The Devil's Disciple images
If you have visited many of my production pages, you know most of them include at least one image that's completely incomprehensible. At right is the one for The Devil's Disciple.
The only things that remained to do were (1) build a stop so that the revolve wouldn't move under the performers and (2) build the rest of the set. Item (1) was trivial, just a heavy block and a steel pin, with a hole drilled in the disk at each stop position.
As the photo below illustrates, we first built an 18-foot stud wall to run along one diameter of the disk, plus two 9-foot walls to stand at right angles to that. One short wall got a door, and the long wall got a window. Because the revolve had four working positions, the window appeared in two scenes and the door in two. (The fifth scene was played way downstage and isolated from the revolve by lighting.)
A lot of the work on this set went faster than I'm used to. Don brought an air compressor and some pneumatic tools. Once the plates and studs were cut, it just took a few minutes to join them with an enormous framing nailer. Thing drives a 3 inch cemented nail quicker than you can say "hammer." If we'd done this job without air tools, each stud would have taken two deck screws and three or four minutes to attach. But it was the air staplers I really fell in love with. It was sheer bliss attaching plywood faces to flats without having to use those wretched 3/4 inch screws.
Director Cat has three kids and a husband with very tough deadlines, so Matt, Sarah and Olivia showed up for a lot of our work days. Matt asked for a ride as soon as the walls were up on the turntable; Sarah was not sure she liked all the movement. At right you see Matt, with a mild case of the staggers, after a few rounds.
Oh, but I meant to tell you about the construction. On the one day of the project when we could use a lot of hands, a lot of hands showed up. Don cut these plywood slats and the cast nailed them to the studs, at least till we ran out of hammers. Later we used an industrial adhesive to attach blue insulating board to the slats. Don and James spent a lot of time putting up the foam boards over the next couple of weeks, then . . . then came the horrible job of texturing the boards with a wire brush. We carried out buckets of styrofoam dust. And then paint, a lot of paint. I'm telling you this here because when the painting began, the photography ceased, simply for lack of time. Next time you see pieces of the set, they'll be in finished form.
Theater techies all over the world will be grateful for the following tip. James discovered by accident that a cheap paint roller cover (the fuzzy part) used as a clothes brush not only removes styro dust but allows it to fall harmlessly to the floor.
Along with the big revolve, there were three columns and a second revolve, a much smaller one with no disk. You'll see it a few pages further on.
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