101st Technical Commando Brigade, Ann Arbor, MI

Working in Theatre can be dirty, hard work, long hours and lots of fun.
Always looking for some stress release we are always joking among ourselves, having parties and poker games and each year while I was at Michigan someone made T-shirts for everyone.
Based on one of the teachers sayings, and a T-shirt he had, the T-shirt that was made my first year was red and said in big type “ Blow Me Dogface” with “Survivor of Winter 1979” below it.
One day we were all told to wear it to that teacher’s class who topped us all by having the original under his sweater.

The T-shirt from my second year was in the Michigan school colors of Maize and Blue.
I still have it, although it is a bit too small and fabric is a bit thread bare as it has been washed few too many times.
What did it say? See below:

We would wear them whenever we needed a boost after working long hours and I would forget that I had it on when I would next door to “Olga’s Death Gyros” for lunch.
I would get some odd looks from the “normal” or civilian people outside of the Theatre building.
“Olga’s” had the worst coffee in Ann Arbor, at least according to Dick Block one of our design teachers.

In August of 1980 I submitted my thesis with set, lighting and costumes designs for Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta”.
Included with my 60 page paper were several light plots, working drawings, set renderings, costume plates and other related materials.

Set Rendering and Light Sketches

After the faculty reviewed the work I had to go in for an oral review and defend my work.
All of the other MFA students would always wait outside the room to see how you did.
The first question from everyone when I came out of the room was that they wanted to know what designs I had to redo.
I was very proud to tell them the faculty accepted all of my design work and all they wanted were a few changes and corrections in my paper.

Costume Plates

When I get all of my thesis scanned and posted online I will let my blog readers know.

College was now done for me and it was time to go back to Long Island and begin a new phase in my life.



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Richard III

During my second year at Michigan we did Richard III with the late actor Nicolas Pennell as the lead.
He had worked regularly at the Stratford Festival in Canada and brought along a young fight choreographer who was in some of the battle scenes.
We used a stock platform for all of the Shakespeare plays and the designers just added pieces to the unit for each play.
For Richard III the scenic designer just took the set for Richard II from the year before and basically smashed it.
All the nice detail and trim pieces that had been added to the original set were broken off to help show the decay of the kingdom.




Richard II set before it was smashed for Richard III


During one of the fight scenes the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, spun and fell off the platform into the waiting arms off four soldiers who carried off his dead body.
Opening night all went well and the audience loved it.

On the second night the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, spun and fell off the platform into the waiting arms of two soldiers who dropped the fight choreographer who broke his arm and the two late soldiers helped the other two carry off the fight choreographer writhing in pain.

On the third night the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, and fell dead on the upper level and stayed there until the end of the scene.

It always seemed that I was working on one play or another, doing class work or working my thesis but somehow I managed time for a few dates while at Michigan, but no romance would come of it.
The second summer brought four more shows in rep and working to finish my thesis.
I would work only 100 hours on the set up of the lights and then work full time on my thesis, taking only short breaks for a weekly softball game and monthly poker game.

Two non-Michigan students who came to work on the summer rep were assigned to work with me on the electrical crew and they were both nice enough and I have a few odd memoirs of them.
One day while working in the lighting shop I had one of those moments when you feel like some mild electrical shock has gone through you body that causes you to shiver when it happens.
The girl working next to me, Martha, had the same experience and when we turned to ask the other guy if he had felt it too we found him on the floor having an epileptic seizure.

Another time I was working up in the catwalks of the Power Center with Martha when she begin talking about some major surgery that she had recently had done and I almost fell 30 feet from shock when she lifted up her shirt to show me the scar that ran from the middle of her chest to below her belly button.
I was not at all ready to be flashed while working up at that height.




Bio from Summer 1980 Program


I often found reasons not to work on my thesis.
One of my favorite excuses was just waiting until it got dark before I would come in to work.
Because Michigan is in the western part of the Eastern Time zone it stays light much later than it did back home on Long Island.
From time to time I found myself playing Frisbee with guys in the street until well after dusk at 10:30 PM.

A week or so before my thesis was done my parents and younger brother, who was 17 at the time, stopped by at the end of a cross country camping trip that had taken them to the Grand Canyon.
This was the longest trip that they had ever taken.
They collected most of my belongings to bring back home and left with me with just the bare essentials.

My thesis review was near and my time at Michigan was almost done.





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The Master Builder

At one of our weekly graduate seminars the faculty noted that no one was assigned to design the set for one of the showcase productions and asked for a volunteer.
It seemed that everyone just melted down into their seats, looked into their armpits or out the window and avoided eye contact with the faculty.
Always looking for a new challenge I raised my hand and said that I would be willing to give it a try.

Scene Design for "The Master Builder" Act I - 1980

The play was the Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama.

I had read all of Ibsen’s major plays and wrote a term paper about his design ideas for my Contemporary Drama class the year before and I had just designed the set for the play for one of my scene design class projects so I felt confident that it would be an easy job.

Needless to say it was not.

Act II

At the first design meeting the director stated that he did not to have any walls in a play about an Architect who, of course, uses walls to design his buildings.

He also had an idea that today would be very easy to do, but thirty years ago I had to come up with a workable solution.

He wanted, what in effect today would just be the effect of a simply laser pointer being wiggled on the sky drop behind the set.

I had seen a rippling water effect that used broken mirror pieces in a pan of water, a fan blowing on the water and a light reflected off of the pan onto the stage.

I replaced the mirror and water with a piece of silver Mylar that was slit, a small fan and a red light aimed up on the sky drop.

I painted two projections with translucent dyes that were used in a pair of old Linnebach projectors.

One was a stormy sky and the other a sunburst both based on paintings by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.



Act III

The set had several platform levels, two about 8’-0” x 8’-0” that played in different positions during each of the three acts.
Additional railing pieces were added to the set during the two act breaks.
Drafting tables and a desk were built specifically for the show and additional expanding foam railings were made from plaster molds.



I enjoyed working on the play and this was my last design project before the final push to finish my MFA Thesis and final summer at the University of Michigan.

 

Set Model



 

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Dance tours to Interlochen Arts Academy

I enjoyed working with the stagehand’s union and was excited that the Grateful Dead where coming to town and when the business agents asked who wanted to be on the crew I quickly volunteered.
Unfortunately I was not called for the crew and ended up just buying a ticket and going to the show anyway.
There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.

In the spring of my first year at Michigan I was called, twice, to help on The New Barbarians concert, a benefit tour put together by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones as part of his plea deal for a drug bust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Barbarians_(band)

Ann Arbor was to be the first night of the American part of the tour and they were expecting many trucks with equipment from all over the country to arrive with the various guest artists for this all-star band and really needed a big crew.
As fate would have it I had a final exam in a Psychology class early the next morning and there was no way I could work the concert and expect to be ready for the test.

The course was called Perception and was about how our body’s senses work and react to things like color and light, and I still use some of what I learned back then when I teach today, so maybe it was a good idea that I did not work that concert.

I really gave it some thought, but I had to pass on what could have been a very exciting event.

Although disappointed in missing these two events I still had plenty of other productions to work on in addition to the regular department productions.
I worked on a re-mounting a production of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, a music/dance event that had been staged before I got to Michigan and I also got design lighting in the Power Center one more time when I was asked to do the lighting for a joint concert of the Wisconsin Singers and Michigan’s Amazin’ Blue, a “Wild” concert of college Glee clubs.

My lighting design teacher asked me to serve as his assistant for a tour of two dance faculty to the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.
http://academy.interlochen.org/

It was a nice trip and I ended up being the stage manager, master electrician in addition to being the assistant to the lighting designer.
Interlochen is a wonderful place, isolated, but even in the middle of the winter it was a very beautiful and peaceful place to be.
Because Interlochen is a high school and not a college, the local town was pretty quiet and did not offer too many options but our first night there the four of us went out to a local bar and had a good time even though we knew that everyone in the bar was looking at us.
The staff treated us very well and had a nice reception/party for us after the show.

Odd memory: it was on the drive up to Interlochen that I remember seeing my first salad bar in a restaurant, although common today, it was still a new idea back then.

Later in the spring I would return to Interlochen as the lighting designer for a tour of the Michigan Dance Ensemble.
I drove up the day before the concert with my assistant, an undergraduate design major, and worked to ready the theatre for the concert.
It was nice to see Interlochen in the spring and it was a welcome getaway just before the craziness of my last few months at Michigan as I finished up my MFA Thesis.
Evidently there had been some incident involving a student and teacher during the time between my visits and there were no students are the party for the dancers after the show this time.

Of course Theatre is a small world and I would run into the woman who was the Technical Director at Interlochen about 10 years later.
I was on a search committee for the Dance Department at Brockport and she was a finalist for the job.

Also I know that Susan, the girl who was my assistant back then, has been working as a company manager on various Dance and Theatre tours over the last 30 years and about twenty years ago I saw her name in the New York Times as part of an article reporting on the stupid and dangerous things that construction workers in the city do.
The idiots were doing things like throwing the lids of 5 gallon pails off of buildings like Frisbees into the people and street below.




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Elton John Concert, Fall 1979

I got a phone call from the business agent for the stagehands union and he asked me which of two concerts the same day that I wanted to work on: The Police or Elton John.
I choose to work the Elton John concert.
The concert was to be in Hill Auditorium, the large and wonderful music hall on campus where I got to Carlos Santana  in concert the year before.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/hill/index.htm

The load-in call was 6:00 AM!

It was so early because there was a rehearsal for some university music group that could not be moved.

We needed to unload all items from the trucks that had to be flown over the stage, put them together and have them flown out before the Noon rehearsal.

I do not know why Elton John’s people would agree to the break in the middle of the load-in but it all worked out.

After lunch we came back and set up the rest of the sound and lighting equipment and also set up the musical instruments.
It is always fun to move a full size grand piano in a road case, even one that was painted orange.
Gee, maybe it was the organ that was orange and the piano was painted yellow, I forget.

As we continued to unload the truck I noticed that there was this young teenage girl standing at the top of the loading ramp.
Over the next hour or so she slowly inched down the load ramp toward the door.
When she was almost at the door one of the road crew turned to the girl and said “You can’t be here, you have to leave”.
You could see her heart break as she walked away defeated in her quest to see her idol.

I still have this pin I got at the Concert

I got a look at Elton when he came in a few hours later and stopped briefly to say hello to the crew.
He was wearing some odd jumpsuit looked like it was made from several strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups pasted together.

The road crew members were very cool, mostly very tall and thin and all from England.
There was one short guy who was the climber who was up and down the backs of the speaker stacks and up on the light grid focusing lights.
As the load-in was just about done I was asked to stay and help with the light focus as one of the all important ladder holders.
I was not really needed because once he was up the ladder he was climbing all over the truss focusing the lights, all without a safety harness.
Only when he was done did he step back on the ladder as he came down.
It was easy money and I also got to stay and eat with the crew.

The caterer was wonderful, there was a food table stocked with food all day long, but the dinner was even better.
It was November and he made a complete Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.
For a crew, mostly from England, thought that this was very cool, enjoyed it all, especially the wine.

After dinner I went home during the show and listen to The Police concert which was simulcast on the radio.
When I came back for the load-out there was a small group of people waiting at the stage door waiting, hoping to see Elton, but all they got was me.
As I neared the door it opened and I was let in.
It was cool to think that I had the right look at 25 just to walk right past all the other people.
Okay, maybe it was how I was dressed, the tools I was carrying and the fact that I had just been there a few hours earlier.

The load-out went well and we got done just after midnight.
Just as the last truck was done and the door closed we noticed that the caterer had also just finished packing up.
He saw our disappointed look and opened his van and gave us a six-pack.
I do not know what brand of beer it was or even if it was cold, but it was best tasting beer I had ever had.
It was a looooong day starting with the 6:00 AM call, but it was fun day and I enjoyed it all.


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Concerts and Road Shows

During my second year at Michigan I got to work on many outside projects, some of which even paid.
The local stage hands union (IASTE)  was not large and when a touring Broadway show or rock concert was in town they would often need to hire extra crew.
They would use faculty and staff from the Theatre Department to fill out their crews.

The Ann Arbor local was run by a bunch of cool people who were ahead their time and other locals because they were one of the first to allow women carpenters and electricians into the union.
The first show I worked on with the union was a tour of the musical revue Eubie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubie!

The master electrician, Janice, was from Ann Arbor and had worked with the local union and I had just worked with her as one of the three lighting designers for the summer theatre repertory.
Everyone on the load-in crew was excited for her return and wanted to hear how the first part of the tour had gone.
Everything was going well but just before noon there was a loud snapping sound and one of the pipe-end ladders with six to eight lights came crashing down to the floor.
As soon as we knew that nobody was hurt the crew chief called "Lunch!" and most of us were sent away as they tried to figure what had happened.

It turns out the batten pipes over the stage had been welded incorrectly without inner pipe sleeves at the joints.
The batten just snapped at the joint under the weight of the hanging ladder.
During the next school break the college had all of the pipes hanging on the stage cut apart and re-welded properly.
The Theatre had been open for about 8 years and they were lucky that it had never happened before and that nobody was hurt.
It was a relief to everyone that it was not Janice’s fault.

I also worked the load-in and load-out for the tour of the play Deathtrap.
The most interesting part of that show was that the road boxes that held the various weapon displays, an important part of the play, that were lifted up and fitted directly into the walls of the set.
The lockable cover could be taken off as needed and easily put back on and locked up after the show.
There were many knives, swords, axes, guns and other fun props that they wanted to keep safe and away from curious hands and stop them from walking away.

I also got to work to load-in crew for some rock concerts.
I worked on the crew for Chicago and Elton John.
The Chicago concert was held in the large Chrysler Arena on campus and one of the first thing I noticed was that the food was much better on rock concerts.
For the stage plays there was only coffee and doughnuts backstage, but for the concerts they brought in a local caterer who put out a wonderful spread of food.

The work was hard but fun.
I had to laugh when I saw a 98 pound woman on the crew trying to move a large rolling speaker cabinet down the loading ramp from the truck and just watched her slide the whole way down.
Oh course I had my own fun when I was a “Human Bungee Cord” as I held on to road boxes as I rode the fork lift up to the stage platform, unloaded them and then rode back down for the next one.

As part of the load-in crew you do not get to the show but I when I returned for the load-out I did get to see and few songs at the end of the concert including 25 or 6 to 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvX_YqiM-hc&feature=related
It was fun to hear the song live because it was one of the songs that my friends and I tried to play in someone’s basement back in high school.
I knew just enough to play the basic bass riff as it just repeats over and over.
Tony and the Tone-deafs never got to play a gig and it was a onetime only experience for those lucky few people in the basement that day.

Coming up next: The Elton John Concert.




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Sound Design

Idiot’s Delight opened in October of 1979 and it was my last major lighting design assignment while at Michigan but I still had plenty of other work to do before I graduated.

Oh course I still had to work on my MFA Thesis which had various deadlines all year long.
A rough draft of my Thesis support paper and preliminary set, light and costume design drawing were do several times before the final work could begin.
As it turned out that the one on the editors of the play collection book from which I got the copy of The Jew of Malta which teaching at Michigan.
The book was one that I had used in my Shakespeare class back at SUNY Buffalo.

I wanted it to look like I really researched the play, which I did, so I thought it would be good to talk with someone who really knew the script and I made an appointment to meet the English professor who edited the play collection and to talk to him about the play and see if he had any insights or thoughts about the play.
In a nut shell he could not care less, he offered some general comments about the period style and the play and at one point he said “I Think the other editor really worked with that play”.
I was able to include a few quotes from him but he was not really any help.

My first year I took costume design classes in addition to the lights ones and the second year I was in several scene designs classes and had plenty of class design projects to work on.
I moved from the scene shop into the electrics shop and I was now the department Master Electrician.
The job came with several duties that included general maintenance and repair of the stage lights and cables, supervising the lighting in the Arena Theatre and creating the sound effect and music tapes for all of the plays.

One of the first things I had to do was to quickly learn how to cut and splice recording tape.
The plays were not underscored with music as much as it is done today.
There might be preshow music, or change music, but it was mostly buzzers, chimes, dog barks and when possible many sounds were done live onstage.
I did some live recordings of actor’s voices, special music and sound effects I could not find on records.
I also had to figure out how to make long endless loop of tape so I could create 20 minutes of rain.
Typically the effect sounds on records last only a few seconds.
I ended up with a 12 foot loop of tape that ran across the electrics work room.

Sometimes I felt like I was doing an old-time radio as I had to make or record my own sounds for a play.
Today it is all done on the computer which makes much faster and a lot easier then back in 1979.
I remember that I had to go to the record shop and was surprised that they still had a listening booth so I could check out a few records to make sure that I got the right version of the music the director wanted.
It took me a while but I found just the right recording of the Lieutenant Kije Suite by Sergei Prokofiev, best known for his ballet score to Peter and the Wolf.

For plays in the Arena Theatre either I did a quick lighting design or most often I would supervise the student designer.
The designers were a mixture of undergraduate and graduate design majors and sometimes a directing student would give it a try.
Usually the small theatre was easy to take care of as there was another graduate student who took care of the scenic elements and I took care of the sound and lighting.

One time there was some excitement when someone who did not know what they were doing plugged the bare end of a speaker cable into a wall outlet thing it was a work light.
There was a big bang and the speaker caught fire.
Opps, you hope that they will not make that mistake again.


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Idiot's Delight

At the end of my first summer and a short trip home to Long Island, I moved into my third and final apartment in Ann Arbor.
It was about three or four blocks north of the Theatre building and close to the Farmer’s Market.
My two housemates were both grad students but not theatre majors.
It was very small, but served its purpose well.

Like my first year, I designed the lighting for one of the first productions of the year.
The play was part of the Guest Artist series in the large Power Center Theatre in which I had just designed in that summer, but now I could design for my play alone.
The play was the Idiot’s Delight by Robert E. Sherwood which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936.

Idiot's Delight, 1979

I felt lucky that we had a good production team.

The director, Jim, was a young faculty member who I had met on my trip first to Ann Arbor for my interview to get into the program.

While working as an actor a few years earlier Jim had guest roles in Room 222 and The Partridge Family, both of which were still being rerun at the time, and he would be teased whenever someone saw him on TV.

Program Cover

The scene designer was also a young faculty member who was in the "second year" of a one year visiting professor position.

Dick would go on to have some success as he is the Associate Head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nancy Jo, the costume designer, was a fellow MFA design student who now teaches at California State University, Long Beach.

I served as the lighting designer for the play and would go to; well, write this blog and a few other things here and there and maybe a thing or two over the years.



Idiot's Delight, 1979


Early on in the production process Jim invited the design team to go see an old movie playing on campus because he wanted us to see the style that was used in it.
We did not have VCRs back then so you could not just order any movie any time you wanted so it was just lucky that some group was showing it on campus.
We went to see My Man Godfrey from 1936 staring William Powell and Carole Lombard.

The movie is a lot of fun and still is one of my favorites.

The style and design of the play was defiantly affected by the movie.

The large set was Art Deco in style and I was asked if mirrored panels as part of the design would be a problem.
I said that I could work around them and that they should not be a problem, but I was not really sure.
In between the mirrored panels were frosted plastic panels that I lit with blue and white lights.
To add to my fun the costume designer had gold glamee costumes for the dancing girls.
Black, white, silver and gold: it was challenging but fun to do.

Late at night

In the play a war breaks out at the end and we needed an explosion outside of a big window that was rigged to fall apart.
We were lucky that one of the MFA students had just come off the road where he was the pyrotechnic for the band KISS.
Now I do not know for sure if it was Doug who blew Kiss’ drummer up so many times that it became the basis of the joke about killing numerous drummers in the movie This is Spinal Tap, but I do know that his flash pots were so big that they burned the curtains in the set window and had to be replaced each night.
Like everyone else from the show, Doug went on to have success in Theatre and was the production manager of last year’s Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall.

As with all shows while I was Michigan lighting designers had to give a talk back after the shows open to discus and explain what you did with the lighting to our fellow students.
I felt lucky that people enjoyed my work but I was puzzled when someone said that they liked my lighting especially the little red tint that I had put into the set.
I did not know what they were talking about, and except for the explosion at the end, there was no red in my design.
I thanked them all for their comments and after they left I walked around the Theatre and found out that it was the Exit signs that were reflecting off of the set.

Puttin' on the Ritz

Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

The lease for my first apartment in Ann Arbor ended in May so I needed to sublet a place to live for the summer.
I found a place just south of the campus near the Student Union.
It was a little further to walk but I would suffer as I got to live with three women and one guy who spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s place.

They guy I sublet my room from had several large fish tanks and did not want to move them and asked me if I would feed them over the summer as none of the girls would do it.
The biggest tank had just a few fish including one large Jack Dempsey (Rocio Octofasciata for those who care).

The fish looked cool and was very aggressive.
It would bite onto anything you put in the tank, like the end of a pencil and your fingers should not to go near the fish.

I did not see any fish food and asked what I was to feed it.
The guy just pointed to the other fish tank that was full of goldfish.
Every day or so I was to catch one of the goldfish and drop it in the tank with the Jack Dempsey.
It would be gone in a flash.
Occasionally one of the goldfish might last a few seconds to swim around but soon would be gone.

It was a quiet place and I enjoyed living there and did not mind when the girls would sunbathe on the roof right outside of my window.
This was still a time before microwaves were in every kitchen and our most modern appliance was a toaster oven that one of the girls used to make burnt cheese.
She would just put some cheese on some tinfoil and crisp it up.
It seemed odd to me at the time until I realized that it was the burnt cheese part of real baked macaroni and cheese that I liked best.

They invited me back to the house in the fall for a 60’s party.
Peace

Just down the street from my house was what quickly became my favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor; Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

http://www.blimpyburger.com/

I was surprised to see Guy Fieri do a feature on it during Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network.
You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVTcAkfuRFw

I was glad to see that it still there, with some of the same staff, and that it does not seem to have changed too much in 30 years, but there is little on the menu that I would eat these days.
If you watch the video you will see the same lady working the grill who was there when I was used to eat there back in 1979.

At the end of the summer the Theatre Grad Students had a big party to celebrate those graduating and also to make fun of ourselves.
Gag gifts were made for everyone, many in bad taste and some flat out rude.
I do not know what the girl who got the “Round, Round, I get Around Award” thought about it but I got a flashlight with a little color wheel attached to it.
Guess I talked about working at Lycian Stage Lighting too much, but hey it was just the previous summer which seemed ages ago after the crazy first year at Michigan.

I moved into my third and final apartment at the end of the summer and was ready for my second year at Michigan and all of its work and new adventures still ahead.

The Van Buren Lighting Board

As I noted in an earlier post, in the summer of 1979 I designed the lighting for Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill and Hay Fever by Noel Coward as part of the Michigan Summer Repertory.
There were two other plays, but both of my productions opened on the same day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 8:00 PM.
This is the only time that I had two plays opening on the same day and needless to say it was a bit crazy, both plays looked good and everything came off well.
There were changeovers of the sets and lights between each of the four plays that took several hours and everyone in the company worked very hard to get it all done.
As the Master Electrician part of my job was to re-patch the lights.

The lighting control board was an early computer board made by Van Buren and there is a description of the lighting board that was in use in the Power Center for the Performing Arts in the 1970’s is in Linda Essig’s 2002 book, The Speed of Light: Dialogues on Lighting Design and Technological Change.

http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Light-Dialogues-Lighting-Technological/dp/0325005087

I would recommend this book to anyone interested the big changes that stage lighting has gone through over the past 25 years, with discussions from the early computer control boards through what is in use today.

The lighting system in the Power Center was State-of-the-Art back in the 1970’s and had many quirks.
It was one of the first computer control boards, if not the first, was prone to overheating as well as dropping its memory.
The system used a slider patch panel that was up on the mid-level loading floor of the fly system on stage right.
Each of the several hundred circuits needed to be moved to their new assignments in one of the 57 dimmers before each show.
Sometimes the sliders would not click in tight to make a good connection or they would be in the wrong slot so it was important to do a dimmer check after each re-patch as there would always be a few sliders that needed to be adjusted during each change over.

As much work and fun that I had my first year there was to be even more adventures in store for me during my second year at Michigan.
Once or twice during my first year I made a few extra dollars by working as a theatre supervisor when an outside an group rented one of the department’s performance spaces but in my second year I worked on more Theatre, Music and Dance productions as well as several union calls working as a stagehand on several touring professional theatre productions and Rock & Roll shows.
Working with the local stagehands union was good experience, lots of fun and paid more money.

One thing that was omnipresent during my entire time at Michigan was the fact that I would have to produce a Master’s Thesis by the end of my second year.
During my first year I saw how hard the second year MFA’s worked on their Thesis’ and how much time that they put into it.
The first and most difficult task of my Thesis was the selection of the play that I would use.

I would need to design the sets, lights and costumes for the play; producing all of drawings, draftings, renderings and related paperwork as well as writing a paper that tied it all together.
There was no restriction and few guidelines given to us, just pick a play that you like and that you can work on for the next nine to ten months.
Oh course I wanted to pick a play that would be fit all the requirements but I also wanted it to be changeling, but not too crazy or with problems that would make it impossible to get it all done.

Early in my second year at Michigan I started the process of selecting a play.
I went through all of the plays I knew and quickly threw out Shakespeare; and not because the plays are difficult, but because many other MFA students had recently used his plays and I did not want my work compared to what they had just done.
When I took a Shakespeare class back at UB the teacher had us read many other non-Shakespeare plays of the pre-Elizabethan era in order to give us a better understanding of Shakespeare’s plays.
We read such plays as Everyman, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Gorbuduc and then we read the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Johson and finally on to Shakespeare himself.
I found this very helpful being able understanding the plays as well as reading them with ease as we progressed from blank verse to Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentamer.

I liked both Marlowe’s plays and his mysterious life and death life; I would have chosen The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus except for the fact that someone had just used it for their Thesis two year before.
My second choice, and the play that I selected, was Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, a play that I really liked when I first read it and I enjoyed working on it.

During the course of my second year there were periodic meetings with the Thesis Committee to report on the progress of the work that I was doing.
Research into the play and playwright, basic design research and preliminary design work all had to be done and approved before the final work would begin during my last summer at Michigan.
More about my Thesis will follow in upcoming blogs.

There was also plenty of other design and class work that I would do my second year beginning with designing the lighting for the first guest artist series production in the Power Center in the fall of 1979.
I had just designed two productions in the summer rep, but those designs were part of a basic rep plot, but now I only had to deal with the one production and could hang whatever lights and specials that were needed for the production.

Summer 1979

At the end of each semester at The University of Michigan there was a portfolio review of all of your class and design work by all four of the design teachers.
The first review at the end of the fall semester was a bit scary as I did not know what to expect.
As I noted in an earlier post the faculty kicked one of the scene design students out of the MFA program and was only given a MA for the work already done.
At the review in the spring semester the only second year lighting design student was kicked out of the program.
He had too many prior problems and incompletes in his class work, but it might have been fact that he was very drunk when he fell down the aisle in the theatre on the opening night of the play he designed that was the final straw that finally gave him the boot.

Because there were no longer any second year lighting design students I was selected to be the master electrician for the Michigan Summer Repertory and got to design two of the four plays.
I had to work with the other two lighting designers to draft a master light plot that would work with all of the plays.

My Bio from the program

Three of to four plays worked well with the rep plot but the set for one of my plays was very different from the other three and did not work well and I had to fight with myself to make the lights work for that play.

I designed the lighting for Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill and Hay Fever by Noel Coward that summer.

Hay Fever

Because we were building four shows at the same time space was always an issue in the scene shop.

The scene designer for the Hay Fever set painted the flats in the small parking lot just outside the shop and of course someone drove over them leaving tire tracks.
At our end of the year party another of the designers made a tee shirt tire actual tire tracks painted on the shirt that said; Hay Fever, Park Here.

Ah, Wilderness

In addition to working on the four plays each summer we also had classes.

The classes were all special topics and sometimes taught by a guest instructor.
One of the classes was a curtain draping class in which we learned how to make and hang various curtain types and other classes were about making props and upholstering furniture.

The most important thing about the summer was that we got to take one day off a week to play softball.
The Theatre Department had two intramural teams, one all male and the other was coed.
It was very important to the general morale of everyone working in the shop as the few hours away helped us all keep sane with all the work being done.
I think we may have had more fun than any of the other teams, but we did not have much luck winning.
Many of the other teams had uniforms, took it all very seriously and had the average age of 19.
Our team with a mix of both grad students and teachers had an average age of 27 and were just there to have fun.
Over the two summers I think we only won one game and we felt bad that we hurt the other team’s chances in the playoffs.

We played a few bonus games against the local stagehands union, usually with a keg near home plate, that were also lots of fun.
I still have the baseball glove that I bought in Ann Arbor and take with me when I go to local AAA baseball games in Rochester.

Scene Shop, Guest Actors and Christopher Walken

I spent my first year at Michigan working in the scene shop.
At the start if each semester we would have a day when all the undergraduate stagecraft students would come in and get a crash course in the shop; the power and hand tools and how to use them and basic shop safety.
The Graduate Assistants were all assigned a group of tools with stations set up in the shop and the students would move around the shop getting a short lecture at each table.
I got to demo the Boring Tools, drill bits, and it was too exciting for words.
In my present job I get to explain all of the tools at the beginning of each semester in my now famous “This is a Hammer lecture”.
To date I have given it 56 times.

Working in the scene shop was pretty basic and nothing too wild happened while I was there.
I do remember that I was assigned the very important job of building all of the special platforms and flats for the set of the Inspector General.
It turned out that all of the special platforms and flats were small in size averaging about one foot square.
The set was a collection of odd shaped walls and levels and my crew and I had to fill in all of the gaps.
I had one very important contribution to the action of the play.
There was a pair of large doors that were the main entrance into the stage and a small sliding door cut into the door to act as a peep hole.
As a joke, after it was made, I added a rubber band to the back of the door to make it spring shut.
The director happened to come through the shop and thought it was so funny that he added it to the business of the play each night an actor would get his nose slapped by the springing back of the little door.

Each of the Guest Artist Series productions had a professional actor, director and/or a designer and my first semester at Michigan when we did Richard II Christopher Walken was the lead.

Richard II, Scene Design by Steven Gilliam

Although all of the other guest artists were good, Christopher Walken turned out to be the most famous.
Back in 1979 Walken was still mostly a stage actor, although he had done a few films by that time.
He seemed a bit distant to me, he had just finished filming the Deer Hunter, and when I later saw the film I could see why.

Richard II with Christopher Walken

Play List and Costume Crew Work

In my two years at Michigan I worked on many plays, plus dance concerts and several touring plays and rock shows.
Here is a list of the major plays that I worked on while at the University of Michigan:

Showcase Productions - 1978/9

Blood Wedding
Red Roses for Me
People are Living There
In Celebration

1979/80

End of Summer
Tango
The Lion and the Jewel
The Master Builder

Guest Artist Series Production - 1978/79

She Stoops to Conquer
Richard II
The Inspector General
The River Niger

1979/80

Idiot’s Delight
Richard III
Eden
The Relapse

Summer Repertory Productions - 1979

Hay Fever
Ah, Wilderness!
Much Ado About Nothing
Wedding Band

1980

Blithe Spirit
La Ronde
Of Thee I Sing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream


As I had noted in an earlier post, I designed the lighting Blood Wedding, the first play of the year.
All of the technical and design classes at Michigan required some hands on crew work.
At the same time I was working in the scene shop, designing lights for Blood Wedding, working on classroom design projects I had to find time to work in the costume shop.

I was assigned to work on the costumes for the Guest Artist Series production of She Stoops to Conquer.
Mt first job was to learn how to use a seam ripper.
As in many theatre productions, costumes are often reused and altered to fit the design of the new play.
After many hours of deconstruction I was moved into the construction phase and learned to joys of running a serger or baby lock.

I was putting an edge on miles of light blue fabric to be used for petticoats for She Stoops to Conquer at the same time they were working on the costumes for Blood Wedding which were all black.
There was lots of cursing as we tried to share the machine.
It is not too hard to use, OK you could cut your finger off or ruin yards of fabric, but he biggest pain was trying to re-thread it if the thread broke and if you used the wrong color you would have to stop and rip it all out and start all over again.

By the end of my time in the costume shop I was doing OK and they even let my use the regular sewing machine and cut out some cloth for a pocket flap for a vest.
Just as I finished the flap on the vest, the costumer noticed that I had the grain of the corduroy fabric running the wrong way.
Of course everyone in the shop laughed and it was decided that it could stay as it was because it would be under a long overcoat most of the time.

I also had to work on the wardrobe crew for another play and was on the run crew for Red Roses for Me.
I did all the basic prep work making sure everything was ready before the play, but my most important job was working as a dresser backstage during the performance.
At one point in the play the main character goes offstage and is in a fight.
I had to tear apart the shoulder of his suit jacket and apply power to his elbows and knees to make it looked as he had been in a tussle.
After the scene I returned the jacket to the shop where a seamstress would repair it and prepare for the next performance.
That was extent to all of my advanced training in costuming while at Michigan.

Power Center for the Performing Arts

I spent a lot of time in the Frieze building shops and theatres but there was a bigger theatre that we got to work in too.
At the time Power Center for the Performing Arts was less than ten years old and had state-of-the art stage equipment.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/power/index.htm

Power Center

In addition to the smaller student showcase productions in Trueblood Theatre there were four Guest Artists Plays in the larger Power Center for the Performing Arts each year.
With the addition of a professional actor, director or designer much more was expected from the Guest Artist Series plays.
The budget and scope of these plays were bigger and were given much more support than the showcase productions.
Soon after I graduated the Power Center went through a major renovation with the addition of a new scene shop and other added spaces.

The lighting board was an early computer controlled system that was not very sophisticated by today’s standards but still it was better than anything else I had seen in use at that time.
Reading over the new Technical Specifications I have seen that all of the lighting and sound equipment is new and up to date.

I would design the lighting for two summer repertory plays, one Guest Artist series plays and a music event.
I would also work on all of the other department productions in the Power Center as an electrician, carpenter or sound engineer.
Additional I worked on several touring Broadway plays, an opera and several dance pieces.
In total I worked on almost 30 major productions plus many smaller events in one capacity or another during my two years at Michigan.

The Power Center is a large theatre and was the biggest I had worked in up until that time.
Working up in the lighting rings was always fun especially those right over that front of the stage.
To focus the lights in the closest rings to the stage you had to sit with your butt on the edge of the opening with your feet on the other side, the light between your legs and the floor 30 feet below.
This was all done without a safety harness.

Lighting Rings over the Seats

To work on the lights in the Rings over the audience you had a climb a ladder on side of the balcony up through a trap door.
There were lights on the ladder too and these were very hard to focus.
The follow spots and sound control board was also there and the technicians running the shows often brought a larger coffee can with them as there was no quick or easy access to the restrooms during a performance.

Ladder up to the Rings

Using the large “A” frame ladder to focus onstage lights was also fun and if you use the sway of the top extension ladder just right you could reach lights six to eight feet apart.

The theatre had at least one union (IASTE) stage technician at all times plus a doorman.
The doorman, usually an older member of the union, checked people’s names as they came in to work.
The Senior House Tech technician kept a log book with every light and the date a new lamp was put into it and he was always mad at our teacher for using different lamps in the lights.
There were always 750 watt lamps in all of the lights and our teacher always had us add 1500 watt lamps in many of the front of house lights but always forget to change out a few after the show was over and this would always piss the Senior House Tech off.
When I designed in the theatre I would just plan to have two units side-by-side assigned to do the same job hoping that the combined output would throw enough light from the rear lighting ring to the stage.

There were a few other quirks with the theatre.
One student assigned to run the lighting board had to be replaced because he had an electrical charge to his body that would change the levels of the lights when he got near the control panel.
Just by running his hand over the board you could watch the levels go up and down on the dials and onstage.

Very unique.

They had not planned the loading dock very well as the road leading to it came up a hill and trucks had a hard time backing up it even if there was just a little ice on it.

One time while working in the theatre there was a wonderful bright shaft of light came down on the stage but the designer could not get it to turn off.
After a few minutes we all realized that a balcony door was open to the lobby and that the shaft of light was reflected sunlight bounced around the big glass lobby that way.
It only happened that one time while I was there, but it very funny watching the light board operator trying to figure out what was wrong.

There were other places that I got to work while in Michigan but I spent most of my time in the Frieze Building and the Power Center which were just a few blocks apart.

The Frieze Building

The Frieze Building was my home for two years.
Although I got to work in other theatres and spaces, the Theatre Department and most of its classes were held there.
There were two theatres, classrooms, a library as well as a scene, costume and prop shops plus storage areas throughout the basement.

Here is a like to the official University of Michigan history of the building page:
http://umhistory.dc.umich.edu/mort/central/north%20of%20north%20u/Frieze%20Building/index.html

It was old, the equipment was not up to date, but it still was a great place to work and learn about Theatre.
Built in 1905 it had seen several changes since it was the Ann Arbor High School.
The scene shop was in the old gymnasium and the main theatre space had been renovated many times.
One feature that was unique was the freight elevator that went from the basement up to the shop and up to the theatre above.
To get to the theatre the elevator had to lift a section of the floor up with it as it came through the stage floor in the upstage right corner.

The main theatre was named Trueblood and the proscenium and stage floor had been extended and slots were cut into the ceiling for lights.
The onstage fly grid had wooden slats and very scary for anyone, especially heavy people, to walk on.
The lighting and sound equipment had long seen better days, but it was still a great place to work and the fact that there was a ghost even made it better.

It only took a few late nights working in the space for the stories of the “Trueblood Ghost” to come out.
There was always some odd bump or other noise, maybe it was the wind or it could have been the pigeons that lived in the eaves, but there always seemed something odd that would happen during a show.
For me I would often find things that were in places that no one working would have put them or objects that moved on their own, like a small ball just rolling across the floor.

One night, while working late in the theatre, I could not get the house lights to turn off.
I tried the wall control switch several times with no results so I thought that I would just shut off the main power feed to the system.
The main switch was an old style big knife blade handle, something from a Frankenstein movie, a bit unsafe and scary.

I pulled the handle, cut the power to the lighting system and all the lights stayed on.
Mmmmm? Think I’ll go home.
When I came back the next day the lights were off and I could not find anything wrong with the system and it all worked perfectly fine after that day.

There was a second smaller theatre that was just off the shop in which many small projects were held.
The Arena Theatre held maybe 50 or so people and did not have great equipment for sound or lights.
When I was the department electrician my second year I helped on may shows there either designing or supervising the other students working in there.
Maybe times it was the first space that a lighting design student would work and many times they were other design students, actors or directors who were just doing it for class.
I had to show them how equipment worked and clean up after they were done plus fix their many mistakes and this really helped prepare me for my current job.

The basement storage was a maze of odd rooms and spaces with sets pieces, props and furniture all over the place.
One time while looking for something in one of the dirt floor spaces of the basement I saw a light flash back at me and thought that my flashlight hit a mirror or other piece of glass but as it move in a odd pattern I thought maybe I had meet the “Trueblood Ghost”.
The girl with me was a bit concerned but soon two college facilities workers came our way, nodded and just walked on by.
I do not think that we ever found what we were looking for.

The attic was just as much fun with its beams air ducks and graffiti from the early 1900’s.
It was almost a complete forth floor, but one had to be careful where you walked.
There were stories of people who lived up there and you could clearly see that people had at least stopped to eat lunch there or some little party.

I worked on many plays, dance concerts and other events in the two theatres in the Frieze building but there were many other places that we worked including the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre in the Michigan League Building, Hill Auditorium, Chrysler Arena and the glass wrapped Power Center for the Performing Arts.
Many of the other spaces were far better than the theatres in the Frieze Building, but it always seemed comfortable and safe to work there.
It is gone now, they have turn it down, but they save a little of the façade to use as part the new building that will soon take its place.

Ann Arbor

There was a former classmate from UB who was finishing up his MFA degree  at Michigan just as I got there.
Having someone else from my old school made it easier, and at times harder, for me when I got to Ann Arbor.
It was nice to have a place to stay when I came out to interview and looked for my house in the fall plus it was also nice that he showed me around town and took me to some parties.
Because I was another student from UB there was some of “who does he think he is” and “what does he know” but the worst thing is that I had a New Yawk accent.
As I soon found out there was always some hazing of the new students, mostly all in jest, and I was not the only new student and we all had to prove ourselves to the older students and faculty.


Ann Arbor was, and still is, a cool place to live and I enjoyed exploring it when I had the time.
There was a lot to see and explore in Ann Arbor.
As I have worked on my Blog I have reviewed my old Playbills and have looked up old friends and places on the internet.

I recently took a virtual tour of Ann Arbor with the help of Google Maps Street View feature.
After thirty years I was surprised how many things still look the same, but of course there have been changes.
The three houses that I lived in are all there and look about the same, although one house had scaffold along side of it and looked like it was getting some long needed updating.

The college and town as grown since my time there and most recently they tore down the old Theatre building just as they opened a wonderful new multi-Theatre complex on the north campus.
For those of us who spent many hours working in the Frieze building we will miss it.
I found a nice photo set on Flickr that shows the Frieze Building in it's last days:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfobrien/sets/72157594246447684/

A postcard shows the building when it was still the Ann Arbor High School:

As a student I did not have a car, so I explored my world mostly on foot and with the help of an occasional bus or friend’s car.
During my time there I went to all of the college museums; the Arts, Natural History and small but interesting Museum of Archaeology, where you could see ancient treasures stolen from other countries.

http://www.umma.umich.edu/

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/exhibitmuseum/

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey

They have expanded and changed all of the museums since 1980, but I did enjoy exploring them at the time between classes and working on productions.
I also found the rare book room in the library, although I was often amazed by how old some of the books were in the regular collection.
The rare book room is now part of the “Special Collections Library”, although I was disappointed they only have a Second, and not First, Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/special-collections-library

There were many fun shops, restaurants, bars and others places I like to go.
For anyone who has spent time in Ann Arbor you would know Nickel’s Arcade, the Cube, the Fleetwood Dinner, Old Town and the Blind Pig.

There were plenty of things that I never got to do in Ann Arbor; places I never saw, but I always had a great time when I was there.

My days were full of working on a plays, researching  papers or drawing and drafting, but those short times between classes, walking home or those rare days off I enjoyed the town as much as I could.

I got to go back to Ann Arbor five years after I graduated, but its been almost 25 years since I was last there and a return trip is long overdue.