We struck King Lear yesterday evening. All in all, a good run, one that met my expectations.
The scanty houses middle weekend (16 Sunday, 11 stalwarts on Friday) built to some better numbers for our closing weekend, including a declared sell-out Saturday (CLS ordinarily sets up two rows of chairs, seating about 50).
We continued to make costume and blocking adjustments through Saturday. Too bad that we never found a safer place for the wheelchair (for IV.iv) that every night I had to wrangle out of a fire exit stairwell.
A few days ago I was noted the passing remark that a typical shift in the NHL is 45 seconds. That’s about the amount of time that it takes to deliver 15 lines of Shakespeare. So I skated my two shifts, plus a bit. I’m actually most satisfied with my tiny bit as the Messenger in Act IV who brings word of the advancing British army.
It turned out that the daylight streaming through the Sunday afternoon windows was not as distracting as the exterior building security lights shining through the evenings. It just never gets dark in that space.
In my long layover between I.i (the division of the kingdom and the betrothal) and III.vii (the blinding of Gloucester) each night I would help Chris by making up his back for when Edgar goes underground as Poor Tom. We went through a few containers of brown and black character color in the nine-show run. Chris tried dark street makeup foundation, but was dissatisfied with the results: too blendy.
I noted before that the church is a multipurpose facility, and that’s really apparent on Friday nights when the AA/NA meetings are held downstairs. I tried to convince myself that the gabble of voices rising through the ventilation system suggested unseen denizens of the palace, but my resolve faltered when I smelled coffee onstage.
Fortunately we had a lot of hands for strike, and we were on our way to food, drink, and celebration in under an hour.