Funny Incident and Hello World!

After working in Theatre for forty years you would think that I have seen almost everything.
Well in last night’s rehearsal something funny happened.
We were getting ready for our second technical rehearsal for our production that opens this Friday.

Boy Gets Girl, 2010

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1511.html

The scene designer had bought a new piece of furniture for the set and several students had just assembled it and placed it on the set.
It was a low shelf unit designed for shoes in a closet.

We use students from various Theatre intro classes on the run crews and a girl who was setting up props walked out on the set, across the office platform and stepped on the shelf unit and snapped it in half but kept going up into the bedroom platform without stopping, but when she did she just turned around looked back and said “What!” as everyone was laughing.

Then the student said “I thought it was a step”.

While working on my blog and posting a recent entry I found a button I had not seen before.
It gave statistics on how many people have read my blog and which countries they are from.
I was very surprised and happy to see how many readers that I have from all over the world.
The top countries outside of the US for readers of my blog are: Germany, Russia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Israel, Vietnam, Australia, Finland and Poland, but there are many more.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers and I hope that you will leave comments or drop me an e-mail and let me know who and where you are.

As soon as the current play opens I hope to get back to writing my normal, if you can call them that, blog entries.




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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

Renovation Update

I have been writing about my life in Theatre and I am about to start commenting on what I did in my second year in Grad School.
I thought I would jump ahead briefly to comment on what is happening right now.
The new school year has begun and we are at the start of the fourth week of school.
Our first production is well under way and opens on October 8th.

http://www.brockport.edu/theatre/current.html

For the past two years we have been dealing with renovations to the Tower Fine Arts Center and its two Theatres and classrooms.
Most of it was supposed to be done by the start of this school year and surprise there is still a few issues.
As of today we still do not have working dimmers in the Mainstage Theatre.
New dimmers were ordered but the New York State budget delayed caused a delay in dimmers being ordered.
I think that they could have been ordered six months earlier but that did not happen.
We did get about 150 new stage lights to replace the old ones that had asbestos wires.
They will be a nice addition to our inventory; that is after we get some dimmers hooked up to run them.

I did use 4 of the new LED Strip lights for a music concert last Thursday.
They work without dimmers and I had them just doing a slow color blend from red to blue in an endless loop that one of my students programmed in the lighting board.

The Lab Theatre has gone through some major work this past summer and should be ready for use some time before the end of the year.

 Roof off and new "I" beams in place

A new SkyDeck lighting grid is being installed.

http://www.iastage.com/skydeck_tension_wire_grid

SkyDeck panels being installed

The Lab Theatre will not look the same as before and the new work lights are very bright.

More photos of the SkyDeck being installed can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=278389&id=560337941&l=2e43ee8003

Other photos of the renovations can be found at the following links:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=236891&id=560337941&l=60dbfb5b1c

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=253517&id=560337941&l=1dd9123715

There is a list of many things that are not yet done with the renovations, some big, some small and some just a pain in the butt.
The new air blowers are very noisy and the one in the lobby sounds like a jet engine.
I had them turn it off for the music concert but the other ones that were still on made it hard for me to hear the concert in the control booth.

We are also getting new pass card locks on the doors in place of keys, of course that is not ready and there are some doors that I cannot get in.

I thought I would take a break from my normal writings and share with my readers what is currently going on with my life in Theatre and I will get back to my regular postings soon.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Nine years ago we lost too many good people and the world as we knew was changed forever.

It turns out that I had met one of those heroes thirty years ago while I was in college.

He was the twin brother of one of my friends and I enjoyed a few beers and many laughs with him during his visit to Buffalo.

Please take a minute to remember all of those who we lost that day.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Age: 47

Hometown: Lindenhurst, N.Y., USA

Occupation: Firefighter, New York Fire Department

Location: Ground, World Trade Center




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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.

A few more thoughts about my Blog

As I have written about my adventures over this past year, it has been hard for me not to always say “This was the best time of my life”!
Well working in Theatre has been the best time of my life.
Each production whether they were large or small, offered interesting problems and challenges that were fun to figure out.
As I think back to my time in grad school (about which I have been most recently writing in my blog) we had a dozen or more talented grad students working together on the productions along with the teachers and undergrad students, it seemed to me at the time that we were doing great work, having a great time and that we were unstoppable.

I thought the shows were all great and that we were doing the best Theatre ever done.
Well they were good, maybe not the best ever, but for me at the time it was a great experience.
I started to learn how to draft in High School, learned more in college but now I was using my skills to design things.
Things that I thought up and drew out on paper were being built in the shop and lights in the theatre set up and focused using my plans.
People were working on things that I designed, of course I felt great.

As I look back today to my work over the years I can be honest with myself, I know how things really were; I know what was really good, what was bad and what turned out so-so, but it was all special to me.

I have always known that I was lucky to come into the world of Theatre; to be able to stay there and make a living doing what I love.
Of course working on the big productions with lots of money, time and staff is fun; but I have also enjoyed getting the chance to work on smaller and more challenging shows in smaller theatres with limited resources.
Sometimes it is while working on small productions; working alone, wearing too many hats, complaining about the conditions, but still finding a way to get it done - is when I have found the greatest enjoyment.

Back in college and grad school I did not know where my career path would lead me but I was determined to enjoy the ride.
I never have worried too much about if I was working in the right or best theatre or school but have tried to make each production the best I could.
Not every play I have worked on has been a great success, but I have always tried to give my best to every production.

Since becoming a teacher I have enjoyed helping others start their own journey into the world of Theatre and I am happy and proud when I hear of the success of my former students.
As I write about my past adventures I do want my readers to think that I view them as my “Glory Days”, the best years of my life.
I would be nice to think that every moment of our lives are the special golden moments, the best days of our lives, and if you enjoy each moment as its comes and make the best of them you will be happy.

Yes I am proud of the work I have I done, I did enjoy them working on them all, but it is the current play, that always the most important production to me.
I have been asked many times if I am sad on closing night, when I have to take a set down, and my answer is always the same; No.
It is the journey; the research, the designing, calculating and building of each show that I enjoy.
When a show is over it is time to move on to the next one and the start of a new adventure.

As I start the second year of my blog I hope to have more interesting stories to share with my readers as I go back and review what I have done, where I have been and where I still may be going.