In February 1987 we did Master Harold . . . and the boys
by Athol Fogard.
The play calls for only three actors but we used
only one student and two outside actors from Rochester to fill out the cast.
Normally I do not like it when we have to use too
many outside actors but there was no way we could have done the play with the
college students we had at the time.
Colleges produce plays for many reasons and giving
acting opportunities to our students has always been one of the top reasons.
On occasion we try to produce plays that we feel
will challenge the audience and Master Harold . . . and the boys was
one of those plays.
Set in South Africa in 1950 during the height of the
Apartheid era, the story follows a seventeen year old white boy and his
relationship with the two adults black men who work in his family's tea room.
The play is powerful in its depiction of institutional
racism and how it destroyed the relationship of the young Master Harold and the
two Black men he had known most of his life. |
| Master Harold . . and the boys |
The simple box set for the play offered some
interesting challenges for me.
The designer chose not only to use vinyl flooring on
the floor but to cover the walls as well.
It was not hard to use but I made a few mistakes on
how best to attached it to the flats but in the end the final set looked good.
The set called for large windows in the front of the
tea room.
We never use real glass on stage when we can avoid
it and there was not plexi-glass big enough to cover the openings.
I ended up using large 3-M window insulating kits;
the plastic sheets you put on in the winter and use a hair dryer to shrink tight.
The script calls for it to be raining at the beginning
of the play.
Making it rain onstage is not impossible to do but
does have many obstacles that you need to overcome.
The water falling on the stage is not as hard as
collecting the water that falls is.
With the water flowing around the stage one has to
worry about the water not leaking out and also the stage has lots of electricity
about and electrocuting someone is not a good idea.
We could not afford to have a real rain curtain, the
collection system and pumps needed to do it right and had to come up with a
simple solution.
All the designer wanted was some indication that it had
been raining and some water on the widows would be enough.
So the easiest thing to do was just to use a
"Hudson" sprayer, a common tool used in most theatres, to spray some
water on the windows just before the play started.
The problem that we had was that the water just ran
right down the plastic and was gone almost as soon as it was sprayed on.
Having drank a few cokes in my lifetime, I remembered
that I has noticed that regular Coke would stick to the side of the bottles or
glasses and that diet Coke would just run down quickly.
Sugar, we needed to add sugar to the water.
There just happened to be some lemonade mix onstage
and I mixed up a big batch in the sprayer.
The sugary mix worked well and after several coats
there were trails of sugar on the windows and the water would slowly drip down
during the beginning of the play.
I do not know how many people could really see the
effect but everyone was happy with it.
I was glad it February and not the middle of the
summer because flies and other bugs would have been a problem.
The set had two hanging lamps but I wanted to add a
third wall light. We had nothing in stock that looked right so I made my own
wall sconce.
I wanted a similar shape and size as the two hanging
lights and somehow I got the idea to cut a plastic colander in half and use it.
It worked and looked good.
Well this is Blog post number 150, I still have many more stories to share and will be posting them soon.
