Maybe this is true of any tour, perhaps the thing to embrace about driving around in a truck and doing theatre in a new location every day (or every week, or every month?) is the part where you're in a place you've never been before. Perhaps you have to accept monotony when you're doing the same show over and over again.
Or perhaps, when saddled with responsibility for 'legitimate' theatre, as opposed to being handed the keys to a 30 year old rig (I have two instruments which are younger than me, the job begins to gain a sort of luster. Okay, maybe the rest aren't ACTUALLY 30 years old, but i have no reason to believe they aren't), given some focus charts and set out on the road. The most interesting part of my job is communicating with the house electrician and patching his front of house instruments and the house lights. Everything else is the same, every day. Here, I'll describe it to you.
- Wake up. Eat some breakfast (does this hotel have meat/hot eggs? hopefully...).
- Pack whatever shit isn't already in my bag.
- Play the ever-changing game of tetris to get my bag into the van.
- Drive truck to venue.
- Try to find and talk to electrician very quickly about my power/DMX needs, then get back to the truck.
- Unload truck.
- Get back into the venue, see how my tie-in is going. Or, if there's no company switch, start wondering where I'm going to find six or seven different household circuits.
- Lay out power and DMX cable for each dimmer pack.
- Set up board. If using house FOH, talk to their electrician and get some reasonable instruments patched. Patch houselights or work out plan for running unison/older control system/light switch (I played a house where ALL of the houselights [for a 700ish seat house] were on a single lightswitch backstage. Baffling). Tell my SM we're patched so she can call the FOH focus. Set up the laptop and make sure the Keystroke is working.
- Focus my rig. I have two actors who do the hang, thankfully. I'd never be done on time otherwise.
- I usually finish about the same time as the SM, clear the board and get into preshow. This usually happens anywhere from 10-15 before house opens to a few minutes after. Now I take a couple minutes to hang out, then get on headset so I can make calls for the actors (the SM is in the house by now)
- Once the show starts, zone out and push go when I'm told. Autopilot here, or else I'll memorize everyone's lines.
- Show's over? Get a house crew member or two to start coiling cable, get the power killed, pack up my control stuff. Help with cable. Pack boxes. Start pushing shit into truck.
- Once set's done we start the pack in earnest. Get it done, get the truck closed. On to the next city.
Seems fine enough, but I'll be damned if this isn't kind of incredibly unfufilling. I'm not challenged, I'm not engaged (the whole process is autopilot, to be honest) and we don't spend enough time in most cities to even be enamored with the new locations.
I'm suffering from terminal boredom.
Posts
