The Children's Hour images
Here is Mrs. Tilford's parlor, about half finished. This entire set stood inside the schoolroom. Each of the downstage walls had a "return" flat hinged on, both for masking and as a support; the grand curtain was brought in to overlap the returns. The door at your left (compare with the plan drawing on page 2 of this series) turned out to have a heavy bamboo-bead curtain instead of a hinged shutter. To keep the whole wall from rupturing its battens during the scene change, we bridged the door with that red thing (later painted black).
Tom and I re-invented a venerable technique for attaching the three walls to one another. We affixed positioning cleats so that the pieces would come together right every time, then used coathooks and clothesline to lash the whole affair together. The method has the virtue that it works fast and securely and that any shlub can learn to do it. In "official" theater, you use special hardware for this purpose, but coathooks work fine; the only drawback is the space the hooks take up on the back of the unit.
The scene change went like this: Curtain down, open the magic flat, strike the girls' book boxes and miscellaneous furniture. Two people carry each of the three walls in through the magic flat. The fireplace unit and furniture come in at the same time and are set down at midstage. Starting at Stage Left, the stagehands swing out the return and position the wall, mate the Upstage wall to it and lash, mate the Stage Right wall and lash, and swing out the Down Right return. The fireplace unit and furniture now go into their spots while a stagehand removes the bridge piece from the door (very important). Meanwhile, an electrician sets the lighting dolly behind the fireplace opening. Done!
This was the show where our lighting system melted down. The first symptoms appeared on final dress night, but everyone hoped they were just electronic sneezes. That hope proved to be vain. Our lighting plant has the control board in a booth behind the last row of audience seating, dimmer packs on a wall in the loft over the dressing rooms, cabling to connect the two locations, and wires carrying power from the dimmers to the lighting positions. On the afternoon of opening, nothing worked right. As soon as the board was turned on, the dimmers began slamming circuits, in random order, with brief spikes of 100% power. You would get physically ill watching it, and it was impossible to perform under those conditions.
So for the first weekend of the run, Steve's subtle design was executed this way: Stage manager, backstage, uses walkie-talkie to alert Claire, the electrician in the booth. Claire uses a cell phone to alert Steve, who is perched on a ladder within reach of the test switches (these work when nothing else does, which—if you think about the name—is the way it should be). The "Go!" comes from S.M. to Claire and then from Claire to Steve, who flips switches. The circuits are the ones he specified in the design, but it's in the nature of a test switch that it is either on or off: no fades, no balancing, no contrast in intensity, just BANG the light comes on and BANG it goes out.
Act 1 didn't suffer too much from this treatment, since it basically used a full-stage wash to begin with. And then we came to Act 2, where the fireplace was to be the main light source and the rest of the stage lights just controlling shadows. Act 2 was played with everything full up. And then in Act 3 we had a thunderstorm and this odd sunset. The storm was a heroic achievement, because the board had been programmed to synchronize with a sound effects CD, but now the board was not working at all. Claire had to watch the timer and a timing sheet and call a cue to Steve two or three seconds before a clap of thunder was scheduled, so there would be a lightning flash at the right moment. They brought it off, and most of the audience was never the wiser.
We did get repairs done between the two weekends of the play's run, so people who attended the last four performances got the benefit of Steve's brilliant work. He and Claire and Julie, who did parts of everybody's jobs, earned gold stars on their charts.
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