Romeo and Juliet and The Foreigner in Rep, Spring 1993

For some reason in the spring of 1993 the department decided that it would be a good idea to do two shows in repertory.

The two shows could not have been more different; Romeo and Juliet and The Foreigner.

Faculty designed and directed Romeo and Juliet was a beautiful production.

Romeo and Juliet

One show alone there was enough to keep us all more than busy but we had two to take care of.

The students had been taking stage combat instruction from a guest instructor for two years and were very excited to have a chance to use what they had learned onstage.

Some of the young women were very good fencers and were used “In Drag” for the larger fight scenes.

I designed a moody but appropriate lighting for Romeo and Juliet and needed to do a gel change between shows for the front light.

Of course we forgot to change the colors for one show and could not figure out why the lighting for The Foreigner seemed so dark.

The Foreigner was designed by a student and directed by an outside director who we had used for several productions.

Romeo and Juliet

The set was simple enough but offered technical challenges the biggest of which that both it and the set for  Romeo and Juliet had to be able to be taken apart and moved out of the way several times during the run.

For The Foreigner we got to reuse the Dracula elevator to make KKK member melt into the floor.

Of course the biggest challenge was that in the middle of the run we took the set for Romeo and Juliet apart and put it in a truck and brought it to East High School in Rochester so that we could do a matinee and then brought it back and put it back together for the rest of the run.

It was a crazy idea and lots of extra work but the students did a great job even having some fun along the way.

The Foreigner

The Production Manager/ATD was being very diligent about labeling all the set pieces so we could put the set back together.

Just for fun the students made some extra brace pieces, labeled them and put them in the truck.

They got a good laugh watching the PM/ATD  try to figure out where the extra pieces went.

Both productions went well and even though it was lots of extra work it was worth it.

Updated June 7, 2017 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Dec 1992

For A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum the scene designer and I switched jobs as I designed the set for the production.

It was a lot of fun and we had some unique problems to solve.

The set design itself was rather straight forward and offered few challenges except where to put the orchestra.

The Brockport mainstage has an orchestra pit and has been used many times but the director wanted the actors closer to the audience so I designed a pit cover the would go over the pit.

There was a cutout downstage center for the conductor and a few of the musicians had to sit down under the stage.

We would use the pit cover a few times over the years, Hair in 2008 and in 2010 when we did A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum again.

I designed in four grills so the orchestra could have a feel for what was happening above them and to let out a bit of the sound.

The pit reused in 2010

The "Air' Grills

At the time I told everyone that the grills were to let fresh in into the pit.

I was lucky that the scene designer and his students painted the set for me.

I was more than able to paint the paint elevations but do not know if I could have paint the whole set as well as fast as they did.

My painters elevation

Just for fun I put a well with real water and a fountain in the center of the stage.

One student spent hours playing with water pumps and nozzles trying to get a good stream of water.

The director had the main Lovers do a scene going in and out of the water. 

Updated May, 23, 2017

Buried Child, 1992

The 1991-92 season was very successful for our program.

The productions were all large in scale and drew a record number of audience members.

At that time we had a good core of technical students plus hard working other students and staff who all worked hard in the building, painting, lighting, sewing and running the plays.

The 1992-93 would also turn out to be an exciting and successful season which again offered us some very demanding problems to overcome.

The season began with Buried Child by Sam Shepard in the fall and the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in the December slot.

We tried something new in the spring by doing both of our productions in repertory of three weeks instead of the usual two.

The two shows in Rep were  Romeo and Juliet and  The Foreigner.

If just mounting the two shows at the same time was not crazy enough we toured Romeo and Juliet to a Rochester high school during the middle of the run.

The production of Buried Child was performed on a large unit set that did not have one right angle.

The raked stage floor ran diagonally upstage and the walls leaned in at various angles.

Even the door, which was over-sized, was lopsided and was custom made.

It is all the various challenges of a show like this that makes it fun to work on.

I would spend many hours at the drafting board trying to figure out just how to make something work only to change it later because it did not look right or the designer or my assistant had a better idea.

(Note: I would begin to use Auto-CAD by the end of that season but at the time of this show I still used my T-Square and pencils. Cad does make everything easier but I miss the satisfaction I got from hand drafting.)

 One night during the rehearsal of the play and actor almost died.

The actor playing the father was a very large man and spend much of the play slumped over next to a couch.

At one of the breaks in the rehearsal they crew found that the actor was passed out and not breathing very well.

Fortunately the actor recovered the show went on without further incident.

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