The Trip to Bountiful images
Progress resumed the third weekend. While Marie was away, we put off all decisions about the Act 1 bed, but it went pretty quickly once she returned. Problem was to make it vanish utterly between 1 and 2 but look perfectly bed-like in 1. The solution we came up with was to use a real-world bed but turn it into a huge wagon with retractable wheels. Above you see Donald and Marie thinking about the sheer beauty of the concept.
The photo at left illustrates the mechanism in ready-to-roll configuration. Each of the four wheels (we used big industrial casters with rubber tires—the only kind anyone should ever put on stage anyway) is mounted to a block of lumber. Attached to the bottoms of the feet is a rail made of 1x4. (In the midground you can also see the stringer that runs the long way of the bed to keep the head and foot from drifting apart.) The wheel block and the rail are connected by ordinary door hinges, which you can't see in any of the pix. In this position it's possible to roll the bed out the stage door and up a ramp to where it will spend the latter part of each evening.
When the bed returns to its Act 1 position next day, crew members lift each end, flip the wheel blocks up, and lower the beast onto its rails. The bed linens will mask all the moving parts. The first two people who worked the trick immediately retired from the crew because they had neglected to withdraw their feet from under the rail, but this is a difficulty we can get past with adequate training and OSHA-approved backstage signage.
A lot of people don't know this: If you put a bed with its head upstage and its foot downstage, audience members generally can't perceive how long it is. I picked this up at an Atlanta production of The Colored Museum, which used a bed that was long enough to sit on but not long enough to lie in. I practiced a similar deception in Town & Gown's Death of a Salesman and in another show or two, and nobody the wiser. But this one is practical (people lie on it) and doesn't point upstage-downstage, so there was no use foreshortening it.
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