PANTS

So I'm breaking my almost year-long internet silence to talk about something REALLY IMPORTANT- black pants.

Pants shopping for women is always a difficult/stressful experience- arbitrary sizing, muffin tops, etc. Shopping for black pants to wear backstage is about 1 million times more difficult.

It is actually absurdly hard to find black pants that not only fit, but also:

-Have belt loops

-Have normal pockets

-Are made of some sturdy, denim-like material (ie not spandex or linen or some dress slacks synthetic fabric blend or HORROR OF HORRORS corduroy)

-Are actually solid black, without holes or artful fading or glitter

-Are not either ultra-skinny-leg jeggings or super retro huge flares.

I have a pair of show pants that I wear 80% of the time backstage. They are perfect. I've had them for about three years, and they are beginning to fade. I'd given up hope of finding another pair, and was seriously considering buying a bottle of rit and dying them back to their former glory.

But today, miracle of miracles, I FOUND THEM AGAIN. And not only that, but they were on sale- buy one get one free. I am the proud owner of TWO new pairs of the perfect black show pants... I just have to find room in my suitcase to get them home with me!

And yes- I am so excited about black show pants, I'm writing a whole blog post about them.

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.

I do not envy her this job- the child wrangler backstage at the Washington Ballet's Nutcracker. Good Lord, what a task. I also know one of the SM's on this show- she's a former OTC intern. She just posted this video on her facebook, which is also really interesting-

you can see her curly hair in front of the monitor in one of the backstage shots.

I would love to work on a show this big, I think it would be so much fun! The bank of cue lights at that console is intimidating. I also really want to call a show from the deck some time... The closest I ever came to that was Pops! and I didn't really call anything but rail cues for that because Joel took his own cues. I'm still bitter about that...

No really, never work with children.

This morning we had a school matinee performance of A Christmas Story. My 7-year-old actor playing Randy, the little brother of the main character, was late for an entrance. It went something like this:

Scene change where several things happen at once in a blue-out.

My realization- I didn't see Randy get behind the couch, but it's possible that I missed it in the scene change.

Mother's line "Randy, are you back there?"

Randy is not back there. Randy is entering the stage, from the wings. Sweatervest half on, suspenders dangling.

Mother has no idea that Randy is not back there, as she cannot see where he is supposed to be hiding, until he walks in the front door of the house like he's coming home.

Before Mother can attempt to cover this situation, he looks out at the sold-out audience of school children, says "I'm late," gives an apologetic shrug, and dives behind the couch.

Mother continues the scene, talking to the now-unseen Randy behind the couch.

I am thinking, at this point, "For the love of God, kid, just put your vest on before you come out from behind that couch."

Randy comes out from behind the couch. Randy has put on his vest. Backwards. Suspenders still dangling.

This kid is a hot mess, but he is so freaking adorable that it almost doesn't matter. Almost.

Things I'm Thankful For- Theatre Themed!

I saw this on Mallory's blog and thought I'd give it my own Thanksgiving theatre twist-

Auburn

I am so grateful for my Auburn family, the Auburn tradition, and my time spent in the Loveliest Village. War Eagle!

Black Sharpies

Sharpies of all types, really. I'm a huge fan of labeling things.

Copy machines

What would my life be without a photocopier? Even though I have a love-hate relationship with the POTS copier...

Days off!

Pretty self-explanatory.

Erasable Hi-liters

You have no idea how much I love my erasable hi-liters. Seriously, I've started to actually color-code things again!

Family

My parents who never really questioned my decision to major in theatre, my grandparents who still aren't entirely sure what my job is, but come to see as many of my shows as they can, and especially all of the support (emotionally and financially) they give me.

Grace!

The best props designer I've ever worked with, hands down.

Headsets

Working without reliable headsets has made me realize how lucky we were at Auburn to have such a nice comm system.

Intern family

Yeah, we fight a lot. Sometimes we get pissy. But at the end of the day, we all love each other. This has been true of every Intern Family I've had, and for that I am blessed.

Katharine & Kendra!

The best SM team anybody could ask for.

K is also for Kelsey: such a good SM- I learned so much more from her this summer than I expected to.

Laptop

I am grateful that my laptop wasn't ruined! Only minor water damage. Heart attack averted.

Microsoft Office

Another self-explanatory one.

Night-vision Cameras

I'm not a spy or a stalker, but I do have to call cues during blackouts. Having a night-vision camera pointed at the stage with a feed to the booth is seriously one of the most useful things for calling a show. I can't even remember what it was like to call cues without one...

Olney Theatre Centre

For taking a leap of faith to hire me for 2 weeks as an emergency substitute replacement temporary ASM, and for taking another leap of faith to hire me again to stage manage a show. My first professional contract(s)!

Playhouse on the Square

I am so thankful for a year-long contract and a whole season of shows that I am stage managing, a whole year of professional credits!

P is also for Pip- mentor, advisor, and artist extraordinaire. Auburn misses you and all your advice, your radical ideas, your motivational speeches, and your hard work.

Q-Lab

I'm actually starting to enjoy running shows in Q-Lab...

Rain onstage (or the lack thereof)

I am thankful to be working at a theatre where it doesn't rain onstage. After 4 years of tarping scenery & keeping towels backstage in the TPT, and a brief stint with a leaky ceiling at OTC, the fact that The Vane had just fully enclosed their theatre was a blessing, and even though Circuit is old, it's not leaky! Knock on wood.

SMNetwork.org

I'm a giant nerd and I love stage management. Everyone on SMNet is as well, & it has proven to be a wonderful resource for advice & just sharing stories about the absurdity that is our job.

Tech staff

I am thankful for a tech staff that I can trust, that knows what they're doing, that always has their shit together.

Useless (useful?) knowledge

My constant stream of useless facts actually come in handy sometimes, if only to give Jeffries a run for his money in Trivial Pursuit. I love to learn new things, whether it's who was the governor of Texas in 1933 (Ma Ferguson) or how to rewire a stagepin plug, and that is a personality trait I am glad to have.

Volunteers

Without volunteers backstage, I could not function.

Weathervane Playhouse

For an unforgettable summer. I learned a lot...

It's not quite the whole alphabet, but gimme a break! It's pretty darn close.

What is my life?

Today I spent 10 minutes with my arm shoved all the way inside a box covered with glitter, attempting to dislodge a wad of tissue paper with a wooden spoon. Then I swept fake snow, went on an Easter egg hunt for prop food scattered about backstage, and threatened to fire a 7-year-old.

Is this real life?

Surreal. That is the only word to describe the first run-through of A Christmas Story. At one point the actor playing Grown Ralph looked at the director and said "Is this for real? Is this really happening?" The director and I looked at each other and she said "We just did not think this through, did we?"

We were rehearsing in two different rooms- one for the Parker house, and one for the other scenes. Not ideal, but we were making do. Then came time to run Act I. If you've ever seen or done A Christmas Story, you'll know why this was a problem- the play is, essentially, the movie onstage. It relies heavily on cinematic-style montages of scenes- 2 pages in the house, 1 page at school, 1 page outside, 3 pages in the house, and so on. For 77 pages. The run-through took about 2 hours, for 1:09 of actual stage time (I'm pretty pleased with myself that I even managed to salvage an accurate run time from that fiasco).

Yesterday was The Great Rehearsal Migration of 2010- the Ballet moved out, which meant that Peter Pan moved their rehearsals from the small rehearsal room to the big rehearsal room, and so A Christmas Story moved downstairs to the small rehearsal room. This meant moving 2 sets of rehearsal furniture and props and all of the ensuing detritus that accumulates in rehearsal spaces, as well as taping out 2 groundplans.

Frantic taping ensued- the floor of the big rehearsal room is unsealed (whose bright idea was that?) so spike tape pulls the paint off the floor. Which means the sets had to be taped in painter's tape, and then spike tape got laid on top of that to color-code the various sets.

In other news, I worked the overnight electrics load-in for Peter Pan, which got me out of the Monday all-call for the scenic load-in. It was fun, and even though I worked from 1:00pm on Sunday-7:00am Monday with an hour break for dinner, it didn't feel like that much. I'm not going to say I was full of energy at the end of it, but I definitely wasn't as exhausted as I expected to be. We started with a bunch of set-backs- couldn't start hanging until midnight for various reasons, spilled coffee on the plot, and had to frankenstein the gel cuts for the cyc fixtures (you can get 4 cuts with the grain going vertically, but only 2 if it goes horizontally. Guess which one we needed? Guess what the ME didn't know when he ordered the gel?) but we prevailed! The hang went really well and we got everything done!

I say I started work at 1:00 on Sunday, but really I just watched the ballet. Ballet Memphis was in residency at POTS for the last 3 weeks, performing A Midsummer Night's Dream. I watched the show from the booth- our lighting designer ran their board for them, so I sat with him and listened to their PSM call the show. I wanted to shadow her, but she called the show from the deck and there wasn't really room for me to stand with her during the show. I really enjoyed the show, it was pretty gorgeous and surprisingly funny. I wish that there were more of the Mechanicals- it's just Bottom and Quince. I guess that's standard for the ballet version? I don't have anything to compare it to, so that's pure speculation.

Right now I'm sitting at the light board- I'm running the board for our lighting designer/master elec while they focus the show.

2 WTF moments & 1 War Eagle moment

Today I had 2 WTF moments:

First, as I was driving in to the theatre tonight for the show, I passed the front doors and saw our house manager outside talking to ... a cop? I pull around the side of the building to park and see that yes, there is a cop car parked beside the building. By the time I had parked and gotten my stuff, the cop had already gotten back in the car and was pulling out, so I high-tailed it inside. No house manager in sight, but our ME is in his office. I asked him why the cop was here and he says "Uh, I think he wanted to buy a ticket, actually." My heart was beating so fast, I thought I was going to go into cardiac arrest.

Then, I found 3 pencils, a pen, a cough drop (unwrapped, but uneaten) and a penny scattered around the apron of the stage. It was like a middle schooler emptied their pockets on the stage. It wasn't there last night, and nobody should've been in the theatre today... It's a mystery.

And I had a total War Eagle Moment this afternoon! My boss and our props designer both had errands to run this afternoon, so I had to meet the head of the theatre department at Christian Brothers University (this tiny little Christian college about 3 blocks away from POTS) to give him a Tele-cue that he was renting from us, show him how it worked, and get him to sign the rental form. Well, I was wearing my Auburn Theatre hoodie, and he War Eagle'd me- he graduated from Auburn with a Theatre degree in... '91, I think he said? His sophomore year was the year they hired Dan! Lynn & Robin were both there when he was, too. His class was the first one to do a haunted house. He also said that he came back a few years ago to visit and (ew ew ew) the green room furniture is the same.

Strangest Patron Ever

So last night, I had the strangest interaction with a patron I think I've ever had- ranked right up there with the guy who didn't seem to understand why I didn't want his 6-year-old daughter to go down the fireman's pole on the set of Alice in Wonderland...

I walk into the theatre at 6:15, a little earlier than usual. The doors were unlocked because of rehearsal in the big banquet room (normally we keep the exterior doors locked for as long as possible due to homeless people). So I walk in and there's this guy standing in the lobby, right inside the door. I gave him the quick Memphis once-over (are you dressed like a hobo? can I smell you from where I'm standing?) and then saw that he was holding a comp ticket voucher, so he was obviously in the right place, just really early.

Man: Is this Black Pearl Sings? Is that here?

Me: Yes sir. There's nobody here from the box office yet, but feel free to wait in the lobby until they open.

Man: Where do I wait?

Me: Right here, in the lobby. There are some benches here, or feel free to look at the art in the gallery through those doors.

Man: I can't go in there yet, though? (ie, into the house)

Me: No, not yet. You need to wait in the lobby.

Man: OK, thanks. What's your name?

Me: Becky.

Man: OK, thanks Becky.

Me: No problem, sir. Enjoy the show.

I went upstairs to the booth. This took me about 30 seconds. When I got to the booth I glanced out the window, and saw the man sitting on the chaise onstage. I leaned out the window and yelled "SIR! GET OFF THE STAGE PLEASE!" And he looked up all startled and saw me, and walked back out to the lobby.

At this point, I'm a little bit freaked out, so while I was eating my dinner in the green room I turned on the monitor for the stage, so I would be able to see if he decided to take another nappy-nap on the set. He didn't come back in, and I thought I'd seen the last of him...

Then, at 7:00, I was standing onstage with one of the actresses, just chatting about the little kids in the audience at the morning matinee, and he opens the doors from the lobby and walks into the house!

Me: Sir, you need to wait in the lobby, please.

Man: Becky!

Me: Please wait in the lobby until we open the doors.

Man: Oh, I thought I heard them say the show was about to start.

Me: No, sir, we've got an hour before the show starts. You need to wait in the lobby.

Man: What time does the show start?

Me: 8:00.

Man: What time is it now, like 7:30?

Me: No sir, it's 7:00. There's an hour before the show starts.

Man: Well what am I supposed to do until then?

Me: Uhhhhh

Actress: You could. Uh. Go get some dinner. Or something?

Man: I already did that!

Me: Well, sir, I'm sorry, but you're just early. The show doesn't start for an hour...

Just then our house manager opened the door and got him to go back into the lobby.

I'm not entirely sure if he had something wrong with him or what, but it was absolutely bizarre.

Tape.

Today I taped out 2 sets- first, I helped our mainstage ASM tape out the Darling Nursery for Peter Pan in our main rehearsal room, then I ventured alone to the wilds of the 5th floor to attempt to tape out the set of A Christmas Story.

I was excited to tape out the Peter Pan set because it meant I could use my nifty little drafting of the rehearsal room that I made for the first time! I was without a task for a little while one day at work, and decided to get a transparency and draft our main rehearsal room onto it in 1/4" scale, so that we can lay it down on a groundplan and know exactly how much of the set will fit in the room and also where that damn pole will end up before we start taping it out and realize that it's smack in the middle of something important, which is what seemed to always happen. Anyway, I did that, and this is the first time we've used it. It was actually pretty helpful, we smooshed some stuff around to make the pole land in the middle of the bunkbed where it would be out of the way.

And then I went upstairs. To the 5th floor. Let me explain about the 5th floor- it is empty. It is a desolate wasteland of empty office space, not even used for storage. Mostly it's just empty- a few of the rooms have scary things in them, like the kitchen with the breaker panel facing on the floor, and the bathroom with no ceiling tiles because the roof leaks- but it's primarily a maze of empty offices. Well, A Christmas Story is rehearsing in this empty maze due to an utter lack of space elsewhere on POTS property, and while it is not an ideal rehearsal space (none of the rooms are really big enough to get the whole set taped out) it's actually starting to grow on me. I've spent the last few days vacuuming, changing light bulbs (which caused a breaker to blow and all of the lights to cease working for a few hours) and Clorox-wiping every surface I can imagine these children touching in preparation for rehearsals to begin upstairs. I've also put up signs with arrows leading from the elevator to the rehearsal room and from the rehearsal room to the bathrooms, and signs that say Homework Area, Props Go Here, etc. I'm enjoying the fact that this space is 100% ours- we won't have to share it with anyone, and while it is not ideal, it's not half bad, either.

My real adventure today was taping the set out... I fit the house in the bigger of our 2 rooms, and the school and Christmas tree lot are going in the smaller room next door tomorrow. I was taping by myself, which is always an adventure, doing the whole "pull a few feet of tape and then step on the end and stretch" thing. The biggest challenge is the fact that this room has brown shag carpeting covering every inch of the floor. I'm not sure yet how well the tape is going to hold up on the carpet, but I do know that none of my lines are straight- pushing the tape down makes the carpet move underneath it, which makes the lines all wiggly.

I think that taping on shag carpet might actually be worse than taping out The Producers this summer when we ran out of colors of spike tape and had to make more by coloring dots and stripes with Sharpies. At least then the lines were straight...

Anyway, the moral of my story today is this: USE SCISSORS. Or a box cutter. Or a knife. Or a sharp stick. Something other than your fingers to tear copious amounts of spike tape, cause my fingernails are jacked up, y'all.

Lazy playwrights

We opened Black Pearl Sings! last night! It was a great opening performance, the audience loved it and the 2 actresses in the show had maybe the best run we've had so far.

The story of the play is great, but I just really have a bone to pick with the playwright. There are so many historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the script it's just ridiculous. None of them are so major that they couldn't be fixed with a little tweaking, but they're also big enough that anyone who does even a tiny bit of googling will notice them immediately. The fact that they're there in the first place is really just appalling- he either did no research into the historical accuracy of what he was writing about, or he chose to completely disregard it. I need a little time to rant...

-The biggest inaccuracy is the fact that the play is set in 1933 and Susannah states multiple times that she wants to be the first female professor at Harvard. The first female professor at Harvard was Alice Hamilton, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Medicine and a pioneer of workplace safety regulations who was hired in 1919.

-Another thing that bothers me is the terrible dialect that Pearl's lines are written in. She is from Hilton Head, and a part of the Gullah people. The Gullah dialect is extremely distinctive, and Pearl's lines are written phonetically in what I can only describe as some sort of generic, inconsistent, stereotypical poor grammar that bears no similarity whatsoever to the Gullah dialect. What bothers me the most, I think, is the inconsistency- she doesn't always use the singular instead of the plural. She doesn't always use incorrect verb tenses. She doesn't always drop the possessive. Just sometimes.

-Another historical inaccuracy- Pearl says "Those historical ladies last night say they got a motto- 'Well behaved women never make history.' " That phrase was coined by a woman named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich at some point in the 1970s.

-Another lovely inaccuracy- they mention in the play multiple times that the house across the street is "the narrowest house in New York" and "the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lives there." Edna St. Vincent Millay really did live in the narrowest house in New York... for one year. 1923. A decade before the play takes place.

-Another brilliant lack of historical research on the playwright's part is the fact that in the summer of 1933, the governor of Texas (referred to in the play multiple times in the masculine, but never by name) was a woman named Ma Ferguson.

Plus the fact that he made the daughter's name Uniqua just irks me. It's drawn a laugh from the preview audience & the opening audience, and it's not supposed to be funny...