Category: Backstage

We got through opening weekend!

On Thursday, a cast member reported a positive COVID-19 test. We were so fortunate that (a) we had designated an understudy for their role and (b) the understudy was actually prepared. Director Lee and I met with the understudy Thursday afternoon, coached him through some lines and bits of blocking, and he got through the PWYC preview with one line call, by my count. He handled the rest of the weekend smoothly. Since we have double cast the Moms character, we’ll end up with four different casts over the three-week run.

Sunday I got happy fingers at the top of the show (in part due to some garbled communication with my sound board op) and I had to back out of a cue live. This is not as intuitive as you might think on the ETC EOS command line. Again, fortunately, I had practiced this maneuver a few times.

We started about 5 minutes late on Sunday due to a late-arriving cast member, which ultimately meant that we lost the last 5 minutes of the show to a block-wide power failure. Aargh!

The continuing challenge: cleaning up bits of candy glass from the eat-the-light-bulb effect. Anything that doesn’t get swept up gets ground into the painted floor. One of our Stevens suggested soaking the floor overnight with a wet towel and an plastic sheet on top of that. We’ll try that this weekend.

We are into the week of dress rehearsals after two 12-hour days of tech work over the weekend. How did I ever do this and work full-time too?

I am getting reacquainted with the Stage’s booth and the new tech in it. We now have walkie-talkies so that I can cue crew backstage. There’s a new audio system; the old light board is in there, but we will be running the show from a laptop with software from ETC: lighting designer Jordan has borrowed some fancy Selador lighting instruments that they will use for some fun effects during the “baby sexy robots” dance.

Major flubs starting the show last night: I need to position the laptop under my right hand and keep the god mic close by, as well as the walkie-talkie. And some other rookie mistakes: I stumbled and dropped a borrowed prop that McKenna rescued with super glue. No more jokes about actors breaking props.

So far, we’ve been more or less lucky, losing only one rehearsal due to weather, one due to the director catching COVID-19, and one due to multiple schedule conflicts. Early on, we ran a few rehearsals from the tiny space at The Actor’s Center in the city—no space available at the Stage. Shades of Metroing down to Chinatown for that somewhat regrettable Anything Goes gig. We had to switch out master carpenters, as our original builder was called away on a family emergency.

At board chair Jen’s recommendation, I’ve filled out digital rehearsal report forms (as Google Docs) until we moved into the theater. I found them slightly useful. Ideally, you one could use them to track things like, “Fran missed today’s rehearsal and needs the new blocking for page 12,” and notes for the various departments. But without the department leads subscribing to the report folder (pull), one ends up just copy-pasting a note to an e-mail message (push). And we still fubarred communication on an item or two. Next time, I think I’ll try something else. Maybe a groups.io group?

We solved the problem of how our actors can boost themselves up onto the ballet barres to climb the walls: we added dummy electrical boxes projecting from the walls, complete with unwired receptacles and conduit.

Grumble grumble: unplanned runs to Target for a mop and bucket (most of the Stage’s gear for cleaning up is filthy) and to Artistic Concepts Group for glow tape and gaffer’s tape. Not to mention by mentioning the buckets of Pine-Sol and Goo Gone that I used stripping old spike tape and gunk from the floor of the Leta Hall Studio. What knucklehead uses glow tape for a spike?

The Stage’s template for scheduling tech now sets aside Friday evening for a paper tech. This is a welcome luxury that I don’t believe that I’ve had before. I had already started setting up my cued script from the plots we had up to that point, but Friday’s meeting filled in a lot of gaps, especially in scene transitions.

I am super glad that I got out ahead of the props problem and started laying out the tables on our dry tech day Saturday, as my props lead’s first day wasn’t until yesterday. Generally, I ended up delegating a lot of the props work to my lead, the scene shifts to my ASM (participating by proxy yesterday), and spiking most of the deck to my director.

We still have some issues to iron out, particularly with sound cues, but I think we’re doing OK. The rush hour commute from Reston to Four Corners sucks, but I have a mitigation plan for PWYC Thursday and Friday opening. My inbox is full of unread notes from yesterday, so maybe the optimism of this post is unfounded!

We blocked the first half of scene 11, where The Girls psych themselves up to compete against another team that has boys doing tricks à la Newsies. Director Lee repeated an element from earlier in the show, an almost throwaway to cover a scene transition; in the context of scene 11, it’s absitively chilling and dark. My vocal reaction to the team was “Holy fuck.” Director Lee is pleased.

And we’re back in the theater!

About six weeks ago, I signed on as an assistant stage manager for Silver Spring Stage’s production of Dance Nation, by Clare Barron. This was my way of easing back into theater after the long hiatus that started in late winter 2020. I figured that the Stage would find someone else to call the show—I had too many planned conflicts during the rehearsal period to commit as stage manager. Well, it turns out that finding a stage manager on shortish notice for a show in March is even harder than finding a substitute WATCH judge for that interval. So after some schedule negotiating, I agreed to SM the show. I’m only slightly boggled.

My last stage management gig was Incorruptible, also for the Stage, with Leta directing, 15 years ago now. Hmm, I wrote up some lessons learned from that project. I should try to implement some of them.

Dance Nation is a highly theatrical show, with wild dynamic levels in the text, adults playing tweens, and surrealist moments. My only familiarity with Barron’s work was a production of Baby Screams Miracle at Woolly Mammoth seven years ago. A number of the cast are young, in training at Studio Theatre—some fresh blood for the Stage as it jumps into the 21st century repertory.

Director Lee had been out of town for most of December, so we did table work via Zoom, and that worked out rather well, as far as I can tell. We had our first in-person meeting with the cast yesterday evening, mostly facilitated by intimacy director Julia. We set some shared guidelines for rehearsal, including “Land the plane,” that is, “Listen to yourself and when you’ve made your point, stop.”

I had already set up my prompt script, but the scripts package from Samuel French came with a pre-punched 8-1/2 by 11 script and binder for me. I feel like a big boy now.

Dry tech today, so I was off seeing other shows and catching up on the e-mail pile. Our company publicist circulated a questionnaire that she will use to write a preview piece for one of the local online theater mags. Some of Lennie’s questions and my answers:

1. What drew you to Clybourne Park as a director/actor?

When I first saw this show at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company six years ago, I wrote : ‘Have you ever had this experience? A play finishes its first act, and as the house lights come up for intermission, you think, “that act was so polished and well-constructed that it could stand by itself; I could go home now and be happy.” That’s how we felt at the act break…’ That’s how strong this material is.

3. In his 2011 review of Woolly Mammoth’s second production of Clybourne, Peter Marks of the Washington Post said that “the play rummages, if you will, in the eternally unfinished basement of American race relations. It is a play about people thinking they don’t sound exactly the way they do.” Your thoughts on that? Actors, how does his second sentence apply to your character(s)?

It is ever a challenge (probably greater than the one I describe in my answer to #6 below) to separate what you know, as a person, that your character sounds like from what you know and feel is going on inside that character. It is a tempting trap to put quotation marks around what your character says and does, to telegraph to the audience, “I, the actor, am not this uninformed/foolish/nasty/hateful person that I am playing.” And I think that everyone in our cast has done a good job of stepping around that trap.

4. Another review quote — when Clybourne opened on Broadway in 2012, Ben Brantley of the New York Times said, “This play probably will be topical for many years to come. That’s bad news for America, but good news for theatergoers, as ‘Clybourne Park’ proves itself more vital and relevant than ever on a big Broadway stage.” That was two years after its Off Broadway premiere. Flash forward to now, four years after the Broadway premiere. Is Clybourne again — or still — “more vital and relevant than ever”? Why?

You betcha. One of the smart things that Bruce Norris does, via the echoes down the half century from 1959 to 2009, is to call out our propensity to slap a label on something (or someone) and think that we have understood it. The character Bev, in 1959, refers with some discomfort to a young man in her community; he has what today we would call Down Syndrome, but Bev has only the word “mongoloid.” In the second act, Kathy (played by the same actor), speaks briefly, thoughtfully about a niece with Asperger’s Syndrome. Will not audiences of 2059 hear Kathy’s words and find her just as benighted?

5. What’s the importance of the specific link to A Raisin in the Sun?

Well, perhaps it is a recognition of the potency of Langston Hughes’s poem, “Harlem,” from which the image is drawn: “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?” That such a simple eleven-line poem could spark Lorraine Hansberry’s full-length stage play, a musical adaptation, and now Bruce Norris’s answer play, is astonishing.

6. As an actor or director, what’s been your biggest challenge with this show? Creating two characters? Recreating the house during
intermission? Something else?

Simple mechanics: falling down, safely, in such a way that I can fall down again the next night.

Reston Community Players is planning a commemorative booklet of reflections and remembrances to celebrate its 50-year mark. I offered the following story, told by many people since the event. This is my version:

I was a supernumerary in our production of Macbeth in the winter 1993 time slot, directed by Jan Belcher. I filled in the background for the battle scenes; I was a servant opening doors and setting tables; I supported the Bloody Captain during his speech; that sort of thing.

Jan was bluntly opposed to the tradition/superstition that the name of the play not be spoken within the confines of a theater, and she broke the taboo loud and clear on load-in day. Perhaps she was justified: the show went on to weather its share of mishaps and technical delays, but no more than usual.

Except for one night.

The first scene with the witches featured a dead body made of styrofoam, hung as on a gibbet. The three weird sisters (Maggie Geuting among them) did a dance around it, and at the end of scene, performed a wash-up move, cueing the flyman to take the corpse out.

But on this night, the corpse missed its spike and sailed all the way up to the top of the flyspace. We heard a loud bang as it crashed into the grid.

OK, nothing to see here; the play continued.

Lady Macbeth (Penny Cupina) came on for the letter scene. Halfway through the scene, one of the plastic corpse’s legs detached and fell to the deck, with a small crash but no ceremony. The stage manager said, “David, there’s a leg on stage. Can you help us out?” “Uh — sure thing.”

I came on to execute my next assigned gate-attendant maneuver, perhaps a little early. I strode over to the chunk of loose set dressing, scooped it up, and tried my best to hold it upstage of my body.

The gates being opened, Macbeth (Tel Monks) and his entourage entered as I skedaddled off stage and disposed of the artificial limb — to everyone’s relief.

We finished our last tech run tonight; tomorrow we see a preview audience. The show is snugging up nicely, and (I think) we are ready for an audience to bounce some funny off. Nick has been mixing Italian bird song (from Xeno-canto, per my recommendation) into the sound design; John’s set, with clay tile roof details and lots of hiding places for eavesdropping, looks great.

Harvey has posted pictures from last night’s run; here’s a cute one of me (Verges) looking for a gratuity from Lou (Leonato). My costume fits and looks good; I’m wearing new tights and a pair of beat-up Reeboks that, as far as I can remember, I last wore, on stage or otherwise, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

We’re still fine-tuning some business—the binding of Borachio is not quite as safe as we would like—and the timing of a couple entrances. Since Verges is one of the watchmen, any time the garden gate needs to be opened or closed, that ends up being my job.