There were two other plays, but both of my productions opened on the same day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 8:00 PM.
This is the only time that I had two plays opening on the same day and needless to say it was a bit crazy, both plays looked good and everything came off well.
There were changeovers of the sets and lights between each of the four plays that took several hours and everyone in the company worked very hard to get it all done.
As the Master Electrician part of my job was to re-patch the lights.
The lighting control board was an early computer board made by Van Buren and there is a description of the lighting board that was in use in the Power Center for the Performing Arts in the 1970’s is in Linda Essig’s 2002 book, The Speed of Light: Dialogues on Lighting Design and Technological Change.
http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Light-Dialogues-Lighting-Technological/dp/0325005087
I would recommend this book to anyone interested the big changes that stage lighting has gone through over the past 25 years, with discussions from the early computer control boards through what is in use today.
The lighting system in the Power Center was State-of-the-Art back in the 1970’s and had many quirks.
It was one of the first computer control boards, if not the first, was prone to overheating as well as dropping its memory.
The system used a slider patch panel that was up on the mid-level loading floor of the fly system on stage right.
Each of the several hundred circuits needed to be moved to their new assignments in one of the 57 dimmers before each show.
Sometimes the sliders would not click in tight to make a good connection or they would be in the wrong slot so it was important to do a dimmer check after each re-patch as there would always be a few sliders that needed to be adjusted during each change over.
As much work and fun that I had my first year there was to be even more adventures in store for me during my second year at Michigan.
Once or twice during my first year I made a few extra dollars by working as a theatre supervisor when an outside an group rented one of the department’s performance spaces but in my second year I worked on more Theatre, Music and Dance productions as well as several union calls working as a stagehand on several touring professional theatre productions and Rock & Roll shows.
Working with the local stagehands union was good experience, lots of fun and paid more money.
One thing that was omnipresent during my entire time at Michigan was the fact that I would have to produce a Master’s Thesis by the end of my second year.
During my first year I saw how hard the second year MFA’s worked on their Thesis’ and how much time that they put into it.
The first and most difficult task of my Thesis was the selection of the play that I would use.
I would need to design the sets, lights and costumes for the play; producing all of drawings, draftings, renderings and related paperwork as well as writing a paper that tied it all together.
There was no restriction and few guidelines given to us, just pick a play that you like and that you can work on for the next nine to ten months.
Oh course I wanted to pick a play that would be fit all the requirements but I also wanted it to be changeling, but not too crazy or with problems that would make it impossible to get it all done.
Early in my second year at Michigan I started the process of selecting a play.
I went through all of the plays I knew and quickly threw out Shakespeare; and not because the plays are difficult, but because many other MFA students had recently used his plays and I did not want my work compared to what they had just done.
When I took a Shakespeare class back at UB the teacher had us read many other non-Shakespeare plays of the pre-Elizabethan era in order to give us a better understanding of Shakespeare’s plays.
We read such plays as Everyman, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Gorbuduc and then we read the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Johson and finally on to Shakespeare himself.
I found this very helpful being able understanding the plays as well as reading them with ease as we progressed from blank verse to Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentamer.
I liked both Marlowe’s plays and his mysterious life and death life; I would have chosen The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus except for the fact that someone had just used it for their Thesis two year before.
My second choice, and the play that I selected, was Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, a play that I really liked when I first read it and I enjoyed working on it.
During the course of my second year there were periodic meetings with the Thesis Committee to report on the progress of the work that I was doing.
Research into the play and playwright, basic design research and preliminary design work all had to be done and approved before the final work would begin during my last summer at Michigan.
More about my Thesis will follow in upcoming blogs.
There was also plenty of other design and class work that I would do my second year beginning with designing the lighting for the first guest artist series production in the Power Center in the fall of 1979.
I had just designed two productions in the summer rep, but those designs were part of a basic rep plot, but now I only had to deal with the one production and could hang whatever lights and specials that were needed for the production.
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