My Blog, First Anniversary

One year ago I started writing my blog about my life working in Theatre and I have enjoyed the review of the journey that has taken me to where I am today.
I have only really covered about ten years on working on plays; high school, college and the first year of grad school and there is over thirty years of stories yet to come.
As I have written each blog I have had to stop and review my memories, look through old photos, programs and do some research on the internet and Facebook to find old friends and classmates to see what they have been doing.

It has been nice to reconnect with a few people I have not seen in many years, but the whole process of reviewing events from your life can sometimes leave me feeling a bit melancholy thinking about the days and people of the past.
You can drive yourself crazy if you worry too much about what you did or did not do in the past, it is perhaps best just to remember the good times, smile a bit to oneself and move on.

It is interesting to see where other’s journeys have taken them whether or not they have stayed working in Theatre or not.
An old college friend sent me an e-mail after he found my blog while looking for some information about a play we had worked on over thirty years ago.

I was surprised to find my blog linked from a major computer software site.
It was my book review for “Light Plot Deconstructed” by Gregg Hillmar that prompted me to start my blog in the first place after joking about writing a book for many years.
I needed an online place for my review and a blog seemed like an easy place to put it.
My review is linked from the Vectorworks website: http://delicious.com/VectorWorks/book-review+light-plot-deconstructed.

What started out as a whim turned out to be very enjoyable and I look forward to writing each new entry.
I do not know if the next thirty years of memories will have as much detail as the first ten, but I know that I still have many more tales to tell and hope to add new ones in the coming years.
I have been trying to follow a chronological order in my blog, but have jumped about from time to time, added some of my current adventures, repeated some stories and have jumped off topic and probably I will do it again.

As I have had time and have gone back and re-read my blog, I have found and corrected a few mistakes and I added a few things that I have remembered since I wrote the original blog entry.
I will have to do a complete re-write when I publish the whole blog as my tell-all autobiography after I retire.

A new school year is about to start, the building renovations are coming to an end, but there are still many major things that are not done as of this time.
Whatever building problems there still are they will just be added into the mix of a new academic year with new students and productions and we will all have to wait to see what new, and hopefully interesting, stories develop.

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.