The Children's Hour images
Here you can see the mostly completed set for Act 1:
At your left is the special "cutaway" wall. Two of the schoolgirls crouch behind the cutaway to eavesdrop on a scene. The adjacent door turned from a single leaf to a double, which wasn't quite as difficult as I told Katie it would be. The section of wall with the painted diamond emblem is the magic flat.
Upstage center is the window and bookcase complex. Because Katie wanted to get the biggest possible bang from the sunset and dusk at the end of Act 3, she asked for windows as big as we could make them. The space behind the windows was needed for storage of the Act 2 set (next page), so we applied scrims directly to the frames and set light sources up in the storage loft—another good piece of work by Steve, with Claire's help. The bookcase, get this, was 4 feet wide by 8 feet high by 16 inches deep and made of 3/4 inch plywood. When we struck the show it took four people to shift the wretched thing. In the photo you can hardly tell that the shelves all slope a degree or two to your right.
It's an understatement to say this was a difficult construction project. While the kids in the cast came to help, most of them were not ready to learn much carpentry, so the number of people standing up the set and building the special units was small. Assistant director Chip brought a few pledges from his fraternity, a major contribution because not only could these guys climb ladders to paint, they also didn't blink when asked to clean out the backstage and stow all the unused flats. But overall, the job was a hard one and we really did run out of time at the end. (You won't be able to spot the unfinished places in this photo, though.)
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