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.

Classes and Football

As a Lighting Design major at the University of Michigan I took a variety of Theatre Design classes but I also had to take a few non-Theatre courses.
I took two classes from the English Department, Modern and Contemporary Drama and one from the Psychology Department, Perception.

Modern and Contemporary Drama: neither class dealt with present-day plays as the first plays we read were written in the 1880’s; the newest was from the 1950’s.
But they were both good classes and I got to read many classic plays, at least 35 each semester, and I think I read everything from Ibsen, Chekov, Shaw, Strindberg, Beckett plus many others.
The teacher, the same for both courses, was a scholar of the works of Samuel Beckett.
The teacher was so proud when he got a return letter from Beckett after sending him a copy his latest book.
The teacher went on and on about how great the letter was and how Beckett was so “avant-garde” and that he was such a new post-modern minimalist, blah, blah, blah.

The letter was a blank piece of paper.

I am thinking “Hey, this guy just Shit on you, and doesn’t care what you think about his plays”, but I did not say a thing.
He was a good teacher, I learned a lot from him and he is still teaching at Michigan and writing books on Beckett, Arthur Miller and others.

Unlike most MFA programs which are three years, at the time Michigan’s was only two years, but we also had to take classes over the summer which made up the normal number of credit hours.
As part of my fellowship I had to work for the Department and my first year I was assigned to the scene shop where I would work with students from the basic stagecraft classes who had to do shop hours each week.
My second year I served as the department electrician and sound designer.

In the summers we worked on four summer repertory plays and took a few special topic courses from guest lecturers.
As a graduate assistant we all worked on many shows, designing for some and just helping out on many others.
Some of the classes required that we would work on specific crews such as sewing in the costume shop or working the wardrobe run crew for the costume design class.
Of course I enjoyed it when I got to design the lighting for shows but I really enjoyed all of the different crews I got to work on.

Because there were at least eight to ten major productions a year, numerous one act lab shows plus four more in the summer, there was always something that needed to be done on one show or another.
It is hard to remember every show I have worked on because my involvement might be limited to just helping out for a few hours one day in order to get a show finished or to fix a problem that may have come up.
Just so we would not get bored we also worked with the Dance and Music Departments and a number of events and I got to work with the local stagehands union when several turning plays and rock shows came through town.
Stories to follow soon.

Of course with all of this work to be done I quickly learned that no work was scheduled on Saturdays in the fall as everyone took off to watch the most important event in the world:

MICHIGAN FOOTBALL!

It is hard to tell from the efforts of the last few seasons, but back then it was all about BO and Football.
I was so busy trying to get into school that I did not even think about getting tickets for the game and although as a student I could have bought season tickets, that first year I would have gotten the worst seats in the end zone.

It takes many years of buying tickets before you slowly move around to the side of the stadium and many more before you are near the 50 yard line.
I knew some students who would buy the season tickets just to sell off the Ohio State game ticket to pay for the rest and even more if they were lucky.
I was so busy with classes and designing lights for the first play of the year that I did not even pay too much about football and thought that there would be plenty of time to catch a game next year.
Things change and I only got busier as time went on, and as you can guess I never got to a game, but it did not seem important to me at the time.

I did get close to a game one week, but that is another story (there may be a waterbed in the story...).

Blood Wedding, October 1978

There were many things to do as I started Grad School; getting used to a new school and town, buying text books and art supplies plus I was designing the lighting for the first department production of the year and had no time to relax.

The play was Blood Wedding and was written in 1932 by Federico García Lorca.
The play deals with the usual tragic themes: love, lust, betrayal, life and death.
Although not ideal, lighting designers are often brought late into the design process after the basic design concepts and stage layout have already been worked out and this was the case with Blood Wedding.
The set design was a unit set with many areas and platform levels with an erosion cloth backdrop.
I remember that the director had a clear vision for what she wanted to see on the erosion cloth backdrop.
She wanted the colors projected on the cloth to progress during the play progressed in the same way as the color of stars change as they get hotter: Red, Orange, Yellow, Yellow-White, White, Blue-White, and Blue.
For the most part the colors seemed to match the action of the play as the passions of the characters grew during the play and I was able to make it work.

Blood Wedding, Lighting Design, 1978

A year a so later I was working with a chorographer on his dance piece when he asked for the same color blending on the cyclorama during his dance.

I laughed a bit to myself and told him I understood completely and gave him just what he wanted.

At an early rehearsal for Blood Wedding, with the ground plan taped on the floor, I saw the set was not going to work as planned because the acting areas were too small for the numbers of actors in the scenes.

I brought it up at the next meeting but was told not to worry about it as everything would be fine.

Later after the set was built actors indeed do not fit in the spaces provided and they were having a hard time moving up and down the levels.

More than one person mentioned that at times the actors seemed like a family of goats going up and down a hillside.

The Moon

Some of my housemates came to see the show and I got them into the balcony of the theatre which was normally closed to the general public.

The play may have had some issues, but the critic for the local paper clearly did not understand the play and the concept of an allegorical character was beyond his comprehension.

I think my housemates got more enjoyment ripping apart the review of the play and how poorly it was written then from the play itself.

After the play there was a session in the theatre with the faculty and other design students where I had to explain my design concepts and methods and answer their questions.

Of course the other students have to try to show that they are smarter, question all of your choices and tell how they could have done it better.

It was a bit tough but I survived.

I felt that I had done a good job with the lighting and was happy with the results, but the end of each semester there was a portfolio review when each student had to show all of their class and design work to the faculty and I would have to wait to see what they thought of what I had done.

After the review the faculty would meet with the students to discuss any concerns that they had with their work and twice while I was there students were thrown out of the design program after one of the reviews.

As it turned out the student who designed the set Blood Wedding was thrown out of the program after the next review.

I felt bad, hoping my lighting did not make his set look bad, but I was assured that it was for the total poor quality of his class and design work and not just this one production.

Through a recent “Google” search I know that the student who was kicked out of the program has been working backstage in Atlantic City Casinos and Resort Hotels.

The small world of Theatre continues as the director of Blood Wedding has been coming to Brockport in recent years to adjudicate our plays for the American College Theatre Festival.

University of Michigan, Fall 1978

So the end of summer came and my job at Lycian was over, I packed up I flew to Ann Arbor to start Graduate School.
Many details are lost to time, but I took a cab from the airport into town, somehow got my things from my friends place and moved into my new house.
The renovations were almost done, with just a few small things yet to be done, but the house looked nice and looking back I had a good time and enjoyed the guys who I lived with.

The first “Official” event of the school year was a BBQ and softball game with all the grad students and teachers.
There were a few new faces but I had already knew most of the people from my two previous visits.
At Michigan they followed the long Theatre ritual of work hard/play hard and there would be many more parties, poker nights and softball games ahead, but so was a great deal of hard work in the classrooms and Theatres.

When I started college I felt a bit unsure of myself and now I wondered if I was ready for Graduate School and would I be able to do the work?
I was eager to do well in all of my classes but Costume History and Design was new to me and I was not sure how well I would do, but I jumped right in, worked hard and tried not to get behind.
Non-Costume Design students were not expected to do the same level of work as Costume Design majors.
Lighting Designers, Directors and Actors could take the class as “Sketchers” and just do simple costumes design plates, but that was not good enough for me.
I have always tried my best at everything I have done, but my first Costume Plates were just plain bad.
It was easy to see how bad my first few projects were and I knew I had to get better.
Each week I got a little bit better and once I reached a certain level the teacher would not let me go back and would push me to do better.

The Jew of Malta, Costume Designs, 1980

I always appreciated the teachers who gave that extra push and have tried to do that with my students when I began to teach.
Having students who want to learn is always a joy and I have always gone out of my way to help them if I could.

Painting the costume plates were at first hard for me, but I enjoyed the challenge of learning how to research, adapt the design and paint the plates.
There were many nights I was up late working on my projects to get them just right.
I am very happy when I look at the progression of my designs from my first projects through my Thesis designs and I will have to scan some of them and post them here.

Unlike some my fellow students, my drafting skills were already very good when I got to Ann Arbor but I still had to learn a few new lighting design conventions.
Sometimes I miss hand drafting, but I do not miss long hours of working late into the light to get something done.
I can now do a basic light plot or set of working drawing in one tenth of the time it used to take, plus they are done more accurately, but there is still something about using your own hands to draw and paint your ideas.

There would be plenty of assignments to draw, paint and draft while at Michigan and I enjoyed the challenges of each project given to me.
I have kept most of the work I did at both UB and Michigan and often use them as examples in the classes I teach.
In addition to class work there was always design work on the stage and the first play of the year, and my first design in grad school was quickly coming up.

House Hunting in Michigan

In the middle of the summer I took a week or so off to drive to Ann Arbor to find a place to live in the fall.
On the way to and from Michigan I stopped in Buffalo and got to see some of my friends.
I drove through Canada to Detroit and then on to Ann Arbor.
I had never driven so far alone before and had a scare when one of the tires on the car started to come apart sending bits of rubber slamming into to wheel well.
It was “Fun” changing a tire on the side of the road in Canada with little shoulder space and cars zipping by at 80 miles an hour.

I stayed with a friend from Buffalo that had gone to Michigan and was getting ready to graduate.
While I was there I got to see all four shows in their summer repertory plus a dance concert.
Madonna was still a dance student at Michigan at the time but I have no way of knowing if she was in the concert or was at home packing and getting ready to take the bus to NYC and on to fame and fortune, but I like to think that I saw her last dance concert in college.

There was a party one night when I got to meet some of the students who would be back in the fall as well as those who were getting ready to graduate.
I am always telling my students my Theatre “War” stories, many of which make up this blog, and bits of sage-like advice.
I tell them about the old adage of Theatre being a small world and that you will never know who knows who and that you will always keep running into people that you already know.
I also tell them to look around the room as they may be working with some of their classmates when they graduate and go out into the “Real” world and I have talked about this in some of my earlier blogs.

One of those who I meet that summer and who was getting graduate was C. T. Oakes and although we did not take classes at the same time at Michigan, I would run into him many times over the years.
C. T. was teaching at SUNY Geneseo when I started at SUNY Brockport in 1982 and I worked with him several times when he came to Brockport to design the lighting for Garth Fagan Dance.
http://garthfagandance.org/

C. T. left Educational Theatre and entered the business end of lighting but I would run into him many times at the USITT conferences and other trade shows.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/c-t-oakes/14/40b/8aa
(I just found out that C. T. now lives here in Brockport, just a few blocks away, again a small world)

After a few days of looking I found a place to live but I was taking a chance as it was old house that was still under major renovations.
I saw an ad on campus and met several guys who had found the house and needed a few more roommates.
We met in a local bar and found that we were a mixed bag of students; both graduate and undergraduate students, majors from English to Theatre to History and even Chinese.
A couple of us were from Long Island, a farm boy from Illinois, a pot head, a book worm and the son of a Venezuelan Diplomat.
I returned in the fall and moved in with the six other guys to the upper two floors of a nice old house just a few blocks from campus, we all got along well and had a good time that year.

Before I left Ann Arbor I met with the Lighting Design Teacher and was told that they were short a designer and he asked me if I would design lights for a play that fall.
Normally they would not have new students design their first semester but I jumped at the chance, not really thinking too clearly as it was the first show I the year and my design skills would be given a big test.
So before I even took one class at Michigan I had seen 5 department plays, a dance concert, a rehearsal for an Opera, attended several parties and attended my first production meeting for a play I was about to design.

I was excited and could not wait for the summer to be over and to start on my newest adventure.

More Summer of 1978

I greatly enjoyed working at Lycian that summer in 1978.
The owner Richard was a good story teller, who liked to talk and I was eager to hear his “War Stories”.
It seems that all us who work backstage in Theatre like to tell tales, like fishermen who tell of “The Big One That Got Away”.
Richard talked about people, theatres and the various shows that he worked on in the New York City area as well as Rock and Roll concerts.
He supplied some of the equipment for the Grateful Dead Europe ’72 tour and to this now aging Dead Head who was only 22 at the time that was very cool.

http://www.dead.net/

When I started working I was the only one there besides Richard and his wife.
He took pride in his products and really took the time to show me the right way to build the different units.
I quickly learned what to do and did not have too rejected parts.
In addition to the PAR Cans and Color Wheels I also had to refurbish lighting equipment that was part of his rental stock.
I would clean-up, paint and re-wire lights and cables as they came back into the shop before they would go back out on the next rental.

Near the end of the summer another guy was brought in to help after I would leave for Grad School in Michigan.
A rental order came in for some follow spots for a benefit gig for the local Democratic Party out in the Hamptons.
The singer Harry Chapin and his band were playing in some rich lady’s back yard I was put on the comp list.
I drove out to the Hamptons and saw a great concert in somebody’s big back yard.
It was very cool to be on the guest list and get waved in and Harry gave a great concert and played all of his hits.

http://harrychapinmusic.com/chapin_site2/home/chapinhp_frm.html

Working in the shop was very cool that summer with little to complain about except that I did get lots of little cuts and burns all summer long plus a big cut when I almost cut my thumb off .
I got lazy and sloppy trying to rush a job as I was de-burring some holes in sheet metal using the drill press just holding the piece with my hand and not with a pair of pliers.
The drill bit caught on an oval shaped double-punched hole and spun around cutting my thumb.

Ouch!

Nice big cut, I swear I saw bone, but I did not need stitches and it healed fine, although I have a nice little scar right next to the dog bite scar I got when I was about 8.

At some point a fluorescent lamp salesmen stopped in the shop and tried to sell Richard some lamps.
He told some big story about how bright they were and of their color temperature.
Richard said “Really, let’s try them out”
So he brought the guy into the shop and put the lights in and brought out his various meters and tested the results.
“Wrong, these do not test to what you said” and the guy was soon sent packing.
I thought it was very funny and I am sure the salesman never knew what kind of business he had walked into until it was too late.

I was happy to run into Richard at the USITT conference in Texas in 1996 and sat with him at the closing banquet.
I asked how things were going and if he still got to do any live Theatre.
He asked “Don’t you know? I built my own Theatre”.
When I later visited his nice new big shop and the Theatres that he built across the road he gave me the full tour.

http://www.lyciancentre.com/

Again I was glad that I got to work in the shop that summer and I have been happy when I have gotten to run into him at the various trade shows over the years.