Alive - And Without Devouring Any Souls

Let’s see. What have I been doing lately? Oh, right! Everything!

Saturday Night opened this past weekend with shows Friday and Saturday evenings, and a matinee on Sunday afternoon. The production went very well, especially on Saturday night. Not only were Hedda, Chris, Katie, Dave, Jenny, and Chris’ parents all in the audience; but I my comedic timing was apparantly impeccable, as I got a lot of laughs. It’s either that, or all my friends in the crowd were giving me a hand. Thanks for coming, you guys!

If you are one of those people who know anything about theater, then you know that opening night is preceeded by tech week, and you will also immediately know what that means to one’s sanity and free time. If you are indeed one of those people, the feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs. If you’re still with me, let me explain: Tech week is the week prior to opening night. It is the time when all of the different groups of people who are involved in the production, and who have been working mostly independently up until this point, all come together at once to make the show really happen. The set crew hauls the set they have constructed from the workshop to the stage and re-assemble their work. The lighting crew hangs and aims the stage lights, their vocabulary laced with strange words like fernell and spot and level. The sound crew figures out how to make the wireless microphones not work. The orchestra comes in and seats themselves in the pit, thus becoming The Pit. The stage hands spike the sets and yell at everyone not to touch the props. The costume designers finally realize that I was sucking in my gut when they measured me the first time. The actors finally get up on stage and realize that they have to re-work all of their staging because the set and stage is totally different than they imagined. And the director just goes insane.

If you can, imagine several railroad tracks all meeting at the same point. Now, place a train on each of those tracks and point them toward the point of intersection. Start up the trains, get them rolling at full throttle, and let them run towards one another. This is what most people would call a “train wreck.” In theater, it’s called “tech week.” Perhaps you have heard the phrase, “Theater is magic?” Guess what? They aren’t talking about creating a story or enthralling an audience or guys wearing makeup or anything like that. The magic of theater is that, somehow, tech week doesn’t end in a steaming pile. The magic is that the train wreck actually turns into a good show that people pay to come watch, and even sometimes applaud at the end.

So that has been my life for the last week-and-a-half. My mom comes to visit this week, and I don’t have rehearsal until Thursday. It’s wonderful.