THEATRE THREE, Port Jefferson, NY

Going back and looking at my tax records, I made less than $500 in 1980; at least that is what I paid taxes on.
So in working on a couple of rock shows in Ann Arbor, several freelance jobs in NYC and my month in working in New Hampshire I took home less than $500.
It seems that I was not going to get rich working in Theatre.

There were not too many places hiring in January when I got back to New York.
I read the trade newspapers and sent out more resumes and waited to see what would come up.
In the middle of February 1981 I was hired to design the lights for a production of the Threepenny Opera.

I do not remember how I found out about the job as I had been looking for theatre working in NYC and this was on Long Island close to where I lived.
My former employer supplied the lighting equipment to the Theatre and may have told about the job, but I am not sure.
Theatre Three is in Port Jefferson on the north shore of Long Island about 20 miles from my family’s house in Sayville.

http://www.theatrethree.com/

I both excited and a bit worried about designing the lights as it had been almost a year and a half since I had last deigned the lighting for a play.
I had designed several sets and had done mostly set construction work during that time.
The building was long and narrow and had been a Movie Theatre at one time and there was also a Cabaret Theatre in the lower level.
It seemed that the bar in the Cabaret was a popular place for off-duty cops and nurses to hang out and drink.
One day when walking through the bar one of the cops thought I was carrying a gun, but it was just my new Buck knife on my belt.

The Threepenny Opera, 1981

It turned out that I worked with director before on several productions by the Sayville Musical Workshop
and one of the actors in the play, Brent Erlanson, had played Bobby in the SMW production of Company and I was saddened to learn that he passed away recently.

They must have liked me as I was hired to design both the set and lights for the next production of Table Manners, one of the three plays in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy.
Unfortunately I do not have any photos of the play, but it is the only play that I have worked on that was reviewed by the New York Times.
The review was so-so:

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/03/nyregion/theater-in-review-table-manners-offrs-meal-in-itself.html

Of course my name is not in the review, it never mentions the set or that they were even are on a stage.
There is nothing in the review for me to say:  “Hay, I Did That!”
Oh well, maybe next time.

The construction staff were not trained “Theatre” people but local carpenters who used 2 x 4’s and sheetrock to build the walls on the set.
I guess it made sense for them to build it that way as they were able to use the skills of the people who they had available and saved money doing it.
The finished set looked fine and cost less than if they had used 1 x 3’s and muslin, the common building materials used in theatre at that time.
It would not have worked if there had been multiple sets or were trying to fly scenery in and out.

While at Theatre Three I also did the lighting for some kind of fashion show/benefit to help some good cause or another.
One of my recently graduated students currently works at Theatre Three.
I am happy to know that they are still there and doing well.

I was disappointed to learn that The Airport Playhouse, another Long Island Theatre that I once worked in, closed this past December.




.

"Make it Pretty"

In the spring of my freshmen year of college I took my first Stage Lighting course.
The class was good and covered all of the basics, Nuts to Bolts or maybe that should be Amps to Volts.
I remember one class demonstration turned into both a funny episode and good learning moment for me.
Working with several lights and colored gels in the classroom, our teacher was showing us what colors worked well together and how they would look.
We looked at several combinations of colors when the teacher said that ambers do not work well on black actors.
Having an African-American in the class he was asked if he would stand in the light.
When the amber gel was put on him he looked great, the color worked well on him and everyone laughed.

What I learned from that class was not to assume anything, but test it for yourself.
Rules and conventions are a good starting place but I have always found that I will do what it takes to make it look right.
Many times over the years I have used the wrong type of light, hung in the wrong place, removed a lens or made my own mixed color gels by cutting and taping them together to get the desired result.

Jumping ahead a number of years, when I was in grad school at the University of Michigan there was a talented undergraduate lighting student from Canada who took classes with the grad students.
During one summer took the small three light mixing box home for the summer.
The unit had three “Inkies”, 3 inch fresnels, and dimmers mounted on a box that contain samples of all the gel colors.
He spent the summer looking at all the hundreds of various combinations of colors and wrote down in a notebook his thoughts on what he saw.

I must admit that some of us laughed at him when he came back in the fall.
Timothy Hunter got into the Yale School of Drama, worked in Europe for a while and designed the lighting for Smokey Joe’s Café on Broadway.
His hard work, plus talent, did pay off as he is the Interim Department Head, Professor of Lighting & Stage Design at the University of Connecticut and also has his own production company.
http://www.timhunterdesign.com/

The summer after my first year of college I went home, armed with one year of college and one class in stage lighting I took on the responsibility of designing lights for the Sayville Musical Workshop’s production of No, No, Nanette.
I was ready when I met with the director to discus the lighting for the musical.

The four controllable qualities of light: Intensity, Distribution, Color and Form
The Four Functions of Stage Lighting: Visibility, Composition, Form and Mood.

I knew my lighting basics, had read the play, I am ready here I come!!!
I met the director and all he said to me was “Make it pretty”.
Make it Pretty, MAKE  IT  PRETTY! ! !
Where was that in the lighting text book?
I am an artist, how dare he . . . .
So I made it "Pretty” and had fun doing it.

Brush-up Rehearsals

As I gained more experience working on the High School shows I also got more responsibility with the Sayville Musical Workshop.
During my Junior year I moved from running a follow spot to helping run the lighting board.
I also helped to hang and focus the lights.
The Workshop had an old resistance dimmer lighting board, sometimes called a piano board, that they would wire in to run extra lights.
It was old even by 1972 standards and a bit dangerous.
You could easily stick your hand into the unit and get electrocuted if were not careful, but it still worked and gave us a few more lights to work with.

That year I worked three productions with the Workshop: Promises, Promises, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Camelot.

When I tell people I work in Theatre they often ask if I have ever worked with anybody famous.
I always say: “Besides Me?”
I tell them yes and give them a few names.
Many times the people I worked with were not famous at the time I knew them but went on to gain fame later on.

Ten or fifteen years after working on Camelot I was looking through the program and there was a photo of the actor who played King Arthur.
At the time he was a 35 year old businessman who liked doing Theatre.
He turned out to be two time Tony Award winning actor Brian Dennehy.
I really do not remember much about him, I was just 16, and he was just another actor in the show.

Brian Dennehy in Camelot 1972

It was while working on Camelot that I saw what fun people could have during Brush Up rehearsals.

Now as an educator for 27 years I will always tell my students that every rehearsal is important and that a brush-up rehearsal is important to the show, and not a time for the cast and crew to have fun.
A brush-up rehearsal is done after a show has been off for a few days and helps the actors with their lines and timing before the next weekend run of a play.

As it turns out Brian Dennehy could not make the brush-up but the director wanted to have it anyway, plus I think it was just his chance to play the King.
After weeks of hard work everyone just want s to have a little fun.
Lines are said a little different, accents used, different props used etc.
During Camelot’s brush-up the royal Thrones were replace by two toilets.
At some point in the second act the director got pissed and yelled at everyone to take it seriously.
Not everyone had heard the outburst and someone had replaced Excalibur with a toilet plunger for the last big speech.
From behind a large box upstage I remember seeing a hand come up as the director was emoting away and replaced the sword taking the plunger away just in time.
I do not remember any other production with as much fooling around, but with the absence of the lead actor and the director overacting it was hard not to have some fun.

Now on brush-ups for other shows I worked on maybe the lighting was just a bit too green or lights flickered during a romantic moment or maybe a sound cue or two may have been added, but I would not know anything about it.
I was too busy laughing.

More and Better Cast Parties

My sophomore year in High School also brought two more shows with the Sayville Musical Workshop.I would run a follow spot for both “Guys and Dolls” and “Fiddler on the Roof”.
This was something new for me and lots of fun, but even more fun was the Workshop’s Cast Parties.
The Cast Parties were always held at a local restaurant, usually one with a piano, and a late night buffet was often set up for us.
Some time around midnight, after the final performance, 30 or so people would show up, quickly eat, have a few drinks, and then the other customers were treated to hearing the entire just finished show sung again plus many selections from the best of Broadway.
Some people enjoyed it, others would move to another area while others would leave altogether.
It was at one of these parties that one of the women working on the show bought me, then 15 or 16, my first Whiskey Sour.
Nothing funky ever happened.
At that time I was still short, very young looking and had not yet become the Greek Adonis that I am today.
The parties were fun and I always had a great time.
It seemed to me that this is what working in Theatre should be, hard work followed by lots of fun.

My Aunt recently showed me a photo of my grandmother, who did a little work on Broadway, at a cast party for some show in about 1918 or so.
There was some then well know silent film actor there at the party.
It did not look as wild as the Workshop parties, or of the ones that I went to later in college, but you could clearly see that they were still having a good time.
I always knew that my Grandmother had played piano for silent movies, and that she did some stage work but late in her life she told us about working on a few silent movies while they still were being made in New York City before moving to Hollywood.
It turned out that my Grandmother lived across the hall from the then young Dorothy and Lillian Gish, famous silent film stars, and that my Great Grandmother would baby-sit whichever one was not working on a movie that day.

It turns out that my other Grandmother, my mom's mom, also did a little work in Show Biz.
It turns our that she sang in a Speak Easy during Prohibition.
No wonder nobody in my family raised an eyebrow when I decided to work in Theatre.

Sayville Musical Workshop

I had fun working on my first plays and concerts.
Living in Sayville I had another opportunity to work in Theatre with the Sayville Musical Workshop.At the time it was the oldest community theatre group in New York State.
It had a long history of quality productions and I was lucky to have had a chance to work with them.
I was saddened years later when I learned that they disbanded in the 1980’s after 35 years of productions.
One of their last productions was all White production of “The Wiz”.
I think someone in charge might have missed the point, but I was not there.

***[Update 02-27-14: I am glad to find out that I was wrong about the Wiz and at least there was some Black actors in the show. In the world of Theatre where most people say that they support "Colorblind" casting it is sometimes hard to pull off. I have seen it work well many times and in other productions it causes some awkward moments. I was young when I worked with the SMW and learned a great deal about how to work in Theatre.]***

In it’s heyday there was a great core of people running the Workshop.
People from the professional business world brought their own specialties to running the Workshop.
Business people took care of the money, a retired Broadway stage hand designed the sets, many real carpenters and electricians helped with the building of the sets and running the lights.
As I remember many of the actors were young school teachers.
A few professional or semi-professional actors were also in the mix.

My first production with them was “Hello Dolly”.
The Workshops’ treasurer was a friend of the author Jerry Herman, they knew each other from summers on Fire Island I was told, and our production was one of the first amateur productions of the musical.
15 and still learning about theatre, I was part of the backstage crew moving set pieces during the show.
I remember that there was very little room backstage and that I sat on, under or behind set pieces to move them during set changes.

In one memorable scene change the actors spun a large set piece on castors around and around during a song and sent it fly off stage left for the crew members to catch before it smashed into the rest of the set.
BAM!
I was there each night as it smashed into my outstretched foot trying to stop it.
Recently I found a link in the Sayville Library webpage to photos of the show.
http://sayville.suffolk.lib.ny.us/sayville%20musical%20workshop/sayvillemuscialworkshop.htm
I think these are the earliest photos I have of any plays that I have worked on.

Over the next few years I would work on many more shows with the Workshop; moving from the backstage crew to running a follow spot, then running the lighting board and finally I designed the Lighting for “No, No Nanette” after my first year in college .

I will write more about my experiences with the Workshop in upcoming posts.