Master Harold . . . and the boys

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.

 

 

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