Ah, Wilderness, October 1988

I am sorry that I have been a bit lax and distracted on my blog entries of late.

As I progress through the many plays that  I have worked on over the years I find that although I have many stories I do not always have wild tales for every show or season of plays.

Maybe I am getting old but some years and shows do blend together.

I clearly remember the 1987 production of Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O'Neil but I only have a few stories but nothing wild.

 

It was a good production, the first of the new school year.

It was a little hard for me to work on the play as I was pretty sick and had pneumonia.

I have worked through many colds and even the flu but this was different and so bad that I even had to take one whole sick day off.

I knew that I was pretty sick when I bent down to pick up something and I did not have enough air to stand up with great effort.

The set would get done and the show went off well.

I thought it was funny that the young actress who played the Irish maid actually spoke very little English.

She was a Latina but I do not remember which country she was from.

The actor who played the drunk uncle was an recent alumni and I do remember that he spent a good deal of time working with the girl running her lines when they were offstage.

I am sure he was just it for the good of the play and not to hit on her but in any case she did OK during the play and you could almost understand what she said.

The play calls for one of the boys to throw firecrackers on the set and we used real ones that I just happened to have.

I think I got them on the same trip through the south when I got the bottle rockets that I had fired at the Anything Goes set a few summers before.

I think I still have a few of the firecrackers in my tool box and I never seem to through them away because I just like having them.

They make me feel young.

As for the rest of Ah, Wilderness I really do not have much else to say about it.

This is does not mean that it was a bad show but just another one of hundreds that I have worked on.

As I go through the years in my Blog I know that I have left out some of the many smaller production that I worked on.

During a normal school year we would have several music concerts of varied styles and size.

We have had classical trios, quartets and full orchestras, jazz groups, folk groups, singers and even Indian Sitar music.

Oh, the Sitar concert, not one of my favorites.

The first song was nice and so was the second but after a while it all sounded the same and the guy would not stop and he played on for hours.

Additionally there are always many student productions from the full club productions each semester to the many one act student senior projects.

I have overseen most of the shows and my direct involvement has varied from just a few words of advice or encouragement to designing the whole set or lighting for the show when the students have been desperate.

I prefer to just advise them, give them some options and let them decide what do it themselves.

I do not have a clear picture on how many productions that I did "Ghost" design work for but I am always happy when the students can do it themselves with maybe just a bit of help.

In any normal school year we may have bonus events in the theatre that take up my time.

In recent years we have had the college president and vice president give their opening of the school year speeches.

In the past I have worked on various commencement related events the nursing, education and ROTC programs.

It has been a very rare year that we have not had some extra event in one of our two theatres.

As I write this we are going to have a bonus production in the lab theatre tomorrow as part of the college's diversity conference.

When they asked to use the space they never said that it was a play that was coming in, I thought it was just going to be a lecture.  

In short it has been a pain in the ass but I got some of my student workers to run it while I work with others on the main department production.

I try to avoid these type of added shows but I cannot always do it.

I will bitch a lot but will work hard to make sure that it will come off OK.

Tempted as I am to do a bad job so they will not come back I just cannot do it.

I do not want anything that I work on or is in our space to look bad as it will reflect badly on our department even if we did not produce it.

Theatre, always fun.

 

 

 

Change

Working at a college there is always change.

Each year the student body changes as some students will graduate or drop out and new ones come in.

Students stay as little as one semester and stay as long as five years or more.

As I noted in another post I think an average stay for students is about three years.

There are changes in the staff over time as well but not usually as dramatic as when we graduate a large number of students in one year. 

The fall of 1988 was the beginning of many staff changes in just a short time that really re-shaped the department.

At the end of my first year one on the faculty left to become a dean at another college and after my third year the lighting designer left after not getting tenure.

There had been little change until the fall of 1988 when we got a new costume designer.

Don was a very good designer but would only stay for two years and then we got a temporary new designer in the fall of 1990 and she would stay just one year.

The fall of 1991 brought our fourth costume designer in just over three years and luckily she would stay for about six years before leaving and we would get the fifth and current costume designer during my time at Brockport.

In the fall of 1989 we would also get a new scene designer who became very popular with the students but would only stay six years before leaving.
 

We would also get a new acting teacher in the fall of 1990 when long time popular teacher Gisela Fritzsching was forced to retire by state law at 70, a law that was changed the very next year.

As I write this she is still going at about 93.

Over the years there would be several more changes with our music staff and other academic faculty, but that period from 1988 through 1991 with so many design faculty changing was challenging for me.

It always seems to take a few shows working together to get use to how other designers work and get to the point where everyone works as a team.

This does not mean that we did bad productions; it just means that we had to work just a bit harder to get it right.

As I get ready to write about the plays I worked on during this period I thought I would take a minute to figure out just who I was working with.

I think maybe I need to go through all my programs and make a chart of who was here when, but that sounds too much like work and not lots of fun.

As I write this we are two weeks away from the start of another school year; it will be my 32^nd year at Brockport.

We have already had a design meeting for the first fall production.

The 2013-14 season for those who care:

Almost, Maine

by John Cariani

October 4-6 and 17-19  

 

Avenue Q

by Lopez, Marx and Whitty

November 22-24 and December 5-7  

 

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

by Sarah Ruhl

February 28-March 2 and March 6-8   

 

bobrauchenbergamerica

by Charles Mee

April 25-27 and May 1-3

So up next the 1988-89 season and stories from those plays.

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