Category: Backstage

“You know, Moisés, how much has really changed in Manhattan in the last 10 years?”

Moisés Kaufman goes back to Laramie, ten years after.

It’s been about 10 days since we closed Incorruptible, the last show of the season. In the brief interval before the one acts festival opens the 2008-09 season, the Stage honored actors and designers for the just-closed season, and Leta picked up the directing award. Good on ya, mate.

Lessons learned from this project:

• I need to me more specific about what and when to accomplish during dry tech time. We got everything done, and by the time actors arrived for wet tech, things went more or less smoothly. But beforehand, there was a little too much milling around before I got down to asking lights “So what cues do you have for me?” Perhaps the trick is to schedule separate time slots for props, sound, and lights.
• Props always kill me. I was much better prepared this time, especially once I got the table maps set up. But we did have some last-minute scurrying. The last thing I did Wednesday night before preview Thursday was weighting and tying the body bags.
• Following practice at RCP, I use numbers to cue lights and letters to cue sound. It’s not quite as necessary at the Stage, because I don’t have to pass cues to lights: I’m running the board myself. Next time around, I would skip some letters that sound too much alike: we had two cues at the end of show where a lot is happening designated M and N, and sometimes my sound op was confused. Also, I figured out that sometimes it makes sense to letter more than one effect—like a fade-down followed by the next music track on a CD—as just one cue.
• I’m going to recommend to the Stage that they invest in a wireless headset system. It’s not important within the booth, but it would assist communicating with (a) the director during wet tech and (b) box office staff on show nights. We spend too much time literally running back and forth from the house to the booth.
• I have an old PDA with a voice recorder that I used to use when I was acting. It would have been handy to have it around for this show.
• A small video camera trained on the lobby doors. I can’t see this area from the booth, so I can’t see latecomers making their way to their seats just as I drop the house lights, nor can I ever be sure that the doorkeeper has closed the lobby door.

I also need to make sure that the Stage board gets these recommendations.

Leta (via Lori) turned up a Top 10 list of saints incorruptible.

We can see the end of the tunnel. Sonya brought in the remaining props yesterday evening; all we have left to do is to pack the body bags and to dress up the letters. Andy and Andrea simplified the intermission changeover, so Leta and I got through it in seven minutes. The light board is new to me, and I like it better: compared to the previous one, it’s a lot easier to jump back into a cue when you have wandered off somewhere you don’t want to be. (As happened yesterday when I double-bumped the GO to start the second act.) Overall, last night’s run was pretty clean; a little more polishing and cleanup and we’ll be ready for a preview audience on Thursday. I’m not yet sure who my sound operator will be tonight, but we can deal. Neil put together a kit of pictures for the press (link updated 18 August 2008).

We moved rehearsal props and set pieces into the theater now that the show before us, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, has closed. The cast got through their first run of Act 1, scene 2 off book, and everyone stayed focused and on task. No small accomplishment, what with two different crews doing construction (mainly deconstruction) work upstairs. Bang! Every time the crews move on to something else, we get a new leak or see daylight through the ceiling. It wouldn’t surprise me to come in one evening and see parts of the lighting grid on the floor.

Meanwhile Andy was making his own noise, working in the shop adjacent to build our set. And I’m trying to feed the cast lines in two different voices, a flutey one for John (Br. Felix) who was scheduled to be out, and a more commanding prompter’s voice, when needed.

The rush hour commute from Sterling to Silver Spring hasn’t been bothering me too much. I’ve started keeping track of how long the drive takes, to confirm my general observation that the congestion gets worse with each passing day of the week. So I more or less know what to expect, and I can be pleasantly surprised when I can get there in only a hour. (?!) The Traffic View of Google Maps helps a lot, too.

The running gag in Incorruptible is that Jack, the layman, always misidentifies the source of a Bible quotation—he mistakes St. Paul for the Pentateuch, that sort of thing. The joke culminates with a particularly venomous curse from Agatha, drawn from Psalms 58:6-8. As Hollinger has it:

AGATHA. …”O God, break the teeth in their mouths…. Like grass let them be trodden down and wither. Let them be like the snail which dissolves into slime, like the untimely birth that never sees the sun!”

Jack guesses Leviticus.

Hollinger helps us out a lot here. Most of the translations of verse 7 employ an image of blunted arrows, rather than that of reaped or withered grass. The King James version of this passage, for instance, is more roundabout:

Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD. Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.

I found this commentary on Ps. 58 particularly helpful. That image of the dissolving snail is rather fine.

We’ve blocked Act 1 and have worked it a couple of times through. Lots of familiar faces in this cast (Robin, Craig, Ted, Kathie, Sally), but I’m particularly pleased to be working with some people new to me, John, Jose, and Vincent. This should be a very funny show, so long as everything keeps fizzing along quickly enough that the viewer doesn’t realize that some of the gags are venerable. I tell people that Leta has chosen to direct a door-slamming sex farce (Leta dislikes door-slamming sex farces) without any doors (Andy has designed this cool colonnade for the up right wall) and very little sex. Incorruptible is actually a black comedy about grave-robbing monks in the Middle Ages, but it has a silver kernel of faith inside it, and that faith is vindicated.

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.

The boys I went to school with used to be able to identify every car as it passed by: Thomas Flyer, Firestone-Columbus, Stevens Duryea, Rambler, Winton, White Steamer, etc. I never could. The only car I was really interested in was one that the Get-Ready Man, as we called him, rode around town in: a big Red Devil with a door in the back. The Get-Ready Man was a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world. “GET READY! GET READ-Y!” he would bellow. “THE WORLLLD IS COMING TO AN END!” His startling exhortations would come up, like summer thunder, at the most unexpected times and in the most surprising places. I remember once during Mantell’s production of “King Lear” at the Colonial Theatre, that the Get-Ready Man added his bawlings to the squealing of Edgar and the ranting of the King and the mouthing of the Fool, rising from somewhere in the balcony to join in. The theatre was in absolute darkness and there were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning offstage. Neither father nor I, who were there, ever completely got over the scene [III.iv], which went something like this:

Edgar: Tom’s a-cold.—O, do de, do de, do de!—Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking… the foul fiend vexes!

(Thunder off.

Lear: What! Have his daughters brought him to this pass?—
Get-Ready Man: Get ready! Get ready!
Edgar: Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill:—Halloo, halloo, loo, loo!

(Lightning flashes.

Get-Ready Man: The Worllld is com-ing to an End!
Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen!
Edgar: Take heed o’ the foul fiend: obey thy paren—
Get-Ready Man: Get Rea-dy!
Edgar: Tom’s a-cold!
Get-Ready Man: The Worr-uld is coming to an end!…

They found him finally, and ejected him, still shouting. The Theatre, in our time, has known few such moments.

—James Thurber, “The Car We Had to Push”

We’re doing our first complete run of the show off book this evening. Ordinarily, eleven days before opening, the books would be long gone, but there are a lot of words in this show, and despite early cuts (disposing of the expository bits between Kent and the Gentleman that I call the “Previously on Hill Street Blues…” scenes) we’re still making small trims in an effort to keep the running time under three hours.

I have a nice little scene nearly at the top of the show, where France is betrothed to Cordelia because Burgundy won’t have her now that Lear has disinherited her. And then I get to hang out and finish reading the last two Lemony Snickets until well into the second half, where I am responsible for carrying off maimed or dead bodies and bringing in bad news (the British armies are moving against France, Goneril has poisoned her sister and then stabbed herself—did I need to preface this with a spoiler alert?)

This is my first work with Cedar Lane Stage, which rehearses and performs at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Chevy Chase, Md. The CLUUC campus is a lovely, leafy collection of buildings on a hillside sloping down to Rock Creek, with the Beltway just beyond. As with most church buildings, there are a number of other groups using the space at the same time—a woodwind choir rehearsal, an AA meeting. All last week it was a little tricky to stay focused because someone was rehearsing selections from Carmina Burana. Lear is howling at the thunderstorm while the organ upstairs is blasting out the reprise of “O Fortuna.” It kinda fits.

(Actually, King Lear‘s familiarity makes for lots of mashups. There is a short story by James Thurber that I will have to track down that puts together a radio evangelist with one of Edgar’s “mad Tom” scenes, and the killing of Oswald swirls into the mix at the end of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”)

We perform in the church auditorium. There is a set of steps leading up to a shallow stage, but in this production, as in most CLS shows, most of the action is on the floor of the auditorium, with audience seating on three sides. By far the most distinctive feature of the space are the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls. Nice views of the surrounding woods, but it means that any lighting effects are completely lost on matinee performances, and we’re doing two of them.

I’m working again with Tom (Gloucester) and Dan (Kent). I’ve seen good work in the past from David (Fool) and Kelli (Regan), and I’m seeing more of it here. Everyone else is new to me, including our Lou (Lear). This is my first time working with director Ed. Ed is a stickler for punctuation (and what Shakespearean isn’t?), hence his nickname and the title of this post, thanks to Brett (Albany).

Tap is an otherwise ordinary dance movie from the late 1980s, with just enough plot and characterization to string together the dance numbers. But there’s a gesture about 13 minutes in that’s worth the rental; it tells us a lot about our protagonist Max (Geoffrey Hines), and about what it is to do creative work.

Max is just getting back on his feet; he’s just out of prison. He walks into a tap dance studio, it’s a little grungy, but he knows his way around. He walks three flights up to a private studio. He’s got his shoes in a brown paper bag. He dumps the shoes out of the bag onto the floor, slips off his jacket, strokes the wood of the floor briefly, and then he begins to practice.

It’s not about the best equipment, it’s not about the bright lights, it may not even be about having heat in the building: it’s about the work.

Last spring’s production of Never the Sinner, directed by Michael Kharfen, received three awards for outstanding achievement at yesterday evening’s WATCH awards, including Outstanding Play. The candidate pool was 79 productions by 29 member companies, so, yeah, this is kind of a big deal.

Ordinarily, I don’t get worked up about things like this, but as Ted says, awards programs are bunk until you win one. I was definitely tingly when I came over to congratulate Michael and the rest of the team. I am honored to have been a part of this fine show.