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.
