Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Play List and Costume Crew Work

In my two years at Michigan I worked on many plays, plus dance concerts and several touring plays and rock shows.
Here is a list of the major plays that I worked on while at the University of Michigan:

Showcase Productions - 1978/9

Blood Wedding
Red Roses for Me
People are Living There
In Celebration

1979/80

End of Summer
Tango
The Lion and the Jewel
The Master Builder

Guest Artist Series Production - 1978/79

She Stoops to Conquer
Richard II
The Inspector General
The River Niger

1979/80

Idiot’s Delight
Richard III
Eden
The Relapse

Summer Repertory Productions - 1979

Hay Fever
Ah, Wilderness!
Much Ado About Nothing
Wedding Band

1980

Blithe Spirit
La Ronde
Of Thee I Sing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream


As I had noted in an earlier post, I designed the lighting Blood Wedding, the first play of the year.
All of the technical and design classes at Michigan required some hands on crew work.
At the same time I was working in the scene shop, designing lights for Blood Wedding, working on classroom design projects I had to find time to work in the costume shop.

I was assigned to work on the costumes for the Guest Artist Series production of She Stoops to Conquer.
Mt first job was to learn how to use a seam ripper.
As in many theatre productions, costumes are often reused and altered to fit the design of the new play.
After many hours of deconstruction I was moved into the construction phase and learned to joys of running a serger or baby lock.



I was putting an edge on miles of light blue fabric to be used for petticoats for She Stoops to Conquer at the same time they were working on the costumes for Blood Wedding which were all black.
There was lots of cursing as we tried to share the machine.
It is not too hard to use, OK you could cut your finger off or ruin yards of fabric, but he biggest pain was trying to re-thread it if the thread broke and if you used the wrong color you would have to stop and rip it all out and start all over again.

By the end of my time in the costume shop I was doing OK and they even let my use the regular sewing machine and cut out some cloth for a pocket flap for a vest.
Just as I finished the flap on the vest, the costumer noticed that I had the grain of the corduroy fabric running the wrong way.
Of course everyone in the shop laughed and it was decided that it could stay as it was because it would be under a long overcoat most of the time.

I also had to work on the wardrobe crew for another play and was on the run crew for Red Roses for Me.
I did all the basic prep work making sure everything was ready before the play, but my most important job was working as a dresser backstage during the performance.
At one point in the play the main character goes offstage and is in a fight.
I had to tear apart the shoulder of his suit jacket and apply power to his elbows and knees to make it looked as he had been in a tussle.
After the scene I returned the jacket to the shop where a seamstress would repair it and prepare for the next performance.
That was extent to all of my advanced training in costuming while at Michigan.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Power Center for the Performing Arts

I spent a lot of time in the Frieze building shops and theatres but there was a bigger theatre that we got to work in too.
At the time Power Center for the Performing Arts was less than ten years old and had state-of-the art stage equipment.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/power/index.htm

Power Center

In addition to the smaller student showcase productions in Trueblood Theatre there were four Guest Artists Plays in the larger Power Center for the Performing Arts each year.
With the addition of a professional actor, director or designer much more was expected from the Guest Artist Series plays.
The budget and scope of these plays were bigger and were given much more support than the showcase productions.
Soon after I graduated the Power Center went through a major renovation with the addition of a new scene shop and other added spaces.

The lighting board was an early computer controlled system that was not very sophisticated by today’s standards but still it was better than anything else I had seen in use at that time.
Reading over the new Technical Specifications I have seen that all of the lighting and sound equipment is new and up to date.

I would design the lighting for two summer repertory plays, one Guest Artist series plays and a music event.
I would also work on all of the other department productions in the Power Center as an electrician, carpenter or sound engineer.
Additional I worked on several touring Broadway plays, an opera and several dance pieces.
In total I worked on almost 30 major productions plus many smaller events in one capacity or another during my two years at Michigan.

The Power Center is a large theatre and was the biggest I had worked in up until that time.
Working up in the lighting rings was always fun especially those right over that front of the stage.
To focus the lights in the closest rings to the stage you had to sit with your butt on the edge of the opening with your feet on the other side, the light between your legs and the floor 30 feet below.
This was all done without a safety harness.


Lighting Rings over the Seats

To work on the lights in the Rings over the audience you had a climb a ladder on side of the balcony up through a trap door.
There were lights on the ladder too and these were very hard to focus.
The follow spots and sound control board was also there and the technicians running the shows often brought a larger coffee can with them as there was no quick or easy access to the restrooms during a performance.


Ladder up to the Rings

Using the large “A” frame ladder to focus onstage lights was also fun and if you use the sway of the top extension ladder just right you could reach lights six to eight feet apart.

The theatre had at least one union (IASTE) stage technician at all times plus a doorman.
The doorman, usually an older member of the union, checked people’s names as they came in to work.
The Senior House Tech technician kept a log book with every light and the date a new lamp was put into it and he was always mad at our teacher for using different lamps in the lights.
There were always 750 watt lamps in all of the lights and our teacher always had us add 1500 watt lamps in many of the front of house lights but always forget to change out a few after the show was over and this would always piss the Senior House Tech off.
When I designed in the theatre I would just plan to have two units side-by-side assigned to do the same job hoping that the combined output would throw enough light from the rear lighting ring to the stage.

There were a few other quirks with the theatre.
One student assigned to run the lighting board had to be replaced because he had an electrical charge to his body that would change the levels of the lights when he got near the control panel.
Just by running his hand over the board you could watch the levels go up and down on the dials and onstage.

Very unique.



They had not planned the loading dock very well as the road leading to it came up a hill and trucks had a hard time backing up it even if there was just a little ice on it.

One time while working in the theatre there was a wonderful bright shaft of light came down on the stage but the designer could not get it to turn off.
After a few minutes we all realized that a balcony door was open to the lobby and that the shaft of light was reflected sunlight bounced around the big glass lobby that way.
It only happened that one time while I was there, but it very funny watching the light board operator trying to figure out what was wrong.

There were other places that I got to work while in Michigan but I spent most of my time in the Frieze Building and the Power Center which were just a few blocks apart.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Frieze Building

The Frieze Building was my home for two years.
Although I got to work in other theatres and spaces, the Theatre Department and most of its classes were held there.
There were two theatres, classrooms, a library as well as a scene, costume and prop shops plus storage areas throughout the basement.

Here is a like to the official University of Michigan history of the building page:
http://umhistory.dc.umich.edu/mort/central/north%20of%20north%20u/Frieze%20Building/index.html

It was old, the equipment was not up to date, but it still was a great place to work and learn about Theatre.
Built in 1905 it had seen several changes since it was the Ann Arbor High School.
The scene shop was in the old gymnasium and the main theatre space had been renovated many times.
One feature that was unique was the freight elevator that went from the basement up to the shop and up to the theatre above.
To get to the theatre the elevator had to lift a section of the floor up with it as it came through the stage floor in the upstage right corner.

The main theatre was named Trueblood and the proscenium and stage floor had been extended and slots were cut into the ceiling for lights.
The onstage fly grid had wooden slats and very scary for anyone, especially heavy people, to walk on.
The lighting and sound equipment had long seen better days, but it was still a great place to work and the fact that there was a ghost even made it better.

It only took a few late nights working in the space for the stories of the “Trueblood Ghost” to come out.
There was always some odd bump or other noise, maybe it was the wind or it could have been the pigeons that lived in the eaves, but there always seemed something odd that would happen during a show.
For me I would often find things that were in places that no one working would have put them or objects that moved on their own, like a small ball just rolling across the floor.

One night, while working late in the theatre, I could not get the house lights to turn off.
I tried the wall control switch several times with no results so I thought that I would just shut off the main power feed to the system.
The main switch was an old style big knife blade handle, something from a Frankenstein movie, a bit unsafe and scary.



I pulled the handle, cut the power to the lighting system and all the lights stayed on.
Mmmmm? Think I’ll go home.
When I came back the next day the lights were off and I could not find anything wrong with the system and it all worked perfectly fine after that day.

There was a second smaller theatre that was just off the shop in which many small projects were held.
The Arena Theatre held maybe 50 or so people and did not have great equipment for sound or lights.
When I was the department electrician my second year I helped on may shows there either designing or supervising the other students working in there.
Maybe times it was the first space that a lighting design student would work and many times they were other design students, actors or directors who were just doing it for class.
I had to show them how equipment worked and clean up after they were done plus fix their many mistakes and this really helped prepare me for my current job.

The basement storage was a maze of odd rooms and spaces with sets pieces, props and furniture all over the place.
One time while looking for something in one of the dirt floor spaces of the basement I saw a light flash back at me and thought that my flashlight hit a mirror or other piece of glass but as it move in a odd pattern I thought maybe I had meet the “Trueblood Ghost”.
The girl with me was a bit concerned but soon two college facilities workers came our way, nodded and just walked on by.
I do not think that we ever found what we were looking for.

The attic was just as much fun with its beams air ducks and graffiti from the early 1900’s.
It was almost a complete forth floor, but one had to be careful where you walked.
There were stories of people who lived up there and you could clearly see that people had at least stopped to eat lunch there or some little party.

I worked on many plays, dance concerts and other events in the two theatres in the Frieze building but there were many other places that we worked including the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre in the Michigan League Building, Hill Auditorium, Chrysler Arena and the glass wrapped Power Center for the Performing Arts.
Many of the other spaces were far better than the theatres in the Frieze Building, but it always seemed comfortable and safe to work there.
It is gone now, they have turn it down, but they save a little of the façade to use as part the new building that will soon take its place.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Ann Arbor

There was a former classmate from UB who was finishing up his MFA degree  at Michigan just as I got there.
Having someone else from my old school made it easier, and at times harder, for me when I got to Ann Arbor.
It was nice to have a place to stay when I came out to interview and looked for my house in the fall plus it was also nice that he showed me around town and took me to some parties.
Because I was another student from UB there was some of “who does he think he is” and “what does he know” but the worst thing is that I had a New Yawk accent.
As I soon found out there was always some hazing of the new students, mostly all in jest, and I was not the only new student and we all had to prove ourselves to the older students and faculty.


Ann Arbor was, and still is, a cool place to live and I enjoyed exploring it when I had the time.
There was a lot to see and explore in Ann Arbor.
As I have worked on my Blog I have reviewed my old Playbills and have looked up old friends and places on the internet.

I recently took a virtual tour of Ann Arbor with the help of Google Maps Street View feature.
After thirty years I was surprised how many things still look the same, but of course there have been changes.
The three houses that I lived in are all there and look about the same, although one house had scaffold along side of it and looked like it was getting some long needed updating.

The college and town as grown since my time there and most recently they tore down the old Theatre building just as they opened a wonderful new multi-Theatre complex on the north campus.
For those of us who spent many hours working in the Frieze building we will miss it.
I found a nice photo set on Flickr that shows the Frieze Building in it's last days:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfobrien/sets/72157594246447684/

A postcard shows the building when it was still the Ann Arbor High School:


As a student I did not have a car, so I explored my world mostly on foot and with the help of an occasional bus or friend’s car.
During my time there I went to all of the college museums; the Arts, Natural History and small but interesting Museum of Archaeology, where you could see ancient treasures stolen from other countries.

http://www.umma.umich.edu/

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/exhibitmuseum/

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey

They have expanded and changed all of the museums since 1980, but I did enjoy exploring them at the time between classes and working on productions.
I also found the rare book room in the library, although I was often amazed by how old some of the books were in the regular collection.
The rare book room is now part of the “Special Collections Library”, although I was disappointed they only have a Second, and not First, Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/special-collections-library

There were many fun shops, restaurants, bars and others places I like to go.
For anyone who has spent time in Ann Arbor you would know Nickel’s Arcade, the Cube, the Fleetwood Dinner, Old Town and the Blind Pig.



There were plenty of things that I never got to do in Ann Arbor; places I never saw, but I always had a great time when I was there.
My days were full of working on a plays, researching  papers or drawing and drafting, but those short times between classes, walking home or those rare days off I enjoyed the town as much as I could.
I got to go back to Ann Arbor five years after I graduated, but its been almost 25 years since I was last there and a return trip is long overdue.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Classes and Football

As a Lighting Design major at the University of Michigan I took a variety of Theatre Design classes but I also had to take a few non-Theatre courses.
I took two classes from the English Department, Modern and Contemporary Drama and one from the Psychology Department, Perception.

Modern and Contemporary Drama: neither class dealt with present-day plays as the first plays we read were written in the 1880’s; the newest was from the 1950’s.
But they were both good classes and I got to read many classic plays, at least 35 each semester, and I think I read everything from Ibsen, Chekov, Shaw, Strindberg, Beckett plus many others.
The teacher, the same for both courses, was a scholar of the works of Samuel Beckett.
The teacher was so proud when he got a return letter from Beckett after sending him a copy his latest book.
The teacher went on and on about how great the letter was and how Beckett was so “avant-garde” and that he was such a new post-modern minimalist, blah, blah, blah.

The letter was a blank piece of paper.

I am thinking “Hey, this guy just Shit on you, and doesn’t care what you think about his plays”, but I did not say a thing.
He was a good teacher, I learned a lot from him and he is still teaching at Michigan and writing books on Beckett, Arthur Miller and others.

Unlike most MFA programs which are three years, at the time Michigan’s was only two years, but we also had to take classes over the summer which made up the normal number of credit hours.
As part of my fellowship I had to work for the Department and my first year I was assigned to the scene shop where I would work with students from the basic stagecraft classes who had to do shop hours each week.
My second year I served as the department electrician and sound designer.

In the summers we worked on four summer repertory plays and took a few special topic courses from guest lecturers.
As a graduate assistant we all worked on many shows, designing for some and just helping out on many others.
Some of the classes required that we would work on specific crews such as sewing in the costume shop or working the wardrobe run crew for the costume design class.
Of course I enjoyed it when I got to design the lighting for shows but I really enjoyed all of the different crews I got to work on.

Because there were at least eight to ten major productions a year, numerous one act lab shows plus four more in the summer, there was always something that needed to be done on one show or another.
It is hard to remember every show I have worked on because my involvement might be limited to just helping out for a few hours one day in order to get a show finished or to fix a problem that may have come up.
Just so we would not get bored we also worked with the Dance and Music Departments and a number of events and I got to work with the local stagehands union when several turning plays and rock shows came through town.
Stories to follow soon.

Of course with all of this work to be done I quickly learned that no work was scheduled on Saturdays in the fall as everyone took off to watch the most important event in the world:

MICHIGAN FOOTBALL!

It is hard to tell from the efforts of the last few seasons, but back then it was all about BO and Football.
I was so busy trying to get into school that I did not even think about getting tickets for the game and although as a student I could have bought season tickets, that first year I would have gotten the worst seats in the end zone.

It takes many years of buying tickets before you slowly move around to the side of the stadium and many more before you are near the 50 yard line.
I knew some students who would buy the season tickets just to sell off the Ohio State game ticket to pay for the rest and even more if they were lucky.
I was so busy with classes and designing lights for the first play of the year that I did not even pay too much about football and thought that there would be plenty of time to catch a game next year.
Things change and I only got busier as time went on, and as you can guess I never got to a game, but it did not seem important to me at the time.

I did get close to a game one week, but that is another story (there may be a waterbed in the story...).

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Blood Wedding, October 1978

There were many things to do as I started Grad School; getting used to a new school and town, buying text books and art supplies plus I was designing the lighting for the first department production of the year and had no time to relax.

The play was Blood Wedding and was written in 1932 by Federico García Lorca.
The play deals with the usual tragic themes: love, lust, betrayal, life and death.
Although not ideal, lighting designers are often brought late into the design process after the basic design concepts and stage layout have already been worked out and this was the case with Blood Wedding.
The set design was a unit set with many areas and platform levels with an erosion cloth backdrop.
I remember that the director had a clear vision for what she wanted to see on the erosion cloth backdrop.
She wanted the colors projected on the cloth to progress during the play progressed in the same way as the color of stars change as they get hotter: Red, Orange, Yellow, Yellow-White, White, Blue-White, and Blue.
For the most part the colors seemed to match the action of the play as the passions of the characters grew during the play and I was able to make it work.

Blood Wedding, Lighting Design, 1978

A year a so later I was working with a chorographer on his dance piece when he asked for the same color blending on the cyclorama during his dance.
I laughed a bit to myself and told him I understood completely and gave him just what he wanted.

At an early rehearsal for Blood Wedding, with the ground plan taped on the floor, I saw the set was not going to work as planned because the acting areas were too small for the numbers of actors in the scenes.
I brought it up at the next meeting but was told not to worry about it as everything would be fine.

Later after the set was built actors indeed do not fit in the spaces provided and they were having a hard time moving up and down the levels.
More than one person mentioned that at times the actors seemed like a family of goats going up and down a hillside.

The Moon

Some of my housemates came to see the show and I got them into the balcony of the theatre which was normally closed to the general public.
The play may have had some issues, but the critic for the local paper clearly did not understand the play and the concept of an allegorical character was beyond his comprehension.
I think my housemates got more enjoyment ripping apart the review of the play and how poorly it was written then from the play itself.

After the play there was a session in the theatre with the faculty and other design students where I had to explain my design concepts and methods and answer their questions.
Of course the other students have to try to show that they are smarter, question all of your choices and tell how they could have done it better.
It was a bit tough but I survived.
I felt that I had done a good job with the lighting and was happy with the results, but the end of each semester there was a portfolio review when each student had to show all of their class and design work to the faculty and I would have to wait to see what they thought of what I had done.
After the review the faculty would meet with the students to discuss any concerns that they had with their work and twice while I was there students were thrown out of the design program after one of the reviews.
As it turned out the student who designed the set Blood Wedding was thrown out of the program after the next review.
I felt bad, hoping my lighting did not make his set look bad, but I was assured that it was for the total poor quality of his class and design work and not just this one production.

Through a recent “Google” search I know that the student who was kicked out of the program has been working backstage in Atlantic City Casinos and Resort Hotels.
The small world of Theatre continues as the director of Blood Wedding has been coming to Brockport in recent years to adjudicate our plays for the American College Theatre Festival.