This would be a bit different that school year as I decided to move to the main campus closer to the theatre Department and most of my classes.
The new campus at UB was fun, but I was spending too much time on a bus getting back and forth just to go back to the dorm to sleep after long days at the Theatre.
The Theatre Department’s Lighting Design teacher had taken a leave to finish his MFA and we had his assistant in charge that year.
I guess I was a bit pumped, a junior now ready to take on new challenges and responsibilities.
That year I again worked on many plays in many different capacities including serving as the Lighting Designer for Harold Pinter’s “Old Times", Technical Director for Euripides’ “The Bacchae” and the Stage Manager for Eric Bentley’s “From the Memories of Piteous Pilate”.
We had a nice core of tech students who had now worked together on many shows over two years.
We were now upper classmen and took leadership roles on all of the productions, but still worked on each others shows even if not assigned.
Even with all our work we always found time to party.
By my junior year many of the theatre majors had moved off campus as I would do in the spring semester.
One friend and his housemates had a great Halloween party that year and another the next year.
They got complaints from the neighborhood homeowners association, so you know it must have been a great party.
What was there to complain about?
They moved their living room furniture, rugs, TV and lights all on the lawn for a nice display.
Inside there was plenty to drink and someone had set the beer up so it came out of the kitchen water faucet when you turned it on.
The next year to top the lawn display from the previous year they took a car that one of them had been working on and tipped it on its side, “crashing” into the house, with a dead body hanging out the window and colored lights inside the car.
Working as the Stage Manager for Eric Bentley’s “From the Memories of Piteous Pilate” was interesting and different from the things I normally worked on.
Eric Bentley, 93 as I write this, is a well known and respected critic and scholar of the work of Bertolt Brecht.
His best known play is “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigations of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee 1947-1958”.
In his prime he toured the world doing his one man show signing the songs of Bertolt Brecht.
For several years Bentley was a guest professor at UB and came to some of our rehearsals.
He gave me script updates from time-to-time, but the director told me to just thank him and put them in the back of my prompt script.
Several years later when the script was published I was not too surprised to find that the written play did not match the version that we produced.
One day while waiting for one of the rehearsal to begin I got to hear Mr. Bentley play the piano.
He played selections from the two music books that had been left there, The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan Songbooks.
The Department brought in a guest director from NYC for the play.
He asked me to sit with him during the auditions and after one actor left he asked what I thought of him.
I did not think he was very good, but who am I to say, so I just told him that the actor gave him everything he had, he was not hiding anything and that there was not any more depth to him.
He got a part.
Several weeks later when the rehearsals were to begin we found out that the director had quit and was to be replaced.
The new director stayed with the original cast and we went on.
I enjoyed the show and the rehearsal process, but never stage managed again.
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