ALL THE WORLD IS KINDA LIKE A STAGE

In the summer of 1975, while pursuing a degree in Theatre Design at Penn State University, I headed to Dayton, Ohio to work as a stage carpenter at Wright State University.  The summer theatre season put on by the University included six productions:  the musical Man of La Mancha based on the story of Don Quixote; the psychological thriller Veronica's Room (by Ira Leven –author of Rosemary’s Baby); the classic black comedy “Arsenic and Old Lace”; “After Magritte”, a surreal comedy by Tom Stoppard; “The Real Inspector Hound”, a one-act audience participation ‘whodunit’ also by Stoppard and, finally, Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”.  You can well imagine the craziness of pulling together SIX plays over a four month period, all on the same stage! 

The set designer, whose name is lost both to me and the internets) was considered one of the best of his time.  In order to meet the heavy schedule, we first completed the first set – in this case for Man of la Mancha, and while the production was being performed, spent the days and late evenings building the set for the next play to the rear of the stage so that it could be moved forward and fixed into place after the set for the previous week’s performance was torn down.  The Man of la Mancha set was immense, consisting of a thirty foot backdrop of Styrofoam pieces molded and painted to look like the walls of a Spanish prison fortress.  About 20 feet up from the stage in the center of the wall was a platform, from which a working staircase was lowered into and raised from the bowels of the prison where, as part of this play within a play, Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, was awaiting trial by the Spanish Inquisition.  A third level, hydraulically lowered at the front of the stage, contained the orchestra.  What I remember most about the setting was the smell of burnt Styrofoam, as we used makeshift burners (a bent coat hanger attached to an electrical source, to shape divisions and patterns into the foam walls.

The set for Veronica’s Room was pretty straightforward, consisting of the back wall of a living room, made from canvas covered “flats”.  A unique aspect of the set design was that the top of each section of the free-standing wall had a slightly different angle, subtly leading the eye of the audience to the point in the room where the play would climax.  As I mentioned before, on the night after the last performance of Man of la Mancha, we tore down the prison wall and moved forward and fixed into place the set for Veronica’s Room. And so it went for the rest of the season – a never-ending rhythm of construction and destruction at what often seemed like a breakneck speed.

I do have to insert an aside in this story about theatre design:  Towards the end of the summer, in the rush to get the last stage finished, I was cutting a piece of wood on a band saw.   Perhaps because I was applying too much pressure, the wood snapped and my right hand swung into the blade, which just nicked the base of my little finger – deep enough to cause concern, pain and a quantity of blood.  My friend Wendell (who I had come to Dayton with), decided to drive me to the nearest medical facility, which happened to be a Children’s Clinic a short distance away.  Since they weren’t really set up as an emergency room, we ended up sitting on little plastic chairs in the waiting room for about an hour, as small kids with colds and other childhood mishaps were taken in and treated – all the while with me, my bleeding hand wrapped in some gauze and held throbbing over my head.  I finally said to h*ll with that and had Wendell drive me farther into town to a public hospital emergency room.  There, they took me right in, and the doctor on duty decided that he was going to have to do some “fancy” stitching because the saw blade had nicked the tendon that controls the finger.  He set me up with my arm stretched out to the side of the bed next to a tray of instruments and went off to find a couple of interns: because the tendon stitching was a bit unique, he wanted to use it as a teaching experience.  As I lay there waiting for him to come back, two Dayton City Policemen came into the emergency room with a young drug addict in tow.  In a moment of slackness, the boy tore away from the grip of the cops and went running and shouting through the emergency room, flying past me, barely missing my outstretched arm and sending the tray of instruments scattering to the floor, to two police hot in pursuit.  As I said, luckily he did not hit my arm.  After things settled back down, the Emergency Room Doctor and his interns reassemble the instruments and finish the job.  He later told me that if the blade had cut through the tendon, there was a potential that it would have snapped back into my arm like a rubber band.

Who says drama is only for the theatre?