The Thelmian Chronicles

Backstage, onstage, from the bridge…stories from the theatre days abound!

Following are some of my favorite memories.

During a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the actress playing Blanche Dubois breaks a bottle during a scuffle. The bottle is, of course, supposed to be a “sugar” bottle which is designed to break without injury. Unfortunately, during one performance, the bottle somehow turned out to be real glass. Breaking it resulted in severe slices in Blanche’s wrist. Because “the show must go on”, the actress reblocked herself with dramatic gestures in which she would fling that arm (fortunately covered by a bell-sleeve dressing gown) off stage through various openings in the set. At each of these opportunities, the props crew continued throughout the show to add layers of bandages to the bleeding arm. After the final curtain fell, the actress zoomed to the ER for stitches. What a trooper!! It was an impressive “save” to observe from the sound bridge.

Speaking of the bridge, a memorable learning experience for yours truly occurred during Crimes of the Heart, my first show ever working lights. Back in the old days, prior to the high tech equipment used now, the lightboard consisted of panel with two sets of controls so that lighting for two different scenes could be set. Then the lights person would cross-fade from one scene to the next by moving a lever (and then proceed to set the following scene on the dormant board). I got distracted by spotting a friend in the audience during one performance (distraction not being a good thing when you are operating equipment that affects the technical aspects of a play). The first act ended at night, and the second act took place in the morning. When I pulled the lever to bring up Act 2, lo and behold — still night!! Oops!! The stage manager panicked, of course, and insisted I cross-fade the lights. Because I had been a good student when tutored on setting the lights, I was able to point out to the stage manager that cross-fading would only bring back the “curtain warmer” from intermission so that the scene would be lit at knee-level for the actors. I assured him the sun would rise and proceeded to bring up the lights slowly so that dawn could occur as the performers went through the scene. Whew!! Crisis averted, and a huge thank-you to the technician who ensured that I knew how the equipment actually worked.

My favorite bridge memory involved another sound crew stint during a wonderful historical drama, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln. Well, it was wonderful the first couple of weeks, anyway. It was a five-week run and a three-act play. Shall we say……long. And there was only preshow and intermission music to worry about. So lo o o ts of downtime. Sound, in those “olden” days was on a reel-reel tape recorder; but there was also an 8-track tape deck which included settings such as crickets, birds chirping, thunder, rain, and toilet flush. By the third week of the run I was struggling — STRUGGLING — to restrain myself, every time an actor walked off-stage, from pushing “toilet flush”.