Chicago parking is hell. I’m staying with Sean and Sharon for tech week and I’m getting to know what living in the city would be like. I think I’d like it, but there are advantages and disadvantages to such a change from the living environment I’m used to. Apartments are expensive and if they’re cheap, you pay for what you get. Neighbors upstairs may have creaky floorboards or they might be noisy in general. Anyways, if you have a late night out, parking near your apartment building is impossible. Parallel parking is another nightmare; I’m not very good at it and I definitely have gotten a lot of practice in with this internship. Finding parking near the theatre on the first evening took forty-five minutes.
Once in the space, I realized how very ill equipped the theatre was. The seats were gross, rickety and the place was very small. The grid was too low because the place wasn’t built to be a theatre in the first place. The company was already realizing that renting the location was going to provide some difficulties. The owners were unorganized and provided very little information about the theatre. The lighting designer arrived on day 2 and she had a nightmare. She had very few lights to work with and almost none of them had safety cables.
My first night included painting doors and building the two walls of doors on either side of the alley stage. There are three entrances to the stage and we have three doors assigned for each character that work; the rest of the doors don’t work and make up the walls of the space. I worked from eight to midnight and by then, we were ready for Sharon to come in the morning to paint the floor.
Day Two brought in the lighting designer, Maya, who was supposed to teach me lighting, but tech week really isn’t the time to teach a noob. I didn’t learn any lighting, but I sponge painted glass for the three chandeliers. Garcin, Inez, and Estelle each have their own bench and corresponding chandelier. The glass needed some stain on the inside so that the chandeliers gave colored light to match the benches. Then gels were cut to cover each glass so the bulbs didn’t illuminate the grid too much. Painting the glass proved to be a challenge. Sponging the green one looked like mold when held up to light, but to just paint the inside would show the brushstrokes. The color green inside the glass also kept looking more yellow. I ended up adding black to the green paint, using a sponge to make three washes of color with swirly strokes. While Maddie worked on the burgundy glass, I moved onto the blue glass and gave it three layers of dry sponging in two shades of blue. The end look had a very frosted and specked appearance.
After finishing the glass, we moved into tech rehearsal. Maya programmed cues while the actors did a full run. Maddie was in the booth doing paper tech as well. I watched from one side while everyone else was on the other. I let Maya know when my side had dark spots and cast unpleasant shadows on the actors.
My two jobs during performances is running house, letting actors into the lobby after house closes, and letting actors through There isn’t a crossover for the alley stage so actors must exit the entire building and run down the sidewalk to the lobby door to go from one side of the stage to the other. I also have to open a door for a pivotal moment in the script when all the doors fly open and the characters are given the opportunity to leave hell. After rehearsal, we ran through designer notes and went home.
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