Hit by a Bus Rules: Children Will Listen…and Maybe the Adults Will Too.

Alandra Hileman, a day late, but still wise.

Theatre Rule of the Month: …hell if I know.

Many years ago, after a steady diet of watching musicals and occasionally acting in church sketches, my parents enrolled me in a summer theatre camp. That camp was where I caught the bug, leading me to meet my high-school mentor, and eventually to pursuing a variety of theatre degrees in college. Well, folks, I have come full circle, because this summer I am teaching theatre camp. And, conveniently for the purposes of trying to keep this log themes to the behind-the-scenes, it’s tech camp. I love teaching, I love tech, and this seemed like a great opportunity to maybe pass on some of my passion to the next generation the way it was passed to me all those years ago. Of course, I sorely underestimated the power of the soul-sucking apathy of high-schoolers, but I can’t really fault them – I was them in high school too.

I don’t really know if they’ve learned anything from me – I spend a lot of time floundering and making things up as I go – but I’ve learned a few hard lessons that I’ll carry with me into my future backstage experiences. Here are some of the highlights:

* It is really hard to teach a scenic production class when you are not allowed to use power tools with the students. Or any tools, really. However, you may get the opportunity to bond with kinds about shared taste in emo music of the ‘00s. (I’m just saying, my explanation of how to build a flat was boring but I got a ton of pointed for having a P!atD/FOB/MCR playlist, and yes that is a sentence I just typed that I am going to allow to be posted on the internet, so…)

* Do not suggest an effect to a director unless you know with absolute certainty A) how to achieve it, and B) that you have the means to do so within your venue/budget/personnel. Truthfully, I thought I knew better than this. I do not. We start tech on Monday and we only just now decided how we’re going to do this stupid avalanche effect.

* Speaking of effects…light boards are complicated, but you can find literally any answer on the internet. This week I’ve been teaching the kids how to program an ETC Ion but referencing a cheat-sheet I found via Google. YouTube also has some great tutorials. And if even that fails, there is always that one really smart kid that looks at the board and asks, very politely, “have you tried that button?” You have not. It is that button. Accept your defeat with grace.

* These kids likely don’t know anything about theatre. But they do absolutely know that you are probably bullshitting them, so just go ahead and tell them what the deal is. I suspect I gained a lot of respect the first day that I straight up told them I was exhausted and had nothing planned and we were just gonna paint flats. They painted those flats like machines that day.

* Design is not Technical Direction. Technical Direction is not Teaching. Teaching is not Design. If you get stuck doing all three, especially when you’re only vaguely qualified for one-and-a-half, try not to panic. The children feed on fear.

It’s been a weird, often frustrating four weeks, and I’ve still got one more to go before my camp duties end. But even for all the bullshitting, last-minute scrambles to find lesson topics, and inability to actually use any of the equipment in the theater in a particularly hands-on fashion, I’ve met some great kids. I don’t think I’m about to become a great mentor to any of them, but hopefully they at least enjoyed the playlists.

Alandra’s posts other occasional “lessons” she’s learned on Twitter (@LadyBedivere), and on rare occasions updates her general doings at ajhileman.com.

Hit by a Bus Rules: The Write Stuff

Alandra Hileman, after a bit of a hiatus, returns.

Theatre Rule of the Month: Write It Down

I’ve been in a writer’s cave of insanity the last few months, so rather than a cohesive blog, here’s a series of the sorts of “shower thoughts” I’ve had about writing.

***

One of the hardest things about stage managing is figuring out what to write down when. The stage manager should write everything down, of course, but sometimes you’re sitting there frantically erasing your blocking notes again as a scene gets restaged for the fourth time in as many days and you start to wonder if there’s a certain point before which you can safely not take notes. The answer is no, because suddenly in tech week that one offhanded comment from the first read will become absurdly relevant and necessary and you’re gonna pray it’s still jotted in the margin of your script somewhere.

***

I don’t totally understand the Hemmingway-attributed quote “Write drunk; edit sober,” which people often pitch at me when I ask for block-busting tricks. Not like I don’t understand the principle of it, but…when I’m drunk all I wanna do is watch Futurama and play Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook. Maybe it’s just my brain chemistry.

***

I found a Post-It the other day as I was cleaning off my desk that had a very specific sequence of numbers on it, which I finally realized was RGB level adjustments for some set of photos I must have been editing at some point. I assume I wrote it down because I wasn’t doing the whole set at once, but it would have been really helpful if past-me had noted which photo-set it was for. This is why in my notebooks I’ve started writing project abbreviations in the upper corner; so that I can quickly flip through and find all the notes for any given project.

***

Speaking of “shower thoughts,” I’m going to go buy some of those kids’ bath crayons so I can take notes in the shower. I’d get so much more done.

***

By the same account, I need to start running a tape-recorder in my car, because I solve so many plot problems when I’m blasting down the freeway talking to myself, but usually by the time I reach my destination I can.

***

I used to never write notes for things. Never in classes, never for stories or plays I was working on, and to be perfectly honest, when I first started stage managing I didn’t write things down nearly as much as I should have. I think that was where I really started to realized that for as good of a memory as I have, things will fall through the cracks, especially when you’re juggling being the cetral hub of information for not only your department, but everyone’s. I’m still really bad about just taking the moment to writing something down, but I’m trying desperately to get better at allowing myself that time, in every aspect of my life. Especially handwriting – there have been, if I recall, scientific studies which have show that handwriting notes helps us not only to remember things better but also to form our thoughts more coherently. I’ve been trying to take time to enjoy the note-taking process, and to apply the tricks I learned in stage managing on how to annotate an existing script to the process of creating one as well. It’s sometimes a weird hang-up transitioning from the world of executing a script vision backstage to creating said script for others to execute, but I feel like I’m starting to find my groove.

***

This blog is the most productive procrastination I’ve had all week.

You can find more of Alandra’s “shower thoughts” on Twitter (@LadyBedivere), and find out about larger projects at ajhileman.com.

Hit by a Bus Rules: Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time

Alandra Hileman, time after time.

Theatre Rule of the Month: Early is On Time, On Time is Late*

*borrowed, quite rightly, from US Marine Corp.

I had great good intentions of writing this blog post a month ago. I thought I should get ahead, because I already knew that this blog would be due within the same 48-hour period as two full-length play drafts and a short writing assignment, as well as the high likelihood of getting scheduled to work. Predictably, it is currently 12:30am on my due date, and I am writing this blog having just gotten home from a work shift.

I’ve always struggled with time: being on time, accurately predicting travel time (or time travel), time management in general. It’s something that I became most aware of in the last few years as a young professional as I’ve had to try to convert my time into money. And sadly, like money, time is also finite, and I only have so much of it I can dedicate to various projects. Since I like to keep busy to distract myself from my crippling inadequacies, I also have a tendency to overcommit, as can again be evidenced by the fact that I’m writing a blog at…now, 1am. (I’m multitasking, obviously.)

Time is a big deal in theatre too, so there’s no escaping it. Whether it’s your call time, the “unity of time” rule, or just the bright and shining hope of finishing a 10-of-12 tech in only 9 hours, we spend a lot of our…wow, see, let me try that one again…we put as much effort into tracking and measuring time as we do crafting the artistic elements of shows. And since I often work in tech, time cards, timed breaks, and “is it go time yet?” are ever-present phrases in my life.

Speaking of which, attempting to talk about time without using time-worn phrases is in fact more time-consuming than I anticipated and to boot I think it’s time I get some sleep. (2am – whoot!). So if you’ve some thoughts on time, share them…if you can spare a minute.

You can follow Alandra’s crazy draft-writing marathon commentary on Twitter (@LadyBedivere) and find out what all the crazy is leading to at ajhileman.com.

Hit by a Bus Rules: Ritual and Reverence for the Modern Age

Alandra Hileman, full of reverence.

Theatre Rule of the Month: Don’t Say The Name of The “Scottish Play” Inside The Theatre

Aha! Even with the switch of my column from Tuesdays to Fridays, I still got a convenient real-world date that synced up with my monthly ramblings. What date, you ask? Nope, not even remotely Valentine’s Day. (You’ll wanna watch my Facebook and Twitter for THAT annual joke.)

No, I’m referring to this last Wednesday. Ash Wednesday, which all lapsed Catholics and natives of New Orleans will know marked the beginning of Lent, a high-church Christian holiday of fasting and meditation for the 40 days leading up to Easter Sunday. Now, I’m not actually Catholic, but given my predisposition for personal guilt and suffering, I’ve always been drawn to this particular holiday, which involves giving up things you love or enjoy and instead meditating on the divine.

I bring this up in a theatre blog because this year the advent of Lent got me thinking a lot about ritual. There’s a lot of connection between superstition and the divine, and between theatre and religion, dating back to the earliest origins of humanity and which many scholars have explained better than I could. But what I’m more interested in these days is the strange and delightful ways in which the modern theatre rituals have evolved.

One of the seeming oldest and most enduring rules in theatre, and certainly one of the most exciting to tell stories about, is the rule that we never say the name of Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play” inside the theatre (unless you are performing the show itself and must say the lines) lest you curse the production mwahahahahaha, etc. There are hundreds of stories, some very famous, about terrible tragedies that have befallen those who didn’t adhere to this rule, and a good couple dozen ways to supposedly dispel the curse should someone slip up. And unlike, say, not whistling in a theatre, which originated for an incredibly practical reason,* there is no specifically logical reason that we don’t say the name.

I, personally, don’t believe in a curse. But I don’t say the name inside the theatre, both out of deference to people who are genuinely troubled by it, and because I like participating in a ritual that connects me not only to my immediate cast and crew, but to every cast and crew out there, almost like a secular genuflection. We have lots of these traditions and rituals in theatre that have persisted from earlier generations, such as using “break a leg” instead of “good luck” and leaving the ghost light on in the dark theatre (which I’ve always felt is the perfect blend of practical and sacred). And they become one of the many connective tissues of the theater community – we don’t recite prayers in unison with others all over the world, but we do commit the same lines to memory and treat them with reverence. Or intentional irreverence. But it’s still part of what strengthens the bonds we have with everyone else who works with that same text.

The other thing I love most about ritual in theatre, besides the way it connects the community, is the way new rituals are always being created and passed on. I have worked with a few companies and individual actors that have very specific drinking rituals which occur at certain points in the process (most often on opening and closing nights, sometimes for other occasions). I know a few companies that hide a certain object or prop in every show. There are great individual rituals too: I know a lot of actors who develop their own specific warm-ups. One of my frequent bosses is constantly making us eat snacks. This week is was “You have to have a Double-Stuffed Oreo. Tech week tradition.” Who cares if it wasn’t before, it is now, because we all did it. I have a specific ring given to me many years ago that I always wear on my opening nights, the classic theatre masks. I wear it on either the third of fourth finger of my left hand, either to remind me how much I enjoy being “married” to my work, or as my subtle flip of the bird to bid goodbye to a stressful tech as we open. It doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me, but it’s my own contribution to the ritual of theatre.

In closing, I offer this anecdote: Very early in my stage management career, I worked with one director on a Shakespeare play who always began the rehearsal process with several sessions of table work. As we were going through the text, and of course getting off on Shakespearean tangents, the Scottish Play came up. This director made a point of basically saying this: “Well, I don’t believe in the curse. But I always want to point out to my casts that the historical Macbeths as far as we know didn’t murder anyone and were very good rulers.” As I recall, according to repeat actors, this little speech was something that happened every year. Despite not believing in the “curse,” this director had created a new piece of the ritual to dispel or satisfy it. And that itself is the beauty of ritual, right?

Alandra will be suffering through the next two months of deadlines without the help of caffeine or alcohol, so if you’d like to come find her and commiserate, check out her ongoing calendar of upcoming events at ajhileman.com

* For anyone who doesn’t know: In the 17th Century, out-of-work sailors would often find work as deck hands (see what we did there) in the theatres, primarily running the rigging of scenic drops and such. They used a complex series of whistles to communicate, so anyone else whistling ran the risk of accidentally signaling for heavy canvas drops or even sandbags to start falling from above.

Hit by a Bus Rules: A Poe Excuse for a Blog

Alandra Hileman honors a very special day. 

Theatre Rule of the Month: Measure Twice, Cut Once

Today, January 19th, would be Edgar Allan Poe’s 207th birthday. His happens to be one of the few famous birthdays I remember without prompting, thanks to two years in high school I spent working on a massive research project (which, as a matter of fact, I was never actually required to finish and turn in). I also probably have more poems and passages from Poe’s work rattling around in my memory than any other single writer, not that I would trust myself to do a proper recitation anytime soon. Delightfully, I’m finally getting the opportunity to put all this info to use in one of the far-to-many plays I’m currently in the process of drafting up, which means Poe has been on my mind a lot of late.

Interesting fact about Poe: he was a fairly obsessive reviser. Many of his poems and stories exist in multiple versions, with revisions running the gamut from simple spelling corrections or a change of title all the way to entirely new stanzas or endings. His output of fiction, poetry, and essays was fairly prolific, so when you begin to comb through the various publications to look for the revisions and variations, it adds up to quite a lot of text to compare.

Yes, publications. There aren’t many original drafts belonging to Poe that survived his turbulent and impoverished life, so most of the revisions we know about come from fair copies that were in the possession of magazine editors to whom they had been submitted, or the actual published texts, of which there were often several variations. Which brings me around to this month’s rule.

One of the first things you learn (or should learn) in both carpentry and sewing is the rule of “measure twice, cut once.” This rule gets brought up often in the theatrical world because, honestly, there’s usually not enough money in the budget to do something over if it doesn’t measure up the first time. So if you’re building a set, first you measure everything: the doors, the floors, the 2x4s. Then you draw your sketch to scale, measure your space and materials again, (for extra credit measure your scale drawing again), and then, and only then, do you start cutting and screwing. Apply the same to sewing, but with bodies and fabric.

It’s a solid rule. And it’s totally the opposite of what many writers seem to be taught. I’ve done readings for plays where I see draft after draft after draft presented, each one different, often each presented exactly as flowed from the writer’s pen (or laptop). Outlines are perfectly respectable, but not required. And sometimes, you keep making changes and revisions even after you’ve, I don’t know, won a Pulitzer prize for your play and had it produced and published all over the world. (coughBuriedChildcough) But then, words are a lot cheaper than lumber, so you can usually afford to screw up or change your mind more easily.

This isn’t intended as any sort of perfect metaphor, and all rules are probably made to be broken. But it is interesting to look at these two sides of how things are made. One is a very precise, planned system meant to deliver exact results the first time it comes together. The other may be a perpetual work-in-progress, or an experiment in throwing something half-baked in front of people and then adjusting after you see what it is. And since re-researching Poe brought it to my attention, I’m curious to pay more attention to where these two methods come to the fore as I plug away on measuring and (eventually) cutting my own writing about Poe.

So, happy birthday to the inventor of the modern detective story, formative contributor to the science fiction genre, first American writier to try to live on writing alone, and all-around wow-you-make-me-feel-better-about-my-life-choices guy, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. Thanks for the work.

If you’re more interested in Poe’s alcoholism and weird relationship with his 13-year old cousin than his revision habits, you can come see Alandra Hileman’s upcoming play Cyprus, Sin, and Care this Spring in the BoxCutters readings series at The Breadbox. Quoth the Raven, “See You There!”