Author Topic: Ever tried Twelfth Night in the '50's?  (Read 7069 times)

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PSMKay

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Ever tried Twelfth Night in the '50's?
« on: Sep 25, 2007, 08:59 am »

Here's a horror story for the archive: I was ASM for Twelfth Night, and the SM wasn't exactly the most organized person for the job. Never mind that everything that could go wrong did...

I have a sneaking suspicion that I should have been worried about this play more than I actually was. My highschool was doing Twelfth Night as our 'big show' for the year. I'd been doing theatre work for all of about a year, and through a series of odd circumastances found myself to be the resident ASM. Being the devout kid that I was I went religiously to every rehearsal, quit my part-time job focusing solely on theatre and schoolwork. This worked out really well overall, and I was particularly pleased to find out that my hard work was paying off: I could use the time with the play as community service hours for one of my courses. That's about where it stopped being quite so much fun and games I suppose. I would duck out of my classes early to do work for the play, particularly the one that was using these hours as a part of my education. So I was painting, organizing everything, and getting actors straightened out. Little did I know that our SM, wasn't quite doing so much work. It turns out that he was at fewer rehearsals than I, and I was orgainzing everything for him because he seemed to lack that area of expertise. Even so, I loved doing it all. That is until the show actually started.
To make it really clever and slightly out there, our show started on the twelfth night of christmas. Everyone chuckled at the director for making this happen, though it could have been an omen for stranger things to come. On either the first or second night, during the fight scene our charming leading lady fell hard onto an edge of a riser, causing a seriously bruised tailbone, funny walking, and reworking many of the scenes to accomodate this new facet. The following night, our head of stage crew fell backward down a small flight of stairs hitting his head against a prop, causing a concussion, and serious mayhem backstage. Here I was, when I hear a series of thuds, and a flock of people go down the stairs, and I'm roped off to a corner stuck to headset with random actors asking me for ice. Immense swearing over headset ensues, and the SM rushes off to make sure that the guy's okay, leaving me to call what I know of the show and orchestrate the actors into moving set pieces on and off during blackout. This resulted in my saying 'go' to an actor moving a table, and the lighting op pressing go. Lights erupted midway through the blackout, and everyone froze. Lights dimmed and moving continued. Naturally there were a number of early lighting cues, and one rather large one which caused a blackout halfway through a scene on another night.
Even though it was very well my worst stage experience thus far I can look back on it and laugh out loud, Twelfth Night is by far my favourite play, and I'm still nearly able to say every line in it.

 

riotous