The Diary of Anne Frank, 1991

I have written many times here how much I have enjoyed working on a particular show and I know that I may seem that I loved all the shows that I have worked on over the years, but the 1991-92 season at Brockport was one of the best all-around seasons of plays that I have ever worked on.

Each play in the season was well done, had great casts and challenging sets to work on.

We were lucky at that time that we had a great core of tech students who enjoyed working on the plays.

I was the second time while I was at Brockport that we did The Diary of Anne Frank.

We had done the same show about eight years earlier and it should no surprise to readers of this Blog that we still had set pieces from that production in stock and were able to use several old pieces in the new set.

Program Cover

We used several windows and building top cut-outs on the skyline upstage of the set.

The same big sink was used and I am sure that some of the same furniture must have been used.

Although it was not really seen by the audience we welded a spiral staircase to the upper level.

It was one of the first pieces that we used our new MIG welder on.

Unlike today we did school matinees for many of the productions back then.

I think that year we were able to do matinees for all four productions which added nicely to our income that year.

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"Loose Ends" April 2015

Another school year is almost over and we just opened our last production of the year.

We have three more performances of Loose Ends by Michael Weller.

There are a few more musical performances to do before the end of the school year.

More photos from this past school year as well as many previous years can be found on the college's web site:

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

The summer does not look too busy yet, we will host 5 freshmen orientation sessions onstage in July.

But first we will have an event that I have never worked on before.

I have worked on all kinds of plays, musicals, opera, dance, lectures and speeches, but June 6th we are hosting part of the summer Special Olympics.

The weightlifting events will be held on the Mainstage.

I just have to turn on some basic lights and a microphone or two.

We just selected our season of plays for the next school year.

The Foreigner

by Larry Shue
October 9-11, 22-24 

As You Like It

by William Shakespeare
December 4-6, 10-12 

Vanities

by Jack Heifner
February 26-28 and March 3-5 

Assassins

by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman
April 22-24, 28-30

Details to all these events are to follow.

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1991-92 Season

The 1991-92 season was the most successful season of plays that I have ever worked on.

Every show was very well done and we made lots of money.

Everyone always says that masking money is not the primary goal but boy it makes things easy.

The profitable productions help pay for those which might be wonderful shows but do not bring in any audience.

Our season in 1991-92 was:

 The Diary of Anne Frank

A Christmas Carol

Photos to Follow

Dracula

Dracula's Cave

 Brighton Beach Memoirs

Construction Photo

 I am behind in scanning my photos and have many stories from this season but I will be adding them all soon.

This was a crazy time for me, lots of work and changes in my life and I really felt I grew a lot as a teacher, designer and person that year.

Festival of Ten - IX

Festival of Ten -IX opens Friday.

This production and all the crazy snow is what has been keeping me busy lately.

Photos from 1st Dress

Dark of the Moon, Adam Lazarre and D-Day.

In May of 1991 we did Dark of the Moon was written by Howard Richardson and William Berney.

Dark of the Moon  is set in the Appalachian Mountains.

A basic love story, boy meets girl, except the boy John is a “Witch Boy”.

John,   the “Witch Boy”, seeks to become human after falling in love the human girl, Barbara Allen.

The set was a stylized view of a rustic town and surrounding area in the back woods of the Appalachian Mountains.

There was some fun in costumes of the sexy witch girls played by dancers.

The cast was made up with mostly college students with a few adults and children mixed in.

The woman who played Barbara Allen was a bit . .  . mmmmm…….Odd, no Unique.

She was a widow with a 5 years old son who was always around the theatre.

He was not a problem but most people were a bit surprised that he was still breast feeding and one night during a talk-back onstage he just came up onstage and had a little drink.

I hoping that that young boy is now a very well adjusted 29 year old man who loves his mother greatly.

This was the last play for long time and well-loved faculty director Adam Lazarre.

Adam worked in Hollywood back in the 1950’s and 60’s was now the department chair and had been the dean of the arts school when I was hired at Brockport  in 1982.

He had a small part in the movie Guys and Dolls and I saw him in an episode of Perry Mason on ME TV.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0673419/?ref_=ttep_ep18

After the last performance of the show a small tree was planted in front of the building with a commemorative plaque.

The tree is still there and is now taller than the building.

I really liked Adam because he was not full of crap and would tell just what he was thinking.

Some people did not like him because they could not bull shit him and get away with it.

One day Adam and I were talking about nothing too important when he just switched gears and for the next fifteen minutes talked to me about D-Day.

He was part of the Normandy invasion on June 6^th 1944.

He told about his group of men being trapped at the bottom of the sea-side cliffs and how he spent the night listening to the injured men that could not be reached or helped.

During the night the men called out for God or their mothers but as the tide came in things got quieter.

I was not sure what to say so I just listened.

Back in college I had several friends who were Vietnam Veterans and from time to time they would tell of something that had happened to them and I found it best not to ask too much but just let them talk.

I think that they must reach a comfort level that finally frees them enough to talk about it.

My father never talked too much to me about his experiences in WWII.

The play was fun to work on with the various witches and a few special scenes but a amusing moment came from our department secretary.

She was concerned for all of us working on a play that dealt with witches and black magic so she had her church pray for us.

The next year when would produce Dracula she was even more upset and there was even more pray for us.

Well all the pray must of worked as both plays did well and there were no devil sightings.

Oh yes we still have a few pieces from the Dark of the Moon and recently  reused a large shelf unit in our  production of Fox on the Fairway.

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Roshamon, March 1991

Our first show in 1991 was Roshamon, a play based in part on a 1950 Japanesse movie directed by the famous director Akira Kurosawa and staring the well known actor Toshirô Mifune.

The story of the play was the retelling of a murder and rape by several witnesses who each have a different story.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon

Traditional Japanese theatre includes several styles including Kabuki, Noh (and Kyōgen) and Bunraku.

Our guest director wanted to incorporate parts of each style in our production.

Most traditional Japanese productions would not use a blend of styles but we had them all in our show.

We had hired a temporary costume designer that year and she was chosen in part because she had experience in Japanese costume design and she did created very beautiful costumes for the show.

We also had to make Bunraku puppets, a life-size horse costume and a very stylized set which included a Hanamichi, a ramp that ran out into the audience.

Although a mixture of styles the play looked nice and came off well.

The biggest problem during the production came on the Sunday night of the first weekend of the show with the start of the Ice Storm of 1991.

The storm caused major powered outages and closed the school for several days and delayed the second weekend of the show.

http://www.progrocher.com/pix/icestorm/ice1.htm

Many branches and whole trees fell that night and a tree fell across the front of my car.

As luck would have it, the tree did no damage to my car it except bending my radio antenna.

*** 

Stamping, Shouting & Singing Home, Dec1990

Directed By: Suzanne Sturn

Scene Designer:  Drew Francis

Costume Designer:  Madeline Huggins

Lighting Designer:  Gary Thomas Musante

 Stamping, Shouting & Singing Home was a collection of three one-act plays written by women.

The plays were: A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell also known as Trifles, A Chat with Mrs. Chicky by Evelyn and Stamping, Shouting & Singing Home by Lisa Evans.

Links to more information about the plays:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffrage_drama

http://playsforyoungaudiences.org/wp-content/files_mf/stampingshouting_excerpt.pdf

The three plays were acted on a unit set that was a large raked stage that had translucent panels flown in for each play.

The stage floor was covered with many lauan ply planks that made a large parquet pattern on it.

It was very time consuming but looked great when it was done.

The flooring for the just completed The Cripple of Insihmaan might have been more complex and certainly took many more staples to finish and when done it took two days to remove them all.

The Cripple of Inishmaan, 2014

Taking out the staples.

The large panels were simple and covered with a spun mesh fabric that was very expensive had to be shipped in from Germany.

With some changes we re-used the panels again the following year for A Christmas Carol.

We got the material from Rosco but the closest thing to it that I could find today comes from Rose Brand.

http://www.rosebrand.com/product2967/118-Kaos-Open-FR.aspx?cid=158&idx=9&tid=1&info=Netting%2b%2526%2bGauze%2bFabrics

So what do I remember most about this production?

The actors, crew or plays themselves?

Nope, something else.

When we came in one morning we found that the main stage curtain had fallen down on the stage.

It appears that the tie lines had rotted away over the years and one finally broke and the slight shift in weight snapped others and started a cascade of broken ties and the whole thing fell down.

As the curtain fell it ripped itself apart and we had to buy a new one.

Few people would miss the old purple curtain.

Fortunately the only other item that was a damaged was a golf club that had been leaning against the proscenium.

What it was doing there I do not know, it was just a toy that someone had been playing with most likely hitting tape balls around the theatre.

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