The New World of Civid-19

 

Well 2020 the year of Covid-19 is finally over.

I had thought, hoped, that I could have caught up on my Blog posts but it never happened.

I couldn't get my mind on my Blog and funny stories of the past when there was this new uncertain crazy world flying all around us.

My brother-in-Law, who had been declining fast to the ravages of dementia, was one of the early victims of the virus.

It brought it too close to home.

After the school closed down in March it became a waiting period to see what the world would through at us next and I never seemed to get a solid grip on getting anything new done.

When school began again this fall it turned out that we had only one production to work on.

We recorded a stage reading of Voices of Freedom Summer—A Reflection on the Turbulent Summer of 1964 and it was streamed online.

My students set up eight music practice rooms for the filming.

Extra furniture was cleared out of the rooms and “Green Screen” material was attached to one wall.

A video camera, lights and a microphone were added to each room.

Each actor also had ear buds so that they could hear each other and be cued when to begin.

All the wires ran out to the hall were it was all recorded.

After a week of rehearsals and recording the sound and videos were mixed into the final product and posted online.

It was not live theatre but gave our students a good experience.

My stagecraft students worked on setting up the rooms and making changes as needed.

The biggest addition to the rooms was adding panels to deaden the sound.

Carpet scraps and blankets were attached to small flats and placed in the rooms.

A segment with all the performers wearing masks was recorded on the Mainstage and used at the beginning and end of the piece.

For much of the semester my students worked on small projects on the stage and in the shop.

We built a new rehearsal table, re-built another and cleaned the stage and shop several times times over.

At the end of the semester all classes went online and I had my students watch a variety of tech videos.

The spring semester is going to start with online classes and hopefully move to face-to-face meetings early in March.

This spring we are planning to do our Festival of Ten, XII.

I am not sure what format we will be doing the 10 ten-minute plays.

They will most likely be filmed with the current plan is to do some, if not all, on the stage with the actors wearing masks.

We will have to wait and see as things seem to change fast in these days of Covid-19.

It became clear to me early on in the pandemic that live theatre, with many people sitting close together in theatres would be one of the last things to reopen.

Let us all hope the vaccines work and we can get back to a more normal world.

Things Change---The Grapes of Wrath, 1990

My vacation in May of 1990 started out just like the previous eight years.

After the last show of the school year was done and school was over for another year I took a few weeks off and went back to Long Island to visit my family.

As I had done most years before I came home to relax, visit with family and friends and maybe go into the City and see a Broadway show.

That May I saw The Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of The Grapes of Wrath with Gary Sinse as Tom Joad.

It was a great play but I was stupid and bought box seats on the side.

I could see backstage and saw how things worked but still I wish I had a seat more to center.

I was not impressed by the stagehands in shorts and a printed t-shirts walking on the stage at intermission.

Also while back on Long Island there were several used book stores that I liked to visit and of course I had to get some Pizza.

I am a bit of pizza snob.

I like New York Style Pizza and although I had some favorite places to go I found that almost anyplace I went on Long Island I would find better Pizza than I could back in Brockport.

This trip was different because my mother was sick.

She had seemed to have a cold or flu that had gone on for months.

My mother was in good spirits but her voice was going and she found it hard to talk.

After two weeks it was time to go back to Brockport and start work on the summer musical 42^nd Street.

When I got back to Brockport we got right to work on the play.

It was going to be a big show but we had a good crew and I was happy because I able to hire on a former student who just got out of Graduate school as my assistant.

Things on the show were going well but each time I called home my mother’s voice got worse and after a while see could not talk loud enough to use the phone.

In early June I got a call that my mother was in the hospital for tests but she was doing OK.

At first they said she had Lyme Disease. 

It seemed to fit some of her symptoms but not all of them.

After a week I got a call, my mother had cancer, but it was the “Good Kind”.

I did not know that there was a “Good Kind”.

It did not sound good so I made plans to go home.

The play could wait.

The Scene Designer and ATD said that they would take care of things while I was gone.

The day before I was leaving for home I got a call, it was too late, my mother had passed away.

She had insisted on starting chemotherapy treatment but it was too late and too much for her.

So now I was driving home for a funeral, not a visit.

Needless to say it was trip that I do not remember making.

My mother was a member of the local volunteer ambulance company and they were great in helping with everything.

There were people in uniform standing as an honor guard each day at the funeral home, EMT’s, firemen and police.

Funerals by their nature are not funny but some things do happen that can make you laugh.

I drove my father to the church and the cemetery after the mass.

Instead of a hearse the coffin rode in a box ambulance along with a police escort.

My dad smiled a bit when he saw the motorcycle cops block the entrance to the highway so that the funeral procession could get on.

As we were nearing the cemetery another funeral procession was pulled over to the side of the road so that we could go past.

The other people in the other funeral procession had seen the police with lights on and the ambulance so off course they pulled over to the side to let them by and we just drove right by them all.

This made my father laugh and said something about how my mother would have liked what had happened.

This has been hard for me to write and what makes it more poignant for me is that my mother was just 58, the age I am now.

A few days later I returned to Brockport and got back to work on the summer show.

Everyone was nice and had kind words of support when I got back and although it was hard it nice to have something to take my mind off of what had happened.

It was good to get back to work but of course my mother was still on my mind.

Somehow we all pulled together and got the show done and managed to have some fun doing it.

Unfortunately a few weeks later the mother of one of my student workers was killed in a car accident and everyone was numb for a while again.

After the show was over I went home again in August for a visit.

It goes without saying that it was hard to go home but I wanted to support my dad and sister who also lived there.

Of course this was a major milestone event in my life and these events, both good and bad,  happen on their own schedule and never seem to happen when it is convenient.

Back in college my grandfather died during the blizzard of ’77 and there was no way for me to get home for the funeral.

My one grandmother died when I was a senior in high school and her funeral was the day I was supposed to take the NYS Regents Exam, similar to the SATs, that was used to award scholarships.

After talking with my family it was decided that my grandmother would have wanted me to take the test and take care of my future and somehow I was able to do well and I even got a scholarship.

Working at a college and also in Theatre sometimes I feel a bit insulated from the real world and unfortunately it take something like my mother’s passing  smack me in the face and make me see the real world.

I am sure that everyone’s parent’s passing is hard and affects each person in a different way.

For me getting back to work was just what I needed at the time, but even today 24 years later there are times  that my minds wanders and I think of my mother and have to stop and reflect for a few moments.

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Garth Fagan Dance, summer 1989

I have lists of titles and programs for most of the plays that I have worked on but I do not always have anything from many of the other events, concerts or talks that I have worked on and can easily forget some on them.

Many of these events are what we call “One and Done”.

A  event set up, performed and taken down all on the same day.

Before I move on the talking about what I did in the 1990’s I thought I do a quick review of the 1980’s.

The biggest thing I left out was in the summer of 1989 right after A Chorus Line when we had Garth Fagan’s dance company in for a show.

Garth Fagan was on staff in the dance department at Brockport and went on to win a Tony award for his work on the Lion King in 1997.

I had done a few little things with Garth over the years and knew him but he was here with his own design and tech staff so my staff and I just helped on the production.

Here is another case of it is a small world.

The lighting designer for many of Garth’s dances was C.T. Oakes who had graduated from the University of Michigan just before I got there.

I had met him a few times when I came there to interview and later when I came to look for a place to live.

When I came to Brockport C.T.  was working down the road at SUNY Geneseo.

After a few years he left and when to work for various lighting and theatrical supply companies and I would often run into him at some of the USITT conferences.

Now semi-retired it turns out that C.T. ended up here in Brockport and I run into him from time-to-time.

Small world.

So that summer we had to put down a dance floor and add side boom pipes and make the stage into a Dance theatre.

They performed in our theatre because it was July and the Dance theatre does not have air conditioning.

A summer or two later Garth Fagan came back with his company and set up everything again, but not to perform but just to tape a TV commercial.

It was easy, not too much pressure and everyone was a bit more relaxed.

As I review some of my programs I see a few of the many smaller events listed that I worked on and truthfully I do not remember all of them.

I remember that one of the  musicians who came in with an act hated to room they had for him in one of the reconverted dorms and left to check into a real hotel.

I saw some of those rooms and they were awful.

Today we normally send outside guests to one of the local B&B’s.

Over the years we have had every kind of music act, some good and some so-so, not too many bad ones.

Maybe a bit boring or they played too long, but never any truly bad ones.

Oh, except for the old dancer doing interpretive dance to these harsh poems being read by the poet.

That was awful, I hated it, the rehearsals were torture and I was never so glad to have a show done as I did that one.

As noted before I often helped with the student productions and Children’s Theatre shows.

Most of the other extra events I have worked on at Brockport have been Music concerts with a few lectures and puppet shows mixed in just for fun.

When the event is bad I just try to do the best I can and get it done, but when they are good I sit back and enjoy them as much as I can.

So what went on in the 1990’s?

Stayed tuned for many new and exciting posts.

***

Play Selection, a Science or Crap Shoot

Choosing a season plays for any type of theatre has many requirements and there are numerous factors to be considered in selecting a play to produce.

The number one factor in any type of theatre is of course money.

The more actors needed the higher the salaries will be, but also the costume costs will be higher in larger cast shows.

The number and style of scenery required, props, lighting, sound and even special effects all add to the overall costs of a production

In professional theatres they must select plays that will sell tickets.

In academic theatres selling tickets can be important too but the plays also have to fit the teaching goals of the program.

In my time at Brockport we have selected our seasons in several ways over the years with some ways working better than others.

Currently we put out a call for plays and ask faculty and students to suggest plays to be considered.

A committee reads through all of the plays and pares them down to a smaller number and then all of the faculty read the plays and select a season from the.

In the past there was a department document that outlined all of the many types of plays and how often the department should produce them.

Some years ago I was on the selection committee and we tried to follow the guide but found it not to be possible.

There are many factors that change from year to year.

The number of students available, their skills, the ratio of male/female students are just a few of the things that can effect what is selected.

For many years the directors would pick the shows that they wanted to do and unless there was some objection we would do them.

Time and money is the great limiter.

We try to pick a smaller shows at the beginning of the school year and larger ones later in the year when the student have more time to rehearse and the crew time to build bigger sets.

I recently noted that the season we had chosen for 1989-90 was not the season that we did.

The season listed in the program for Mother Courage and Her Children in April of 1989 was the following:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Cyrano de Bergerac, Purlie Victorious and the ever popular A Play to be Named Later.

I am sure that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was selected because of the large number of female roles but in the fall it had been replaced with Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean which also had a large number of female roles.

Cyrano de Bergerac was the only play that we did not change and produced in December of 1989.

Purlie Victorious was replaced with its musical version Purlie and moved to the fourth slot.

The play to be named later was NigHt of tHe pterodActyls which was a children’s theatre piece.

I do not remember why we had all of the changes that season but it was not the only time we have had to change a play.

Sometimes we have chosen a play for which the rights have been pulled back by the publisher because it might be running on Broadway or other professional theatre.

In the past plays have been changed because of staff changes, because another play became available or simply we just wanted to do something else.

I will be writing about the 1989-90 season, its plays and the new scene designer in upcoming Blog posts.

***

Some Christmas Thoughts . . . .

Just before Christmas I watched many movies with Christmas themes with my wife.

One of which was my favorite version of A Christmas Carol from 1951 with Alistair Sim.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044008/

 

 

It has been several years since I had watched the whole movie and even though it was the "colorized" version I still enjoyed.

Because of the movie I thought back to the several stage versions of the played that I have worked on.

Three years ago I wrote in my Blog about the first the production of A Christmas Carol that I worked on back in December of 1980.

I have also worked on three productions of it since I came to Brockport and will write more about them as I continue my Blog through the years.

In additions to the three traditional productions we also did a spoof version of A Christmas Carol.

Our department had planned to do the show every other year, any even though the show tends to make a lot of money it put too much of a strain on the technical staff.

The play calls for many costumes and sets.

Our original plan called for reusing the same set each year the same way that our local professional theatre does, but with different directors and new script each time it did not work out.

To really do the play right, special effects such as fog, snow and other visual effects are needed.

It got to be too much for us to do and we stopped producing A Christmas Carol.

I will write about these productions as they are coming up soon when I get back to my chronological review of my career.

Have a Happy New Year.

 

 

 

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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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