Festival of Ten - XII

 

With the Covid-19 shutdown I thought I would have plenty of time to work on my Blog.

Time yes, interest no.

We did have one department production this spring semester plus several smaller student productions.

Most were filmed and one done live with masks.

The student one acts were all done in our black box theatre.

The biggest production was of The Dumb Waiter complete with a set and working dumb waiter.

The actors wore masks and there was a small socially spaced audience.

   

Our department mainstage show was our 12^th edition of our Festival of Ten-Minute plays.

We built an outdoor stage next to the historic Erie Canal and filmed the plays in one long day.

We were lucky with a cool be sunny day and except for a bit of wind things went well.

 

The ten plays were edited with the addition of music and sound effects and were streamed online.

Over 40 students, alumni, faculty and staff all worked together to mount the show.

I write this post as the mask mandates are just being lifted and there is hope things will be next to normal when school begins again in the fall and we can get back into the theatres again.

The New World of Civid-19

 

Well 2020 the year of Covid-19 is finally over.

I had thought, hoped, that I could have caught up on my Blog posts but it never happened.

I couldn't get my mind on my Blog and funny stories of the past when there was this new uncertain crazy world flying all around us.

My brother-in-Law, who had been declining fast to the ravages of dementia, was one of the early victims of the virus.

It brought it too close to home.

After the school closed down in March it became a waiting period to see what the world would through at us next and I never seemed to get a solid grip on getting anything new done.

When school began again this fall it turned out that we had only one production to work on.

We recorded a stage reading of Voices of Freedom Summer—A Reflection on the Turbulent Summer of 1964 and it was streamed online.

My students set up eight music practice rooms for the filming.

Extra furniture was cleared out of the rooms and “Green Screen” material was attached to one wall.

A video camera, lights and a microphone were added to each room.

Each actor also had ear buds so that they could hear each other and be cued when to begin.

All the wires ran out to the hall were it was all recorded.

After a week of rehearsals and recording the sound and videos were mixed into the final product and posted online.

It was not live theatre but gave our students a good experience.

My stagecraft students worked on setting up the rooms and making changes as needed.

The biggest addition to the rooms was adding panels to deaden the sound.

Carpet scraps and blankets were attached to small flats and placed in the rooms.

A segment with all the performers wearing masks was recorded on the Mainstage and used at the beginning and end of the piece.

For much of the semester my students worked on small projects on the stage and in the shop.

We built a new rehearsal table, re-built another and cleaned the stage and shop several times times over.

At the end of the semester all classes went online and I had my students watch a variety of tech videos.

The spring semester is going to start with online classes and hopefully move to face-to-face meetings early in March.

This spring we are planning to do our Festival of Ten, XII.

I am not sure what format we will be doing the 10 ten-minute plays.

They will most likely be filmed with the current plan is to do some, if not all, on the stage with the actors wearing masks.

We will have to wait and see as things seem to change fast in these days of Covid-19.

It became clear to me early on in the pandemic that live theatre, with many people sitting close together in theatres would be one of the last things to reopen.

Let us all hope the vaccines work and we can get back to a more normal world.

Theatre in the age of Corvid-19

For everyone the past few months has not been anything like what we had hoped for 2020 to be. 

As a Theatre Educator I had been busy as usual working on music concerts, theatrical productions,

teaching classes and supervising student projects when the world changed.

Our production of Stupid Fucking Bird was selected to go to the American College Theatre Festival
in Maryland

and our students came back a few weeks early in January to rehearse and make necessary
changes for the tour.

The Festival theatre was different than ours so a few set changes were needed and blocking modified.

After just a few short days of rehearsal the set was packed into a truck and the cast and crew were off.

The performance went well and all our students did a great job.

The truck with the set and costumes returned just a few days before classes began.

The experience was very positive to all the students involved and this gave a general  energy boost
to the department as the new semester was underway.

Even back at the start of the semester stories of this new Virus was popping up in the news.

Our first sign that things ahead were going to be different is that our first music event had
to be postponed because of bad weather.

It put a little bump in our plans but we moved on.

Our first play of the semester was Crimes of the Heart, it would be the third time we have done
it on the Mainstage and the students have also produced the play twice in the Black Box. 

It had been twenty years since our last production so it was not too fresh in most people's memory.

The production went well, the cast worked hard and seemed to enjoy working with each other.

My Stagecraft class, only 5 in number, worked hard to get the set done.

The set was a little late getting finished but all the students came together and pushed hard to get
it painted

and the last details done.

In the end it looked good and the performances went well.

As the weeks of the production went on the Virus was more prominent in the news and various
plans started to be discussed.

By the end of the production we were a week from spring break and it was clear something
was going to happen.

Each day the reports got more dire and plans changed, sometimes several times a day.

We had one last concert before the school and state shut down.

The last thing we did before the shutdown was the rescheduled cello/piano concert from February.

It was very good, almost bittersweet, as we all knew that the world was about to change for us all and we would not be back for a while.

.So here we are two months later.

We finished the semester with a hastily put together distance learning program and our plans
for moving forward are ever changing.

Our future production plans have changed several times and I bet that they will change
again before school resumes.

In the words of the old Chinese curse:

May you live in interesting times.

*.*

x

"Oleanna" and "The Crucible", Spring 1996

Our first play back in the Mainstage Theatre after the renovation was David Mamet’s Oleanna, not my favorite play.

I think it was the pathetic weak-willed nature of the characters rather than the subject that made me dislike the play.

I did not LIKE either of the characters and did not care what happened to them.

The two person play had a single set made up of many bookcases suggesting a round office.

After the show many of the bookcases wandered off to various staff offices.

Our spring production of The Crucible by Arthur Miller was a much more interesting production.

Written in 1953, the play was a reaction to Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the late 1940’s but the play was set during the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Our Director chose to set the play to the 1950’s during the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

At first I was not sure about it but the play was over 40 years old at that point so the time shifting seemed to work fine.

The settings were fragmented suggestions of locations, with the courtroom have the most detail.

 In the courtroom we had two large TV monitors with a video feed coming from a 1950’s looking TV camera.

The TV camera was made from a 1950’s effect projector mounted on the heavy base of an old Strong Super Trooper follow spot.

A small video camera was hidden in the unit with a cable running out to the two TV’s.

The camera was focused on the accused who was facing upstage and the judges.

The effect was great and added to the tension of the trial scene.

 It come as no surprise to my regular readers that we still have the makeshift TV camera down in storage.

Several local adult actors supplemented the large student cast for a strong and powerful production

.

The Department had done a production of The Crucible back in 1967 and those past cast members who were located were invited to the newer production.

One returning cast member was a former minor local TV personality who unfortunately passed away soon after his visit.

Another former actor with a degenerative disease came in a wheelchair and her family said that she was just so happy to have been invited and return to Brockport.

The other returning cast members enjoyed the show but enjoyed seeing each other even more.

The show ran fine and another school year was done.

After a two year break it was time again for summer theatre at Brockport.

Coming up: Barnum.

Renovations of 1995

The main goal of the renovation of Tower Fine Arts Mainstage Theatre in 1995 was to remove and replace the drop ceiling over the seats which contain tons of asbestos.

Also done at that time was the instillation of a new lighting catwalk and two access ladders up to the cove.

The original fire curtain, also full of asbestos, was replaced.

During the renovation all of the seats were removed and the original purple fabric was updated to a nice boring grey.

Now almost twenty-five years later it might be time to replace the seating fabric.

Scaffold in the Mainstage over the frames for the seats.

One day during the renovation work several of my tech students working in the shop practicing their welding skills.

One of the construction workers who was passing through the space stopped to see what the students were doing.

He gave them an impromptu ten minute master class in welding; showing how to adjust the welder, hold the MIG gun and what sound to listen for when making a good weld.

Frying eggs.

In just a short time the students learned more than I could have ever taught them as welding is not one of my strongest skills.

The students thanked the man and continued practicing and making much better welds.

When we got the Mainstage back in January of 1996 we had to explore the space and see what changes were made and to see what we had to do to get ready for another semester of plays and music concerts..

The first thing we found is that the stage floor was ruined.

During the asbestos removal they had built a clean-up shower right in the middle of the stage and a good deal of water had leaked out.

The original stage floor was covered with ¾ inch particle board and the water had swelled the floor panels so much that it was almost 18 inches off the sub-floor in spots.

The worst panels had to be removed and replaced but still much of the rest of the floor was in bad shape.

Somehow and someplace money was found and we replaced the whole stage floor during one of the next free summers.

Soon we all had to see the new lighting catwalk and found that the floor was steel diamond plate with raised texture bumps.

Not good on the knees when working on the lights.

New Catwalk

It did not take too long for us to find and put as much scrap carpet as we could to cover the floor.

My students worked hard to replace the lights to the cove and learn how to work with the new lighting catwalk and the extra pipe added to allow the lights to be focused on the stage.  

    

The first event of 1996 was a music concert at the end of the second week of classes which did not take too much effort but the real test would be the first play a few weeks later.  

* * *

‘Twas the Night before Christmas, 1995

Because the planned renovations to the Tower Theatre Mainstage was behind schedule we changed our Christmas show from A Christmas Carol to a children’s version of ‘Twas the Night before Christmas and moved the show to the Dance Theatre in Hartwell Hall.

The set had several restrictions put on it in order for it to be able to be used in the Dance Theatre.

It had to be small enough to build in Tower and ship over to Hartwell and be easy to be set up and taken down each day so dance classes could be held between rehearsals.

Because the dance theatre has a Marley floor we could not nail or screw anything to the floor.

In addition all of the set pieces all had carpet pieces attached to their bottoms as not to damage the floor.

The set was fairly simple with a few pieces of furniture, a door way, a large fireplace and of course a Christmas tree.

The one big special effect was a plywood cut-out of a silhouette of Santa in his sleigh with reindeer that flew across the sky.

The cut-out was about 18 inches to two feet long and rode on some cables from one side of the stage to the other powered by a stagehand turning a drum with cable that pulled the Santa through the sky.

The kids loved it and it was a big monument in the play but not as big as at the end of the play “Santa” came off the stage and met with the kids and passed out mini candy canes.

The actor who played “Santa” seemed to have candy canes in his pockets for months after the play.

We moved the set and costumes over to the dance Theatre at the end of November on a day when we got hit with an early Artic Blast.

It was only about 14 degrees plus wind, ice and snow.

A simple job of unloading the truck took three times as long as everyone’s fingers were numb.

I do not recall the same problem when we brought the set back to Tower a few weeks later.

Cast onstage

It was not the greatest piece of literature ever written but the sixteen students in it and the many backstage all did a good job and had fun doing it.

Again we had student lighting and sound designers for this show.

The spring of 1996 was up next and a return to the Mainstage Theatre after six months of renovations.

* * *

The Voice of the Prairie, Fall 1995

The summer of 1995 we had no show at the college for the second year in a row.

I spent my time trying to make sure the renovations of the Mainstage Theatre were going well.

I met several times trying to ensure that the new lighting catwalk’s problems could be overcome.

I addition to the many issues of the building renovations there were going to be big staff changes in the fall of 1995.

In addition to the sudden loss of the scene designer we also lost our production manager/shop foreman who left to take a new job at Ithaca College.

A temporary scene designer was found and a search for a full time replacement would soon begin with me has the chair of the search committee.

The choice of The Voice of the Prairie by John Olive worked well for our first fall production in the Black Box theatre.

Note student working up on the Old Grid.

There were only four actors in the cast and the scene design used a unit set with several moving pieces to change the look of the space.

I remember that all of the students did a good job both on and off stage.

The scenic design was mostly a large barn-like wall with a large sliding door and a smaller door that had to fly in and out in a space without a fly system.

I worked with several of my advanced students to make the several scenic challenges, including the flying door, work smoothly.

The show had both  student lighting and sound designers who did a good job.

We had used the Black Box Theatre for three “Mainstage” productions my first few years at Brockport but it had been a while since we had used it.

After our more recent renovations forced us to use the Black Box Theatre again,  one director found that he liked it and has used it several times even after the renovation were done.

Some productions work much better in the intimate Black Box Theatre than on the larger Mainstage.

The building renovations along with other issues made it was a difficult time for the department.

Because the Arts for Children faculty were made into their own area for a few years, our department was down to just four full time faculty, several adjuncts, a guest designer and myself.

We could have had more issues with unhappy students because of the loss of a popular teacher and other staff losses, but our low number of majors at the time and the fact many others had graduated left few hold overs who might be unhappy but they all stepped up and help keep things going.