On One-Offs

Don't get me wrong. I love what I do, and can't imagine doing anything different. I love touring, I love doing theatre, what else could I ask for but to do both at the same time?

What I don't love is what the one-nighter does to touring. I wake up at seven in some new city, pile off the bus and into the venue. I push through load in and the show and load out, finishing up after midnight. Then we get on the bus and start driving to another city... the next morning I wake up at seven and do it all over again.

I would just love to have the chance to explore some. To see some sights, even if they aren't the sights, you know? I want to take some pictures, enjoy some places.

After summer, my goal is to land a job with a company that'll land me in a city for two or three days at a time. That's a pretty decent goal, I think.

Changing Roles

So, as I've mentioned, I am on the road as ME for The 39 Steps.

In my last post I touched briefly on what I believe to be my greatest stumbling block: acting in a supervisory role. In my previous work, it's mostly fallen to me to do the vast majority of the work, from physical to mental. Every time I've been an ME I've participated in a large portion of the hang and focus myself. Don't get me wrong, I've led crews before. I've taught, directed and scolded. But I've never been in quite the position I am now. I hold sole responsibility for the implementation of my show the way it was designed, and to that end I have a number of crew members that require specific direction to accomplish tasks. In order to finish my load in, I simply can not be 'hands on' and do most of the physical work myself. I have time to hang one of my movers, just to make sure the crew knows how. I've got time to demonstrate what I mean by, 'Run the data to that end,' and have to trust that it gets done. I'm learning to be completely explicit about what I need (one day the strobes missed the DMX train, for example, costing me a good ten minutes while I fixed it) and that I can't sugar coat my requests. There simply isn't time.

I have trouble with that. I find it difficult to be stern. It's hard for me to say "This is what I need and I would like it done five minutes ago." Even though I usually actually want it done ten minutes ago, I just feel like such a tool being any sort of 'boss.'

The worst, though, is when I send a couple folks to retrieve circuiting information or to hang a position, only to discover at my next check-in with that crew that what they've done is just wrong. Now I have to be even more stern, and I just hate that. I don't want to be perceived as 'that dick roadie,' because I really don't think I am. It does seem, though, that local crews don't feel the time crunch the same way, and that's a problem. Why should they rush around if they don't know how desperately behind I feel?

Right now my schedule is something like this:

8am - Truck opens and boxes start coming. I know now how I would approach labeling cases, the next time I'm gearing up for a tour. It's not how I did it this time. Hopefully by now I've taped my electrics so the crew can just start hanging once I get the pipe.

10:30 - First break. My goal at this point is to have my fixtures hung and cabled, and the cables run to the distro. At this point I'll set people on getting my atmospherics set up and cabled, and set up my board. This leads into:

12:00 - Lunch. Right now I would be in a great place if I was ready to start focus right after lunch, though so far there have inevitably been problems preventing that. Conventional focus can be time consuming for any variety of reasons, but it's getting better. The majority of my instrumentation is dedicated to six washes, so with a competent crew I can describe the first area in detail and then just focus the hotspot and they'll get the cuts while I get the next light up. Usually the spikes are going down while I start my focus, so when I've finished the FOH washes I can hit the specials on that pipe.

After I finish conventional focus, I have to hit mover focus. I'm getting more confident in this, but a lot of it still comes down to my SM/ASM to tell me where stuff is. I've only seen this show from the front once, during an understudy rehearsal, which is a big hindrance for me. I just don't know what these things are supposed to look like, so I'm doing what I can.

~6:00 - Dinner. I'm getting to the point where my focus is completely done at this point, and now I can check my practicals and presets, and do whatever other pre-show stuff I have.

--

It's a lot of stuff, and definitely the most responsibility I've ever been saddled with. I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I know I've gained a boatload of new skills that will help carry me forward in my career.

I am definitely looking forward to a summer rep season, though.

On the road again.

So my last post was depressing.

Things have, since that last entry, changed quite a bit. I've just hit the road with a national tour of The 39 Steps. We had a somewhat difficult tech process, owing mostly, I think, to a master carpenter who broke his ankle days before he was supposed to fly out.

Difficult tech weeks are part of the business, though, shit happens right? Well, we got through it. My first load in was... not good. I was much less prepared than I thought I was, and the show looked terrible. I was dealing with a local crew who moved at a fairly glacial pace, and just couldn't seem to complete a hang position without a mistake or two, and circuit information was just not recorded well or consistently.

I pushed through as much of my focus as I could, and managed to at least light the stage, though the show didn't look much like its intended design. I was also learning how to run the Hog, as our tech process had left me with no time to familiarize myself with it. (The lack of any kind of ability to directly control dimmers is a huge downfall in my opinion.)

We did two nights in our first venue. The second day I was able to sort out the circuiting information by being a little more stern than I like with the local crew, but we got it done. Then I was able to push through my focus and get shit looking right. The second show looked great, I'm told, and I'm much happier about it.

We're en route to Iowa now, having stopped in Missouri for the day. That's all I've got for now, I'll try to write about my experiences living on the road later.

Oh, by the way, I have already lined up my summer job as Principle Elec/Board op at Shakespeare & Co. in MA.

Will hang lights, reinforce sound for food

The job search might be the single most soul-crushing and existence sapping experience I know. Being possessed of a somewhat... specialized skillset and no desire to perform duties unrelated to those skills, my work opportunities are painfully limited. I know that my current mood would only deepen further and further under the saddle of employ in the field of fry cookery or shelf stocking or customer service punching bag, so for as long as I can humanly avoid activities such as that, I will continue to fight.

Today I was informed I would not be receiving a position I was very excited about. It was close to home, it was enough hours to support myself, I had a chance to sublet an apartment with some excellent people, and most of all it was in my field. It's not to be. I don't know how to express the disappointment that comes with news like that, the sheer pointless patina that everything adopts in that sort of light.

So now what do I do? Continue sending out resumes I guess. Hope that weird interview I had turns into a summer stock at least. Who the hell knows what I'll do for that fall, or until may. What if I don't get a summer job? I'm so tired of wasting all of my time.

The now.

I haven't written anything in particular for a while. It's tough to find the inspiration, motivation, and time for writing. I need to have all three at once, and they just don't coincide often. Now, in the steady grasp of sleeplessness, might as well be as good a time as any.

Tonight we're in Brooklyn, with a show at Brooklyn College tomorrow. Our sound tech (who toured with this company last fall) insists that tomorrow will be an excellent crew, and numerous. That's always nice. Today's (Monday?) crew was pretty exceptional. We had already played the space (Strand Theatre, Lakewood) once on this tour, and just last week Encore went through. They're well practiced this year. I think it was the fastest in we've had. The out was up there, too, but I think it was a few minutes shy of the record. I didn't write the record down so it's hard to be sure.

We've only got two more shows this week, and then we're off for thanksgiving until Monday. We'll be spending the break on Long Island, so I might spend some time exploring the city in somewhat greater detail than I have had the opportunity to, so far. So far, in my somewhat limited experience, I do like New York. It's a whole other sort of thing from any of the cities I've spent time in previously. Granted that's not much of a surprise to anyone, whether they've been here or not, but it is significant enough, I think, to be mentioned; even though we all know it already.

The tour is coming, rapidly, to a close. I can't say I find myself disappointed, and if you've read any of my recent writings I think you'd guess that without any mention. I like the idea of being on the road, but I want to be on the road with a show that challenges me, that gives me more than 15 minutes or so a day of troubleshooting, even perhaps a show into which I had some level of input. I know that I couldn't stomach touring forever. It's not the environment I need, but I do like the travel, the seeing of new places.

So where do I want to be? Really with any company that's regularly producing work (New, old, original, rehashed) with a proper creative team (so community theatre is not a great option, in most cases) who is actually interested in expressing something beyond the text. What role do I envision myself filling there? To be honest I think I could be happy in my electrician/carpenter/welder/audio engineer/wizard role from college, or in a more standard ME position, or as an LD, or some blend of all of those. Give me the chance to express myself and to create again. That's all I really want. And probably all I really need.

ennui

I'm not being challenged.

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.

1. Wake up. Eat some breakfast (does this hotel have meat/hot eggs? hopefully...).
2. Pack whatever shit isn't already in my bag.
3. Play the ever-changing game of tetris to get my bag into the van.
4. Drive truck to venue.
5. Try to find and talk to electrician very quickly about my power/DMX needs, then get back to the truck.
6. Unload truck.
7. 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.
8. Lay out power and DMX cable for each dimmer pack.
9. 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.
10. Focus my rig. I have two actors who do the hang, thankfully. I'd never be done on time otherwise.
11. 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)
12. Once the show starts, zone out and push go when I'm told. Autopilot here, or else I'll memorize everyone's lines.
13. 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.
14. 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. 

Staying the hand of apathy

Some of you might have thought I'd have written more before now. I know I would have. I certainly set out with the intent of writing about my experiences fairly regularly.

The trouble with writing about my experiences on this tour is that my experiences, day to day, are somewhat indeterminate. My memory is a wash of similar hotel rooms and theater after theater. If you asked me where I was three days ago, I don't think I could tell you without consulting my log. Time has become a smooth gradient from one shade of gray to another shade. I have to admit this hasn't had the greatest effect on my own morale. Coupled with the other negative factors of this tour, that's probably not a great thing.

That's not to say I haven't had some singular and excellent experiences on this trip. But it is to say I've had quite a few days that differ little from their companions. This week I will spend less than 24 hours in any given city in texas, as we've a show each day. I don't think I'll remember much of this state.

That said, perhaps I'll write about the exceptional times soon.

Time, elongated

So I left off at the end of load in. The set is up, props are in place. My rig is assembled and appears to be functional, so now it's time for focus. The LD takes the stage and we start. It's a simple plot (We're pulling a little less than 100 amps, I'm told, so there's not a huge amount of instrumentation), but this is the only chance I'll have to practice the focus. We run through it, it's pretty straightforward. Later that day (Or the next day? I don't remember) I get the rest of my gel, get the frames labelled to match instruments and get it into the fixtures.

So we're ready to go. Tech starts out as a cue-to-cue of act I. This show is only an hour long, but it's heavily supported by projections, as it's teaching some basic math concepts and most of them are well illustrated by a projection screen in the set's mid-stage arch. What this means is that while there are relatively few significant lighting changes, there are several long runs of 10-15 cues that are closely spaced. It's one of those "Standby cues 12 to 26.... Go, go, go.... go, go go, go" things. It makes for re-working things a large number of times.

At this point most of this week is kind of a blur, to be honest. It's a lot of rehearsal, a lot of me trying to get my work box into a reasonable order, and little else. We had two dress rehearsals this week, the latest being on Thursday. After that one, we packed up and loaded the truck, developing our pack list as we went. Once we got it loaded, I drove it to the Ryder lot and we were ready to go. We leave for Albany Monday morning. I'm the only one who's driven the truck at this point, so I'll be navigating for Jeremy on this leg of the trip.

We'll travel almost 1500 miles before October, and end up in Georgia in that time.

Keep an eye on my widget if you're interested in where I am.

Fleeting moments

I haven't written since my arrival in Boston, and now I'm days away from my departure.

I feel as though I've been here for weeks and weeks, though it's only been two. So much has happened, so I'll try to describe it.

The weekend of my arrival was good, I got to the house and got settled in. The woman from whom I am renting a room was here, and we talked briefly. Her son, whose room I am in, left for Ireland the next morning, for two weeks. Talk about serendipitous timing. On Saturday, I went to find the rehearsal hall. I found the area where I thought it should be, but couldn't find a building with the right number [Turns out it was there, just very flaked and faded, and I missed the Masonic Lodge label. You'd think I'd be better at sniffing them out] and gave up. I went downtown after that, wandering around until I grew tired. I saw Chinatown, and sat in Boston Commons and wrote some postcards (I have so many more to send), and then came home.

Sunday, after speaking to my lone housemate; another employee of the company, (The landlady has spent all of her time, but for brief moments, somewhere else. It's just been Sheila and me.) I searched out the hall one more time. I discovered the faded number and the Masonic legend, and thought I was prepared.

Monday morning, bright and early, I boarded the train and hopped on a bus and stood outside the building which houses the rehearsal hall. I arrived perhaps forty-five minutes early, having only been told to be at this address at 10am. I stood outside, wondering how I might enter the building; my only company a man listening to a small portable radio o na pair of headphones and occasionally singing along.

Eventually two people approach the building and unlock the door, I ask if they're with Chamber, and they reply in the affirmative. I'm ushered upstairs by two folks who were seemingly quite excited to see me, having known of my impending arrival for some time. They are Kate and Jeremy, two members of my show's cast. My arrival is hailed by the rest of the cast, and my stage manager. I'm given a tour of the space, and then stand around for a while. There's a rehearsal which is, conveniently enough, a full run, so I watch that, as this is likely my only opportunity to see the show from the front. The cast is good, and I like the show.

After the run, the production manager shows up, and we talk briefly. I'm sent on a couple of errands, and the day is over.

The rest of the week is consumed in training on my rig. Everything is more or less prepared at High Output, in Canton. I get to assemble the rig and see what it's all about. We spend some time labeling things (Much of it is assembled by the two actors on my crew) and configuring equipment. I think this is the point where I begin to realize how different this show will be from the norm, in the sense of how little input I'm destined to have in the process. The show's been done before, and will be done again. It's being boiled down into a simple formula; a recipe for a play.

At the end of the week, we haphazardly pack the truck (A 26' box truck, with which I become fairly familiar over the next few days) and head to the tech rehearsal space, some blocks away from the company's primary space. Load in is... complicated. It's the morning of the last day of Ramadan, and the space is directly across the street from a moderately sized Mosque. Traffic is intense. The stage manager and I know very little about what to expect or what's expected of us. The loading dock is only ten feet deep or so. We back the truck straight in and look at the situation, and decide that's ridiculous, given the existing traffic. There's a misunderstanding, and I try to come around the block while the situation is sorted out... turns out this is not the decision anyone would have preferred. I finally get back to the theater (it's been fifteen or twenty minutes, traffic was ridiculous. I almost witnessed a fight in the middle of the road between two drivers) and it's decided to back the truck straight in, just as we (the stage manager and I; at this point the production manager and everyone else is there) had done previously. This is done, in spite of the absolutely insane traffic on this relatively narrow road. We leave the flashers on and figure it will be fine, just as it always is at this space. (I would guess most load-in days aren't on the last day of Ramadan...) I am informed that my decision was not the one that would have been preferred. Whatever, shit happens I guess.

Well. It's not fine. A police officer shows up and begins belittling and yelling at everyone. He asks the PM, "Is there something wrong with you?", and is curious as to whether I have ever driven a truck before. His requests were less than terribly clear, and the traffic is still absolutely insane.

The truck is repositioned and we continue with load-in. It's fairly uneventful, and I guess it's somewhat faster than the average. We're ready for tech week.

That's all for today, I'll write more this weekend, to catch up with current time, before we leave.

Someplace new

So, while you, likely a lone reader addressed here, were eagerly refreshing my blog, waiting with barely contained enthusiasm and desire to read yet more of my mindless drivel, you may have noticed that my location widget updated. I'm in Boston now.

I arrived in a stunning blaze of... fog. Everyone on the plane was surprised by the landing, it looked like we were in a cloud from 30,000 feet all the way to the ground. Nuts. Good thing the IFR is part of a pilot's license, right?

I've settled in (as much as I think i'm willing to) to the room I've rented for the duration of my stay in this city. It looks like it'll mostly be three Chamber employees in the house, as the lady who owns it isn't going to be here much, and her son's going to Ireland for two weeks. Whatever works.

Tomorrow I go to get lost in the city. So now I must sleep. More thoughts to come, and probably some pictures.