The Plight for a Place called Home

ACTS differs from other theaters in that ACTS tech people also act. All of our tech people do a fine job in that area. There is John Ertel, who builds any set that our director, Kathy Sutter designs. John has built the set and played everything from the aviator in the Little Prince, to Luke the physician in ACTS, the doctor in Curious Savage to the Aaron in The Lost Day. Chuck Sutter, our soundman and technical specialist has also doubled as soldier, father and milkman.

The problem with this is that if we act, we can not operate things like the sound board and the lighting board while we are on stage. As always there is exception to this rule. When we did Our Town, Chuck played the milkman. Bryce Harper, one of our lighting people played the police officer. I played Sammantha Craig.

Since they were all bit parts we swapped positions. Sometimes I operated the sound board, sometimes Chuck or Bryce operated the sound board. Sometimes Bryce operated the lighting board, then I operated the lighting board. In ACT Three, both Chuck and Bryce were on stage, so I got to do both lighting and sound. Curtain Call was the real trick. Everyone is on stage for curtain call. The five hundred yard dash is one of most important skills they taught me in high school.

Training new actors does not put any strains on our use of the building we practice in. There is always that scary period when the older members of the cast worry if the new actor will learn the lines they need to learn. They generally do. Acting requires you to memorize lines, learn cues, understand how someone else thinks, react to either the situation their characters are in, or react to the characters in their immediate setting, and convey the feeling and thoughts of the person that they are playing to an audience. Twenty-one rehearsals is the magic number for most successful shows. Sometimes ACTS manages to do it with less.

However, to learn tech has different set of requirements. The tech people have to learn cues too. Traditionally tech people have less time to learn their cues than the actors do. That's why tech people use scripts during the show. Right? Try doing back to back level changes that require both hands, watching the stage, and reading your script by flashlight at the same time.

Tech requires you know where things get plugged in, how to use duct tape to your best advantage, which levers, buttons, and knobs, do what on which piece of equipment, how to deal with cables, nails, and objects that weigh more than you do. Tech requires you to learn how to mix colors of light as well of colors of paint. Tech requires listening to sound levels and and adjusting the appropriate control. Within the confines of the the term tech, there is room for many specialists each adding their own talents to produce a show. Within the confines of one tech term there is still room for multiple specialists.

Learning how to one job for a show takes time. College productions usually give their tech crew two weeks,(a rehearsal each night,) to learn how to operate the piece of equipment that person agreed to operate. These people usually are not also responsible for setup too. The person running sound, just operates the sound equipment. The person running lights just operates the lighting board. The stage crew just moves set pieces and perhaps one or two props.

Our lights do many things besides simply lighting the stage. Different scripts call out for different lighting setups. Scripts call for sunlight, candlelight, twilight, early morning, sunsets, fireplace lit rooms, cabins lit by lanterns, lightning, houses on fire, camp fires, stars at night, reflections of bubbling brooks, and there are more.

Each lighting effect is programmed into our lighting board. Each lever on the board is an effect in itself. Two to five levers control the transitions from one effect to another for one scene. What ACTS considers to be a fairly easy lighting show usually consists of nine or ten preprogrammed channels, that have to be coordinated by the operator to match an ever changing set of instructions. How easy or hard a show is depends on how many times the lighting operator has to go through the procedure of changing the settings on board, and whether or not they are also running the sound board, and tape deck at the same time.

It takes five rehearsals with all the equipment setup for an actor without tech experience to do an "easy" show. It takes just as many rehearsals for an experienced tech person to do a complicated show. For an "easy" show our lighting and sound board operators are expected to do a good job after two rehearsals.

It takes another four hours to point them in the right direction, choose and duct tape the the gels to get whatever effects we are aiming for. It takes eight to twelve hours to do the same job, when ACTS lighting crew is interested in learning the principles of lighting design. Then we have to hang and wire the lights in multiple ways, and critique what we did before a solution is settled on. We can not get enough time in the building to normally teach people how to do lighting design.

ACTS Easter Pageant was a wonderful vehicle for teaching lighting design principles. We did the same show for multiple years. That meant we had a whole year to critique, the lights from the last show, throw out ideas to make our job easier, and come up with new things to try for the next show.

Although we started from the origonal lighting design made by Karen Baker, the lights were never the same in any year. Bryce Harper was our lighting operator for the Easter show. He was learning lights by working with the Alden High School's stage crew, and by working with ACTS. After the forth Easter show, Bryce had gained enough knowledge and experience to help design the lights for Our Town and Godspell.

People without any theater experience have a harder time learning tech. These are the people who suffer the most from ACTS not having their own building. People who have never operated a lighting board before have a hard time imaging it. People who have never duct taped wires, duct tape jobs look like they never did it before. We want them to succeed. We give them all the information we can. There is too much knowledge required for most of the tech jobs to be absorbed in one or two days.

ACTS should be able to teach these people who have the desire to learn, are willing to work, but lack the experience to do a professional looking job in the amount of time we have to prepare for a show. Workshops would be a way of meeting this need, but to have a workshop you need to have the equipment set up and working ahead of time. To have a building which we did not have to share with another group would allow us to have a larger pool from where can draw our tech people from.