Horrifying Conclusions

The other day on my way home from rehearsal in SF, I was struck by a horrifying thought: what if stage management is God's way of preparing me to have children. And it's not like I had a terrible rehearsal or anything; actually, it was great, and everybody was really on top of their game. But as I was typing the rehearsal report I started thinking about all the things I've been doing on my last two SM gigs:

-- Coordinating eight separate schedules to make sure everyone shows up where they need to be on time.
-- Emailing the office to make sure we have a space to play in.
-- Putting everything away when we're done using it at the end of the night.
-- Mediating heated discussions about insignificant details and facilitating mutually beneficial compromises (though this was definitely the last gig I was on, not the current one).
-- Making sure that everyone eats, gets potty breaks, and takes their vitamins, except myself of course.

And of course when we get into the actual performance space I'll be keeping track of everybody's stuff and seeing that everything gets done the way we need it to happen. There's even a good dose of sleep deprivation and kissing boo-boos…it's all the tropes of parenting, but minus having to rent out my uterus for nine months.

And then I realize that I keep doing this voluntarily, and know that I may, in fact, be doomed to procreate. At least I can rest secure in knowing that I will always be able to blame theater for why my kids got so screwed up. My mom does it all the time.

Two New Projects, and a Headset in a Pear Tree

Because when I return, I return with a vengance...

After a semester sadly bereft of stage management, I am now diving headfirst into, not one, but TWO new projects, and both are entirely different than anything I've done before. It's both exciting and terrifying, and will probably give me a lot of fodder with this dusty old thing.

The first project, which I've been aware of for a while but we've just started to really work on, is a piece called Jump: A Love Story, which will go up this coming October. It's actually the MA thesis project of one of SFSU students who wrote for the One-Act Fringe which I stage managed back in October of '10. It's not so much a play as what we're calling a "multimedia expressionist theatre investigation", incorporating movement, film, animation, theater, found and original text, and whatever else we decide to incorporate. The...well, maybe story isn't the proper word...the premise incorporates a young man who is preparing to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and a chorus of seagulls associated to Shakespeare's Juliet, Ophelia, and Cleopatra. It's very difficult to describe, but it's going to be a unique and interesting experience. In addition to stage managing, I'm also semi-assisstant directing, and I'm quite looking forward to the very collaborative nature of the project.

The second project is much more short term: I'm stage-managing-behind-the-camera, or as we call it, "producing," a short film written and directed by one of my friends who goes to the Academy of Art. The filsm is called Amelioration and deals with the repercussions of child abuse and the hope that love can heal. It's a pretty deep subject, and to boot it's my first real foray into film (the true first doesn't count). Still, I'm thrilled to be a part of it, and my job is mostly emails and paperwork, so there's not much change from my stage work.

Both projects are all over Facebook and Twitter (go social networking!), so I'm going to do a link-dump here to get it out in the open now, and you can expect jucier updates to come soon!

Links for Jump: A Love Story:
Production Blog: http://jumplovestory.wordpress.com/about/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Jump-A-Love-Story/191452540890869
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/jumpalovestory

Links for Amelioration:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Amelioration/209654252384320
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Amelioration11

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Headset

Last semester, I took two classes in conjunction with stage managing one of the mainstage shows at my university. One of these classes was a class everyone is required to take in order to get their theater degree, and is essentially a crafty way for the faculty to staff all the productions under the guise of teaching you "Leadership" and "Organization". This year the class was taught by our fantastic new Production Manager. He was fantastic for three major reasons

1. He's a damn good Production Manager with a great deal of experience as not only a PM, but also a lighting designer, a director, a musician, a stage manager, and a dad of two youngish kids.

2. He was only teaching the Stage Management/Production Management type classes, unlike the few semesters when we had no PM and so the Lighting Design instructor and the Playwrighting instructor tag-teamed on the class. Don't get me wrong, they're both good PMs too, but they were each teaching a dozen classes, while our new PM was teaching two.

3. He used to be in a punk band in the 80s and would let us diatribe about all kinds of silly things.

So one day we're in class discussing tech week: what it is, how it works, and specifically how the stage manager fits into the whole thing. The Stage Manager is the calm in the center of the storm. The Stage Manager answers all the questions, calls all the shots, and keeps the train on the tracks. The Stage Manager is God, pulling together the universe on a tiny theatrical scale in just six days (and probably passing out with a bottle of Two-Buck-Chuck on the seventh).

It sounds kind of awesome when you talk about it, but being the prime deity in your own private universe isn't all it's cracked up to be. Everybody is running around like crazy. Things are breaking, malfunctioning, and disappearing, and everyone wants your undivided attention to fix their specific area of the production and they want that attention right-fucking-now. And you who are responsible for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING that is about to implode must look each person squarely in the eye, smile, and in the soothing voice reserved for babies and puppies tell them exactly what they are going to do next to fix the problem and move forward.

Shockingly, it is incredibly difficult to be the only calm one in the room when everything you are in charge of is in chaos.

It sucks a little bit too, because theater is kind of incestuous. So, 95% of the time you're surrounded by friends, or people you were at school with, or relatives, or that company you hate because their sell-outs but they were the only paying gig you could get, or people who have 10+ years experience on you because you're fulfilling their EOE requirements, and you're trying to make it known that despite all of these facts, from the moment they enter to the moment they exit the building you are in charge. It is scary. It can be difficult. It is probably the one element of stage management that I personally am the least comfortable with, because I never want to step on anyone's toes, but sometimes you have to…and then you politely explain to them why their toes shouldn't have been there in the first place, because you are the stage manager, and you are doing your job, and they need to do theirs. And it's fucking terrifying when you have to do that. But everyone has to listen to and respect the stage manager in order for things to get done, whether they like you or not. (This is assuming that you're good at your job - stage managers who suck at their jobs will be another post or twelve.)

So we're wrapping up all this discussion, and the PM says "So, how would you summarize the job of the Stage Manager? In tech week, in general, whatever you want. Anybody?"

And, still half-asleep and practically drooling on my binder (because this particular day of class is in the middle of tech week for the show I am stage managing and I had been up until 2am doing paperwork before getting up at 6:30am to catch my train), I raise my hand and say, "Speak softly and carry a big headset?"

Apparently being half-dead makes me more snarky than usual, but he liked it anyway.

Zen and the Art of Binder Maintenance

Backtrack to the middle of October. I've just finished a ten-or-so week long process of stage managing a show. Sunday morning, right before I took off for the final performance, I stood in the doorway of my room and looked around. A quote from someone far wiser than I popped into my head: "phenomenal cosmic power...itty-bitty living space." Allow me to show you what I mean.

I realized three things as I looked at this debacle:
1. Not putting laundry away for over a month could explain why I couldn't find all three of my long-sleeved black shirts.
2. I have too many books (technically I knew that, but still).
3. This could explain why I've been having such trouble sleeping and getting my non-SM homework done.

"But," I hear you all say, "your bed [not pictured] is perfectly clear for sleeping in, and don't you have an hour on the train ride home each night to do your homework?" Technically, yes; in fact all three of the essays I turned in during the course of the rehearsal process were written at least partially on the train, and despite getting home at 1am only to get up again at 6am I did come home and sleep in my own bed every night. However, that's not really what I'm getting at here.

Whenever I'm attempting to write, be it fiction or school assignment, I pace in circles around the dining room table. In high school, my friend Sam said that he saw the pacing as a physical manifestation of my thought process. The act of walking represented the mental progression from some Point A to a Point B, and as soon as my mind reached a logical stopping place, I would stop pacing and be able to sit down and write. The state of my room is also a physical manifestation, this time of my general mental state. I clean my room when I'm really upset. Like, haul everything out of the closet and develop. And usually by the time I'm not upset anymore, my room is in pretty good shape. Again, physical reflection of mental state.

"But what does this have to do with Stage Management?" you all grumble.

Well, folks, it has to do with maintaining your own zen, for lack of a better way to say it. Stage Management is probably 75% paperwork and organization. If your personal space, the place where you escape from your SM duties, is a mess, most likely your brain will be too, and the more scrambled your brain, the more scrambled your paperwork will be. At the point of greatest stress in this last show, the week leading up to and week of tech, my binder was missing all kinds of paperwork and my emails were going out days late. My room also looked like a bomb went off. Once I got over the hump of tech, hung some shirts up in the closet and put all my socks away, my emails were more consistent and my paperwork was better organized again.

It really sucks, because when I'm Stage Managing in The City and living in The Suburbs I spend more time on trains and buses commuting than I really do at home. I think most SMs have this sort of problem; half my cast was utterly convinced that I was living in the building because they would leave the building while I was putting things away, and in the morning they'd arrive and I'd already be sending emails in the office. One of my actors had quite literally not done laundry in over a month and was borrowing clean clothes from a friend; the same actor spent about six night a week crashing somewhere other than her own apartment. Functioning on these less-than-ideal schedules, it's no wonder that one's personal space begins to resemble an archaeological dig site.

Honestly though? It's just as important to go be in that space, organized or not. When you spend all your time around other people, especially the people you're working with, you eventually show up to rehearsal covered in your own feces and screaming gibberish. Not that I've had personal experience with this, yet, but there are stories…

And now, a month after the shell of this diatribe was originally written, I look around and realize that my room looks about the same, though the piles are now more neatly categorized into groupings such as "schoolwork," "random books," "discarded Hallowe'en costume pieces," and "dead kittens." Remember kids, do as I say, not as the things living under my bed tell you to do.