Items from Storage and Other Odd Tales

We are lucky at The College at Brockport in that the Department of Theatre has a large storage space for our old sets, costumes and lighting equipment.

So much room in fact that sometimes it is too much and we save things that we will never use again.

I have built entire sets with the old walls and platforms from our storage with little need to build anything new but just altering a few things here and there.

Those shows are rare and the set for our current production, Coyote on a Fence, is a mixture of old and new set pieces.

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1698.html

COYOTE ON A FENCE

Most of the platforms and walls are from stock as well as some steel step units made back in 1990 for a summer production of 42^nd street.

Special for this play we did have to make 5 new 4x8 flats, two jail cell doors, two ship’s ladder stair cases and two small stage extension platforms on the side stage areas.

Much of this will go into our stock and fill up our space a bit more.

Back during the recent renovations to our building I was able to throw out a great deal of old stuff but somehow it has filled back up.

I am always surprised but what I still find that I did not know that we had saved and many times I wonder why we saved something in the first place.

Back in October I wrote about our production of Androcles and the Lion and how we still had the raked platform stage that we made for the production.

Recently I found a foam tree that was part of the show and after 25 years the foam has deteriorated to the point that it will crumble in your hands with little effort.

I took one last photo and it is headed for the trash.

We have some set pieces and furniture that seem to get used all the time just because they are just the right size.

There is a small settee that was here when I came and has been used endlessly.

It have been every color in the rainbow, stripped and repainted many times, had pieces added to it, broken, rebuilt and still lives on.

There is even a matching chair that gets used only about half as much.

Other popular pieces are always appearing onstage from our collection of bentwood chairs and small tables, both square and round.

The most difficult thing to find in our collection is four matching chairs.

People will sometimes donate things to the Theatre, but rarely is a full set.

I have added a number of wonderful  “Roadside Antiques” to our collection over the years, you know, junk from the curb.

Wait Until Dark

The second show of my second summer at Brockport was Wait Until Dark for which I designed the set.

Here at Brockport we just did the show again in April of 2011 as part of regular season with the same director as in 1984, Dick St George.

I cannot really tell which production was better because of the large gap of time and my memory of the acting has faded, but I  can honestly tell you I had more fun on the summer production of 1984 because I was more involved with the production.

 

For the most recent production I just served as the Technical Director and had a student Lighting Designer so I had less input into how it looked.

Scene Designer for WAIT UNTIL DARK, 1984

The summer shows were always lots worked mixed with lots  of fun and the student workers did a great job and we all had lots of fun building and running the shows and also during the all important cast parties.

I do not recall that when we did the summer show that we had too many problems except with the noise of the broken refrigerator which is import to the action of the play.

This past year we had a professional sound designer and the show had a “Soundscape” with music that was a bit too melodramatic and other odd noises important to the special plot moments of the play.

Back in 1984 we had a real door buzzer wired into the set and used the shop air compressor as the sound of the refrigerator.

Rough Draft of Scene Design

Final Design

It had to be covered with old stage drapes to muffle the sound a bit but we just turned it on when needed.

The thrown knife effect was done about the same way in both shows and unless you were looking in the right spot you never saw it.

The knife used in the first play was mine and it was a real Buck Knife I had gotten for Christmas.

It turned up missing after one of the performances and we had to buy a new one and it is the same knife that I have with my tools to this day.

The husband of the main character is a photographer and there is a dark room onstage important to action of the play.

The changes that have happened with the passage of time could clearly be seen with the photographic props.

Back in 1984 we just moved equipment from the department dark room onstage and plugged it in and used it, but for last spring’s production they had to hunt for an enlarger, safelight and the other items needed.

We did use the same old front loading washing machine in both productions.

I think we even used the same oven that has been a piece of crap that we should have thrown out years ago.

In both productions we used crew people with costume changes to walk across the platform that was outside of the set’s windows at different during the play.

For our recent production I used about 15 to 20 student and about five to six weeks to build the set, back in 1984 I had about 6 helpers and we built in less than 10 days.

WAIT UNTIL DARK, 2011

It is amazing how more help can actually slow you down sometimes; but back then on the summer productions we did work at least eight hours a day seven days a week but  because it was the summer the students did not have to run off to classes.

Now being 30 years older than most of my students instead just 4 or five years older, I do not get as close to them as I did when I first started working at Brockport, but I still enjoy working on the plays and teaching the students how it is done, even though I no longer get to go out drinking with them.

Two brothers who were both in the summer production of the play and happened to grow up in Brockport were back in town and came to one of our fall productions.

It was nice to see them both, but it was a shame that they missed the newer production of Wait Until Dark.

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