An introspective look at my career choices, or, Why I'm Not a Lighting Designer

I had a discussion today with a couple of lighting designers about my color blindness, and it got me to thinking about my career path.

I wanted to be a lighting designer for a while. The fact that I'm red-green color deficient really didn't factor into that decision, it was mainly based on the fact that I "designed" the lights for every show at my high school my junior & senior year. This is due to the fact that I was the only person who knew how to use the light board, I did some research to learn the difference between a par & an ERS, and I knew how to pronounce the word "fresnel." Basically I was a glorified master electrician. I made sure that all of our 75 lighting instruments were plugged in and we had some vague sort of wash onstage, achieved via bounce focusing on our 4 motorized electrics (everything else was dead hung to the ceiling). Occasionally I'd go really crazy and convince Pruitt to order a gobo.

Anyway, the point of my high school reminiscing is to say that I was much happier as an electrician than as a designer. I like following the plot, I like reading the paperwork and putting gel and templates and all the accoutrement in order. I don't like having to make actual artistic decisions.

I'm the same way with scenic painting- show me what you want it to look like, give me the paint (mixing paint is not my strong suit, you know, with the color deficiency), and I'm your girl. Stage makeup, too- I loved stage makeup, loved the class, loved everything about it except the designing. I liked following instructions and making it look like the chart. Designing my own? Not so much.

That's why stage management is so perfect for me- the director and the designers decide what it looks like, and then I make it happen in every performance. Give me a cue sheet, some spot charts, a whole bunch of spike marks, and I'm golden. I am the facilitator of the art, but I do not make the actual artistic decisions, and that is just the way I like it.

On mentorships

So I've started a long-distance mentoring program through SMNetwork.org, which is an amazing amazing resource for stage managers (and really anyone in theatre). I am a guinea pig- there has been discussion for a while on the site of getting some kind of mentorship program up and running, but nothing really happened with it until one of the mods stepped up to the plate and volunteered to mentor up to 3 people- 1 in high school, 1 in college, and 1 in the early stages of their career. I volunteered to be a mentee, and here we are!

He is an AEA SM who has worked in regional theatre in the DC area for several years and just recently made the move to the world of NYC commercial theatre. We'd been emailing back & forth, and talked on the phone on Monday. He had some great advice and insight into working in DC, which is where I want to be. It was so reassuring to have a conversation with someone in the business whose career path is so similar to where I want to be in 10 years and who basically told me I was taking the right steps, moving in the right direction for where I want to end up. I'm looking forward to continuing- hopefully we can get the ball rolling for some other mentor/mentee pairs.

On a slightly similar note, I skyped with the AU Stage Management class a few weeks ago! It was honestly a little surreal- I am by no means an expert on anything (as evidenced by the fact that I am in a long-distance mentorship program right now!). I really enjoyed talking with them, though, and I hope I was helpful. Our other SM intern was with me, so we gave them a little bit of an internship/young professional viewpoint, I guess.

On Coexistence:

overheardinthetheatre:

“Actors without Technicians are just naked people standing on a dark and empty stage trying to emote. Technicians without Actors are just people with markitable skills and lots of free time.”

-Crew T-shirt

I have seen this quote and its variations many a time, and it never ceases to piss me off. Today it appeared on my tumblr as a post from the often hilarious "Overheard in the Theatre" blog, and I felt the need to break my 2-month blogging hiatus to rant about it.

The superiority complex that so many technicians/designers have over actors is frankly just stupid, and the fact that the post was titled “Coexistence” just makes that feeling of entitlement ironically condescending. Obviously we high and mighty technicians deign to bestow our marketable (notice how I spelled that correctly) skills upon you pitiful, helpless actors in our bountiful free time.

My job has no purpose without actors. I depend on them for my livelihood. My job title is “stage manager-” a stage with nothing on it does not need a manager. We coexist, a symbiotic relationship, like sharks and those little sucker fish that follow the sharks around.

The respect that I have for actors is enormous. It takes skill, hard work, passion, and training, and a level of determination and self-sacrifice that few professions require. I have no illusions about my skill (or lack thereof) as an actor. Without technicians, an actor is "a naked person standing on a dark and empty stage, trying to emote." I beg to differ. An actor, a decent actor anyway, any actor worth his salt, would not allow a lack of technical assistance to prevent him from telling his story to the audience. He would find some clothes, he would find a light switch, and he would not try to emote. He would act. Just ask the girls in the BFA Performance program my senior year at Auburn, who produced Five Women Wearing the Same Dress without any technical staff, and gained not only new skills, but a greater respect and understanding for those of us on the other side of the curtain.

It is true that there are sometimes actors who don't understand what goes into the technical aspect of a production- take, for example the tech process of a musical I recently worked on. We were having sound issues, namely the orchestra was overpowering the cast due to their placement in the house. The cast couldn't hear themselves in the monitors, no one in the audience could hear them, etc. Instead of working through it, they were angry with our sound designer- Why can't he just turn down the volume? It's too loud! They had no concept of how difficult it is to mix a live orchestra, and no trust in the designer to fix the problem as best he could until we could find a more permanent solution (ie, moving the orchestra into another part of the building entirely & just using the monitors).

However, this goes both ways. I recently worked on a production that had a large, moving scenic element that rotated without a fixed point. The actors were moving this unit themselves without a run crew of any kind, and unanimously told me that it was very difficult to move and control- they needed handles. When I relayed this information to the scenic designer, he replied "They don't need handles. They're actors. You can't expect them to figure out how to rotate it correctly on their own." When we showed him that the way the actors were moving the unit was exactly the way they had been instructed to and it was still unnecessarily difficult, he agreed to the addition of handles.

Basically what this all boils down to is respect. Respect for other artists. Respect for another person's work. Having enough respect for someone else as a person to view their work as art. Respect for the creative process. Eliminating the sense of "the other" or "the inferior" so that all members of a company are viewed as equals.

Theatre is a collaborative art, y'all. Truly the most collaborative art form in existence, and without respecting your co-collaborators, where are you?

Opera a Capella

I ran the light board this morning for a school matinee performance of the world premiere production of A Midsummer Night's Dream: Opera A Capella. The show is a joint venture of POTS & Opera Memphis, & has just been an absolute extravaganza of... stuff. Basically it's an opera version of Midsummer, using Shakespeare's text (no supertitles), and with all the accompaniment performed by a "voicestra" of a capella groups, with no orchestra.

It got an EXCELLENT review in The Wall Street Journal. Yeah, the actual Wall Street Journal.

Here are my thoughts:

I really enjoyed it. Like, I legitimately enjoyed watching the show, and I had fully expected to hate it.

Visually, it was gorgeous, the lights especially. I mean really, some of the best lighting design I've seen ever. The set was great, the costumes were great, the lights were fabulous.

I thought that it was blatantly obvious which cast members were used to standing still & singing without having the expectation the audience would actually understand what they were saying. By that I mean singing in German or Italian with English supertitles is very different from singing in Shakespearean verse. People have to understand what you're saying, or they won't be able to follow the plot. Not to say that any of it sounded bad, because it didn't- gorgeous sounds coming from all of them, just hard to make out what they're saying.

I found the voicestra to be very distracting for the first five minutes or so of the show, especially since the first few minutes was Theseus & Hippolyta, who were two of the most opera-y (read: difficult to understand) of the cast. I knew that I needed to pay attention to the actors onstage so that I could follow the plot, but all I wanted to listen to was the CRAZY AWESOME A CAPELLA MUSIC EXPLOSION coming from the pit. After a few minutes, the newness of the voicestra (I hate that word, but I feel like typing 'a capella singers' or 'vocal instrumentalists' or something is just lame) wore off, and I made a conscious decision to stop paying attention to them as more than just accompaniment. After that it was a lot easier to focus on the action and to follow what was happening.

Apparently the voicestra couldn't be there for the matinee, because this morning's performance was instead accompanied by a piano & the beatboxer. So, not so much a capella as... opera with weird accompaniment.

Watching the opera's SM call the show was fascinating. I've been reading a lot on SMNet about the differences between SMing for opera & theatre, but watching it was something else. The paging was... intense. I can't imagine paging actors for every entrance. Overwhelming.

One day, I am going to go into the scene shop when there is nobody there and take all of their drill guns, hide them in various places around the building, and then promptly forget where I left them.

Yesterday, I had a push broom, a regular broom, 2 dustpans, & a foxtail in the green room, all labeled CIRCUIT SM ONLY.

Today, when I needed to sweep before our first rehearsal onstage, I instead spent 15 minutes looking for those items.

Here's my tally:

• Push broom: UNDER THE ROCK WALL. Really? It's under the wall. You need to sweep under the wall?
• Regular broom: MIA
• Big dustpan: Under a trashcan backstage
• Small dustpan: On the tablesaw in the scene shop
• Foxtail: MIA.

Really I just want my foxtail back. Is that so hard?

Peter

Peter is our Assistant Technical Director. Peter is 6'8". Peter's nickname is Gorilla. Today Peter bent a metal rod into a U shape with his bare hands, & left me this note for rehearsal tonight.

If you can't read the note, it says-

"To Becky- The sink works now.
No leaks! Water can always be on.
No need to turn it on every time.
Note: -drain only works on SL side of sink
-Leave weight in SR side, it is necessary for the glue to set correctly. Tell Irene to think of it as a really heavy casserole dish in for a soak, it won't be there tomorrow.
-Peter"

Sister Myotis

Found out today via facebook that the guest lighting designer from NYC who designed Spelling Bee at Auburn (and Metamorphoses and Little Shop of Horrors) also designed the lights for Sister Myotis' Bible Camp. If you have never heard of Sister Myotis, she is a Memphis theatre tradition of loud, hilarious Southern church-lady-ness and she is played by the same actor who was Grown Ralph in A Christmas Story. Sister Myotis wroter herself a one-woman show that played in Memphis to great acclaim and actually moved to an off-Broadway run this past summer, and when Sister Myotis went to the Big Apple, Travis was the lighting designer.

SMALL WORLD. SO, SO SMALL.

Phantom Phish Pheeder

What kind of person takes it upon themselves to feed a fish that isn't theirs? I mean really. And they didn't just feed him, they dumped food into his tank. Sorry, Jessica! I'm tryin' to take care of ya, really!

J.Simps

We have a cast pet! The script calls for a betta fish onstage, and rather than have an empty bowl with some plants in the hopes that the audience doesn't realize there's no fish in it, we have an actual fish.

His name is Jessica Simpson (don't ask).

He lives in his bowl on my table in the rehearsal room and keeps me company during those long periods in rehearsal where the actors and the director are discussing silly things like "character" and "motivation" and I don't have anything to take notes about.

Most of the time he's pretty chill. Sometimes, though, with no warning, he will FLIP OUT and fan his fins out and start swimming around like crazy and bang into the glass.

Every cast should have a pet. It's nice.

Passive Aggressive Happiness

There are no perfect productions. No matter how much you love a show, it's going to have hiccups here and there. Conversely, every show, no matter how hated, has some redeeming quality about it.

Rather than dwell on the past or the negative, I want to blog about what is going well with my current show.

• There's no intermission. It runs under 1 1/2 hours.
• All of the cast is over the age of 18. Hell, they're over the age of 21.
• The script makes no attempt to replicate a film.
• The director has a very clear vision of what she wants and is able to communicate it with the actors and the production team.
• The director and the scenic designer do not hate each other.
• Production meetings consist of collaborative discussion and problem-solving. No one yells. No one dominates the conversation. No one dismisses suggestions off-hand.
• While the show mainly focuses on the arc of 2 characters, the fate of the production does not rest in the hands of one actor.

There are more reasons why I like this show, but I'm tired.