Play Tech-tonics
Posted by Whitney Dibo on 7/29/2008
Truth be told, tech rehearsals get a pretty bad rap. They are known for their epic length, their mind numbing stop-and-start rhythm and their all-around tedium. But in reality, it’s usually just actors who trade these disparaging remarks about the infamous tech rehearsal. The play’s design team on the other hand, probably finds the experience to be somewhat of a coming out party. The carefully crafted lighting, sound, costumes and set are all unveiled in one fell swoop, and all these elements must then wrestle with each other (and the actors) until the rocky tech smoothes out into a fluid piece of theatre. The day can feel a little like Goldilocks and Three Bears: this lighting is too bright, this lighting is too dark, but this lighting is juuuuuussst right. The truth is, tech is not for the actors at all, it’s for the designers: to nail sound cues, tweak transitions, locate missing props and set the lighting just so. And complain as they might, no actor would dare forfeit these wearisome tech hours. Long as they are, it’s the technical elements that ultimately round out the world of the play, allowing the audience to lose themselves in a theatrical, yet believable world.
Tech for First Look is a whirlwind process: the cast, crew and design team arrive in the Garage Theatre at 11am and don’t leave until 9pm in the evening. The idea is to tech the whole show in that concentrated time frame – an arduous task for even the most experienced stage mangers.
The first play to tech this week was Keith Huff’s Pursued by Happiness, directed by Tim Hopper. Given the plays rotate in rep, the three First Look sets must be easily compatible, using the same basic layout (which this year means a wooden floor with two white doors). For Pursued by Happiness, which takes place in a conference room, an atrium, a restaurant, two different living rooms and a moving car – sparse but precise set design was the name of the game. Small details suggested atmosphere - the tiki cups on the restaurant table for example, told us these characters were not dining at Gibson’s. Debbie Baer’s costumes also communicated something very specific about the two main characters, as they are both clad in warm earth tones that coordinate ever so slightly. Though the audience might not be conscience of it, these characters, at least visually, seem to really fit. That is no accident.
The second play up to bat was Jason Wells‘ Perfect Mendacity, directed by David Cromer. While the play doesn’t bounce around to as many locations as Pursued by Happiness, it is probably the most technically challenging play of the bunch. Fight choreography with sharp objects and a complex polygraph machine slowed down the tech of Perfect Mendacity toward the end of the day, but that didn’t seem to phase veteran director Cromer. He knew he had four hours of tech rehearsal remaining, if need be, on the day his show opens. Talk about cutting it close.
Fair Use, written by Sarah Gubbins and directed by Meredith McDonough, was the last play to reveal its technical muscle. Despite the crunch for time, their day appeared to be smooth sailing: Fair Use ran through the whole show and even had time to do a “cue-to-cue” at end of day (when the designers get to run through the transitions without stopping for the actors to, well, act). The fact that the action of Fair Use unfolds in a single locale (a law office) probably accounts for the speedy tech-in. The lighting was the main technical hurdle of the day, as the “sun” needs to brighten and dim through the law firm’s blinds as time passes. “If only I could have a sign on my back that reads ‘four hours later…’” joked actress Kelli Simpkins. Alas, if only it were that simple.
Now that First Look Rep is in full swing, it’s easy to forget the technical tedium that went into polishing these plays. The scene transitions are now smooth, the sound cues are on point and the lights turn on and off when they are supposed to. But this is all fruit of the dreaded tech rehearsal, during which the design team toiled away in hopes of making the world of the play as consistent and dynamic as possible. Without it the First Look plays would still be relying on their stage mangers to say “ring ring” when a phone goes off and “lights down” at end of show. And what kind of first look is that?