they were HOT!

After the show last night. WE DRANK! and I mean a lot. I was not hung over this morning because I stuck to beer and we’ve all discovered that in Oklahoma there’s VERY little alcohol in beer. About half of what’s in it in the rest of the country. We started after strike (in case you don’t know it’s where the set of the show is taken apart and hauled away) by going to a Chinese restaurant buffet that was being provided to us by the theatre. It was very good. But most of us were tired and ready for beer. After a quick bite, we headed to the hotel and got settled it. They had all of us scattered all over the hotel, which made partying a little more difficult but we managed. We finally settled in the east wing in the prop master’s room and there we stayed. I went to bed at 3:00 and there were people still going at it. For the first time since being here I had to share a room last night. But everyone who stayed had too, so no one got special privileges. I bunked with Tim. The 18 year old carpenter. He’s cute as a button. After the room assignments came out I kept joking with him that I had requested ONE king size bed for us to share, and that he better not steal the blankets. It was actually fine. I was out like a light the minute I got in bed and didn’t wake up until he alarm went off. And I was a perfect gentleman and did not molest the little boy.

And so now I’m back in the dorm. It’s late and I’m off to bed. I have been selected to drive the costumes back to the university where they were rented from tomorrow. So I have to be up early and then drive an hour and a half each way to get there. I’m not looking forward to it. I’d like to just sleep in and have a nice, easy day. Ah, but there’s work to be done.

Have a great week everyone.

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.

Day Forty-Two: Oklahoma

I have been involved in theatre since 8th grade when I was cast as one of the citizens in The Lottery.  We performed one night at the local college.  I forget what the occasion for the show was.  In high school I acted in almost all of the shows we did, having roles in Oklahoma, Gypsy, and Our Town just to name a few.  In college I continued to study acting playing roles in Guys and Dolls, Charlie Brown, and Godspell.  After college I realized I sucked as an actor, didn’t have the drive to pursue it and to make matters worse it made me a nervous wreck.  So I became a designer.  I’ve been designing lights for theatre, dance and opera since 1989.  In all I’ve designed lighting for close to 100 shows.

I’ve seen actors forget their lines, trip and fall, drop things and break them.  I’ve seen shows stop because of safety concerns, for tornadoes and fire drills but never by an actor.  They have all adhered to the idea that the show must go on.  It’s your job to make it work, hopefully without the audience knowing there’s a problem.  I have never, ever, ever seen an actor stop the orchestra and ask to start over.   After tonight I can’t say that.  Tonight the leading actress entered as usual, the lights came up on her, the conductor cued her and she mumbled something you couldn’t understand, hummed a little and then tried again.  Hummed some more and finally over the orchestra said, “Can we start over.”  I didn’t know whether to laugh or hide.  It was embarrassing for me and I wasn’t on stage.

None of this would be terribly exciting if it weren’t for the fact that the leading lady thinks her shit don’t stink.  She’s made everyone’s life miserable for the past 6 weeks.  I haven’t been in rehearsal, so I don’t have any first hand knowledge but I know most everyone in the cast hates her.  The director has sworn never to work with her again, and stage management would like to push her into the pit.  I don’t have to deal with the actor’s much so I haven’t seen it but 40 people can’t all be wrong.  All of this and she’s having an affair with one of the other actors in the cast and has stopped even pretending it’s not happening.  I think everyone but her husband knows it’s going on.  Except perhaps the family of the man she’s fucking.  That would be one wife and two kids.  Makes me think about the sanctity of marriage we hear so much about.

So tonight she started over.  And was never quite on for the rest of the evening.  She stumbled over words, was off pitch, and just couldn’t seem to get it together.  I sat in the audience tonight waiting to see what would happen next.  Luckily for the most part not much…at least not that the audience noticed.

My ME who I’ve now written off as completely incompetent, was ahead two light cues tonight for almost 10 minutes, completely unaware that anything was wrong.  Luckily the stage manager was paying attention and realized something was up and questioned him enough to make him realize there was a problem.  He might have realized all of this if he hadn’t been reading a book during the show.  I’ve seen some nights where he never looks at the stage and never looks at the monitor to see what’s happening.  He just sits there with his head in the book completely oblivious to what’s happening around him.  Tonight I wanted to strangle him.

And why tonight.  I think I might have forgotten to mention…the show was video taped tonight.  So the official documentation of the show will have the lovely leading lady starting over and will have the light cues in Act 2 completely fucked up.  I can hardly wait to see it.  Nothing like having documentation of the mistakes you make.  Maybe I’ll force the ME to sit and watch it so he can see how bad the show looks when it’s not done the way it’s supposed to be.

Or maybe I’ll go back to New York and call it day.  And know that HE won’t be back next year.   At least not if they want me to be here.

Day Thirty-Nine: Oklahoma

I hate when I feel like I have to do a post, which is exactly how I feel right now.  It’s late, 2:14 a.m. and I’m tired and for the life of me don’t know what to include for today.  I don’t want to recap the day, there’s nothing to complain about, life is good and I sort of want to leave it at that.  But I won’t keep many readers with entries that don’t say anything.

It was a good day.  I woke up this morning before the alarm went off and got to lie there for almost an hour before I had to get up.  I did wait a little too long because the showers were full when I made my way down to the bathroom.  But it was no big deal.  I got dressed and headed downstairs to meet the stage managers to get a ride to the theatre.

At the theatre today I shadowed the stage manager who is in charge of the last show I designed.  There are two stage managers total.  One of them did the first two shows.  And the other one did the last one.  Today I basically followed the last one around so that I could learn the show from her perspective.  Next weekend we are doing the show out of town and she can’t be there.  So I’m going to do her job.  It promises to be quite the adventure because I hate stage managing and I’m going to have my hands full doing my own job.  I’m sure you’ll get a full update next week.

After the show I helped the crew take apart the set for one of the shows.  It closed in town today.  As I mentioned we are touring with it next week but the show I designed is gone for good.  It always seems like a lot of work to only do a show three or four times.  It took us about 2.5 hours to get everything apart and into the backstage area.  Tomorrow it goes on a truck and is taken to storage where it will sit for the next week.

After everything was cleaned up, we ran to get food.  I wasn’t hungry so I waited in the car and called my friend Ryan who is directly to blame for my being here this summer.  He designed scenery here for the past three summers and recommended me to the director after they hated their lighting designer last year.  He raved and raved about how wonderful it all was.  He did all of this and then decided not to come back this season.  He definitely pulled a fast one on me.  So I told him he owed me big time for getting me into this and then bailing.  Then we spent the next thirty minutes on the phone sharing stories about the dorm, the director, and the shows.   In the meantime I had arrived back at the dorm, so I took a three minute shower and got dressed for the evening show.

At the theatre tonight we tried my idea of turning the air conditioner off so that the haze would look better.  We were supported in this endeavor by the facilities people who told us they could give us static air conditioning.  I had never heard of this but it sounded great.  So the show starts and the haze looks great and the temperature rises, and rises and rises and rises.  The static idea didn’t seem to be working.  The haze looked great but the audience was melting.  At intermission I gave in and had the “real” air turned back on.  In about three minutes the place was an igloo and there wasn’t a bit of haze to be seen anywhere.  I had tried to argue that we must suffer for our art.  I was told I could suffer, but not the audience.  Fuck.