Washington’s National Theatre may have converted its rigging system from hemp ropes and sandbags to lines and counterweights, but there remain a few houses (and eight of them on Broadway) that use the nautical system, as Lisa Lacroce Patterson reports.
While hemp houses have deep stages, they cannot hang as many set pieces as theatres with modern counterweight systems because, since the bulky sandbags require a lot more space, those theatres have fewer “line sets” from which to hang. A counterweight system might have a line set every 6 to 8 inches, but a sandbag system requires more than double the amount of space between rope sets. At the State [Theatre New Brunswick, New Jersey], if a tour comes in with four or more 53-foot trucks, often less than half of the scenery can make it onto the stage because of the limited number of line sets.