Ah, Wilderness, October 1988

I am sorry that I have been a bit lax and distracted on my blog entries of late.

As I progress through the many plays that  I have worked on over the years I find that although I have many stories I do not always have wild tales for every show or season of plays.

Maybe I am getting old but some years and shows do blend together.

I clearly remember the 1987 production of Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O'Neil but I only have a few stories but nothing wild.

 

It was a good production, the first of the new school year.

It was a little hard for me to work on the play as I was pretty sick and had pneumonia.

I have worked through many colds and even the flu but this was different and so bad that I even had to take one whole sick day off.

I knew that I was pretty sick when I bent down to pick up something and I did not have enough air to stand up with great effort.

The set would get done and the show went off well.

I thought it was funny that the young actress who played the Irish maid actually spoke very little English.

She was a Latina but I do not remember which country she was from.

The actor who played the drunk uncle was an recent alumni and I do remember that he spent a good deal of time working with the girl running her lines when they were offstage.

I am sure he was just it for the good of the play and not to hit on her but in any case she did OK during the play and you could almost understand what she said.

The play calls for one of the boys to throw firecrackers on the set and we used real ones that I just happened to have.

I think I got them on the same trip through the south when I got the bottle rockets that I had fired at the Anything Goes set a few summers before.

I think I still have a few of the firecrackers in my tool box and I never seem to through them away because I just like having them.

They make me feel young.

As for the rest of Ah, Wilderness I really do not have much else to say about it.

This is does not mean that it was a bad show but just another one of hundreds that I have worked on.

As I go through the years in my Blog I know that I have left out some of the many smaller production that I worked on.

During a normal school year we would have several music concerts of varied styles and size.

We have had classical trios, quartets and full orchestras, jazz groups, folk groups, singers and even Indian Sitar music.

Oh, the Sitar concert, not one of my favorites.

The first song was nice and so was the second but after a while it all sounded the same and the guy would not stop and he played on for hours.

Additionally there are always many student productions from the full club productions each semester to the many one act student senior projects.

I have overseen most of the shows and my direct involvement has varied from just a few words of advice or encouragement to designing the whole set or lighting for the show when the students have been desperate.

I prefer to just advise them, give them some options and let them decide what do it themselves.

I do not have a clear picture on how many productions that I did "Ghost" design work for but I am always happy when the students can do it themselves with maybe just a bit of help.

In any normal school year we may have bonus events in the theatre that take up my time.

In recent years we have had the college president and vice president give their opening of the school year speeches.

In the past I have worked on various commencement related events the nursing, education and ROTC programs.

It has been a very rare year that we have not had some extra event in one of our two theatres.

As I write this we are going to have a bonus production in the lab theatre tomorrow as part of the college's diversity conference.

When they asked to use the space they never said that it was a play that was coming in, I thought it was just going to be a lecture.  

In short it has been a pain in the ass but I got some of my student workers to run it while I work with others on the main department production.

I try to avoid these type of added shows but I cannot always do it.

I will bitch a lot but will work hard to make sure that it will come off OK.

Tempted as I am to do a bad job so they will not come back I just cannot do it.

I do not want anything that I work on or is in our space to look bad as it will reflect badly on our department even if we did not produce it.

Theatre, always fun.

 

 

 

Change

Working at a college there is always change.

Each year the student body changes as some students will graduate or drop out and new ones come in.

Students stay as little as one semester and stay as long as five years or more.

As I noted in another post I think an average stay for students is about three years.

There are changes in the staff over time as well but not usually as dramatic as when we graduate a large number of students in one year. 

The fall of 1988 was the beginning of many staff changes in just a short time that really re-shaped the department.

At the end of my first year one on the faculty left to become a dean at another college and after my third year the lighting designer left after not getting tenure.

There had been little change until the fall of 1988 when we got a new costume designer.

Don was a very good designer but would only stay for two years and then we got a temporary new designer in the fall of 1990 and she would stay just one year.

The fall of 1991 brought our fourth costume designer in just over three years and luckily she would stay for about six years before leaving and we would get the fifth and current costume designer during my time at Brockport.

In the fall of 1989 we would also get a new scene designer who became very popular with the students but would only stay six years before leaving.
 

We would also get a new acting teacher in the fall of 1990 when long time popular teacher Gisela Fritzsching was forced to retire by state law at 70, a law that was changed the very next year.

As I write this she is still going at about 93.

Over the years there would be several more changes with our music staff and other academic faculty, but that period from 1988 through 1991 with so many design faculty changing was challenging for me.

It always seems to take a few shows working together to get use to how other designers work and get to the point where everyone works as a team.

This does not mean that we did bad productions; it just means that we had to work just a bit harder to get it right.

As I get ready to write about the plays I worked on during this period I thought I would take a minute to figure out just who I was working with.

I think maybe I need to go through all my programs and make a chart of who was here when, but that sounds too much like work and not lots of fun.

As I write this we are two weeks away from the start of another school year; it will be my 32^nd year at Brockport.

We have already had a design meeting for the first fall production.

The 2013-14 season for those who care:

Almost, Maine

by John Cariani

October 4-6 and 17-19  

 

Avenue Q

by Lopez, Marx and Whitty

November 22-24 and December 5-7  

 

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

by Sarah Ruhl

February 28-March 2 and March 6-8   

 

bobrauchenbergamerica

by Charles Mee

April 25-27 and May 1-3

So up next the 1988-89 season and stories from those plays.

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The Boy Friend, Summer 1988

In the summer of 1988 our production was The Boy Friend.

It was a summer of change as it was the first time in many years that Adam Lazarre was not directing the production.

Santo Giglio, the long time choreographer, would take over the directing duties.

The play was chosen in part because it would not be too much of a challenge.

For those who know it, The Boy Friend is not a deep musical, very light and to me it seems very similar to the classic No, No, Nannette in style and plot.

The musical has no show stopping tunes or ones that must people would know.

That summer we also had two outside designers working with us.

Both the scene and costume designers were from SUNY Geneseo, 40 or so miles to the south.

I knew the scene designer as I had worked with him a few times before and became friendly with the costume designer as well and we all had a good time that summer.

Our production was not bad and as always I had fun working on it.

The summer musicals were always lots of work but we always made sure that we had lots of fun too.

Wednesday lunchtime cookouts on the loading dock and of course cast parties after each show, and many of the rehearsals as well.

I do not have too many special stories from this production, good or bad, but as with many other shows I have bits from the shows still hanging about, literally.

Until the recent renovation we had a bright yellow plywood Sun from the show hanging in the shop.

Not sure where it is now, I will have to find it and put it back.

I had enough fun with the two outside designers that we talked about getting together after the show was done.

That fall one of the student assistants and I went down to Geneseo to see one of their shows.

Wrong show.

The play we chose to see was about women prisoners during the Holocaust.

It was sad and very Loooooooooong.

There was maybe 10 to 15 women in the play, all dressed in death camp outfits, very pale grey makeup and a few of them even shaved all of their hair off.

They did a fine job but it took more than just a few minutes to shake off the play and get into the mood to go have a few beers with our friends when it was done.

I guess that speaks to the effectiveness of the production and its very difficult subject.

When I left to go see the play I did not know what we were going to see, I just thought we would see some normal college production and have a few beers and laughs after.

The next school year would be the last for the scene designer and we also be getting the first of several new costumes designers.

We would have four different staff costume designers over the next five years and other staff changes were also ahead in next couple of years.

Through it all we still did our productions, most of them good and had a good time doing them.

 

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The Last Baron of Arizona, 1988

The Last Baron of Arizona was written by one of our faculty and directed by another.

It was a Youth Theatre piece, which means that it was based in part on historical facts and had to have some great moral or message, which has been lost to me over time.

It had a large cast with some of our better actors of that time and I am sure they did a good job but I really do not remember much about the play. 

We had a student scene designer and if I remember correctly we reused part of another set, the raked stage from Androcles and the Lion, and added a few new pieces to it.

We only did one week of regular shows but three “Creature Features”, student matinees, at 10 AM the same week.

What fun.

I know I have photos from the play; I just have not scanned them.

When I was looking for photos of the play I came across one that I thought was from the play but turned out to be from one of the Children’s Theatre Mini Tour productions that we did about the same time as many of the same actors were in both plays.

The Play was Low Bridge: Stories, Songs and Sketches of the Erie Canal.

The play produced as part of a class and the students worked hard developing the Mini Tours as that spent half of the semester working on a script and the rest of the time they toured to local schools performing the play.

The set had to be simple as it had to fit in the back of a big 12 person van.

I often did the scene design for these plays or helped a student do it.

They would always do one performance of the show at the college which I liked because it meant that I did not have to go out to see the play at some elementary school full of little kids.

Now I do like little kids, but when you too many together they can be scary as they all have runny noses and carry some awful kid diseases.

We do not call the school matinees “Creature Features” for nothing.

I will  scan and add the image program for the Mini Tour here as soon as I can.

.

 * * *

Jitters, 1988

Jitters by Canadian Playwright David French was written in 1979.

The better known Noises Off, a similar backstage comedy, was written three years later and was made into a movie in 1992.

 

When the play begins we see a traditional box set on the stage and actors come on and start to perform in what looks like it is going to be an awful play.

After a few minutes the “Director” stands up in the audience and stops the action on stage and we find out that we are watching a play-within-a-play.

Now this would have been funny except our director decided to add some preshow action with fake stage hands that gave away the joke.

He would make some other changes that did not help the show either but it was still funny, well for the most part.

After a set change the bad box set is removed and a two story dressing room unit is rolled downstage.

On this big rolling platform we also see the stage door, bathroom, stairs to the upper level and the greenroom.

Through an opening in the middle we can see part of the set that has been reassembled upstage.

It was a nice effect and worked fairly well.

I really like working on these kinds of sets and like all the added details that make it real and make it fun.

There were old theatre posters and programs, working mirror lights and even fire extinguishers under the stairs.

Fortunately unlike Picnic we did not need them during the show.

There was lots of action with people running about the set with one of the characters being knocked out at one point.

Over the years we have had many of our play adjudicated; now it is called a “response”, but the one for Jitters was extra special.

As I had said the director added some bits to the opening of the play and also cut some lines because he thought the plays was running too long.

Now we all know that if you read the fine print on your royalty payment forms to the publishers that you are supposed to do the play as written without any changes, but again we know that everyone makes a few changes from time-to-time.

The changes were big enough that during the talk with the adjudicator she asked if there was a different version of the script used in Canada because she did not recognize the play.

Opps.

As it turned out that her husband wrote the play.

VERY BIG OPPS ! ! !

This play had about three non-student actors in it but there were plenty of parts for the students.

I know that many students enjoyed the department costume designer who was in the play.

Was her over acting real or part of the show?

Depends on who you ask.

Still everyone involved had a good time.

I wonder what ever happened to that cat?

***

Tartuffe, 1987

For our production of Tartuffe written by Molière in 1664 we used the popular translation by Richard Wilbur.
The production was updated to the current day and set in back yard of a rich family in Connecticut.
The set had just one long wall along the back with only one door which led to what was supposed to be a sauna.



Tartuffe, 1987



A little smoke from a fog machine would flow out each time the door was opened.

The front of the stage had a pit extension with a cut out to represent a swimming pool complete with a diving board and chrome ladder coming up out of the water.

Downstage right a hot tub was built into the stage.

The hot tub was really a large oval horse trough with a plastic liner and we filled it each night just before the show with about 100 gallons of very hot water.

By the time the water was used it was just about room temperature.

After each show that water was bucketed out and dumped and fresh water added before each show.

Fun.

 

One of my favorite moments was the seduction scene that took place in the tub as Tartuffe chased after Elmire.

Later in the play Orgon would fall, fully dressed, into the tub.

Yes I have a photo of him falling someplace and will, along with many others, scan it and post it here.

As can be seen in the photos there also was a large canvas “Sail” above the set.

I was never sure what the scene designer had in mind with it and I do not think I did the best job in lighting it but I tried.

Like most plays I have worked on, I did enjoy this production but felt that there were too many non-students in the cast for me.

The non-students were very good and it made for a stronger production but because we are a college I always like to see the students get a chance to act and design when possible.

When we did the play again twenty years later (2007) the entire cast was made up of student actors.

For that production the director set the production into the past to the 1980’s which made it the same time frame as the production noted here.

The newer production was done with a different script and a much broader comic style.

The ending was fun and there is a short video on YouTube of part of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oasPhJ_-3aI

Tartuffe, 2007

Cherry Cheesecake

When I started my blog almost four years ago I was not really sure what I was going to write but I knew That I had lots of Theatre stories to tell and just started writing them down.

I thought I would just go back to the earliest show I could remember, start from there and see where it would go.

With over 150 posts covering  many plays I know that I have often said how any given show was special and everyone had a good time working on it.

Not every play is extraordinary and back in April I wrote about how working on some plays have driven me crazy at times.

But for the most part I have always enjoyed working in Theatre and if I did not like it why else would I keep doing it for over forty years.

My Blog does have a few loyal followers and I know that people do read it from time-to-time, the stats page tells me that my Blog  has had over 12,000 visits so far, but I was still surprised to the reaction to my last blog post.

When I wrote about Picnic I said that I really enjoyed working on it and that and I knew that it effected many of those people who worked on it.

As it happened one of those who was in the play read my blog and shared it on Facebook with many of cast members and staff who worked on the play.

I knew that many of the actors from the play were still friends and had stayed in touch and it was fun to read their posts and recollections of the show, even those which may have differed from my own memories.

Not every show forms long lasting friendships, but that production of Picnic did.

Four of the actors from Picnic would go on to work together on a student production of Extremities which further strengthened their friendship.

The play also caused many bruises for the actors.

Again, not every show will have long lasting effects on everyone involved in it, but some do and that is what keeps us all coming back to work on more.

Even if a given play turns out bad, it is in the weeks rehearsals that bonds of friendship are forged.

When I worked summer stock back when I was in college, the conditions where I worked were poor by most standards, but by overcoming the lack of a well equipped shop with large power tools it gave me more self confidence in my work with hand tools and the basic circular saw.

As I look back on all the plays that I have worked on I have seen many relationships come and go.

I remember a couple who worked on several plays together while in college and met up again a few years after graduation and are now married.

Of course there are those couples who were madly in love while in college and ended up married to others.

Life backstage is not that much different than the rest of the world, but sometimes the pressures of working in Theatre can seem to magnify emotions.

I am happy though when I see those long lasting friendships that I know started on a bare stage or rehearsal room so many years before.

 

 

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