There’s a lot of drama surrounding the school show, every year without fail it’s there. This year it came in buckets, lots of buckets.

While I could type out the intricacies of the past and present of my school’s annual plays, and the politics of the people that run and reside within them, I won’t. Simply because I would be here to long. (In fact I think I would need more than a hand full of diagrams as well.) What I want to talk about today is something somebody said to me about the crew, the technical crew. We the techies run the lights, the audio, and anything else that fits within our realm. We construct the set, we rent all the various things we need, and we sit proudly in our booth and work like dogs. We are not always acknowledged, but we’re always last at the set strike.

Today I was told that we don’t really care about the show, that is, we’re not “really” part of the show. We are away from it, we parachute in on the last 2 weeks and do our work and walk away from it. I was told that we make mistakes because we don’t know the show, because we aren’t around. This is simply not true.
Techies work damn hard for the school show every year. In the 2 weeks before the production we spend more time in the theatre than we do in class, or at home. We build wonderful sets, we paint them, we light them, and we make sure you don’t fall off of them. We make sure the actors are heard, and we make sure they can take a breath when we close the curtain. We do not simply parachute in, we take a damn nosedive in. Your actors breathed the show for 3 months, we learn the show in 2 weeks.

What they fail to understand is that what we do is work, and it is hard. We are in high school, the skills we learned were passed on to us by students who have moved on. The skills you want us to have are learned after a few years in post-secondary, studying and breathing technical knowledge. We pick up these skills and do them to the best of our abilities while trying to learn 8 other subjects, while going out with our friends, while doing homework, while doing your show, while freaking out in typical teenage fashion. We do not simply press buttons!

Why do we do this? Why do we jump into a show two weeks before it opens? This is a misconception, because while you are acting we are planning. We figure out what you want the set to be, we go and we rent the perfect lights to go with your show. We rent microphones and we hone our skills because while you are acting we are still working on other things for the school. We work, and we think, and when your actors are ready, we come in. We cannot work until they are ready. We cannot rehearse our tech until we have something to light! Until we have a full show! Until we have actors belting their lines into our microphones. If you cannot have them doing full rehearsals by the time you want them to, that is not our fault.

Tech week is the week before a show, it is when we work our magic. We do not leave the theatre and we work ourselves ragged. We hang lights, we finish your set, we set up our microphones. With the school’s history we only have about 3 days to hone the technical aspects of the show. There is one crazy full day of trying to set every lighting cue, for every scene. We have to stop because the director is not happy with how somebody entered the scene. We wait, the scene restarts, and we set the cue again. Then you’re not happy with it, we change it. At the same time the poor audio people are trying to make microphone levels, but the actors don’t want to project properly. They’re trying to figure out when exactly you want that 3 second sound effect that starts off really quiet, for some reason. Meanwhile a stage manager is trying to call the show, take notes, and write down every single lighting cue, audio cue, orchestra cue, curtain cue, and anything else the director’s heart contents. Then a microphone is in the wrong place, we run and change it. A light just tilted down accidentally, we run and fix it. We have to re-tape, but we can’t do it during the rehearsal, so we stay when everybody leaves.

Then we have a dress rehearsal. This is the first time all the lighting and sound cues are in order, it’s completely hectic. The poor stage manager is trying to call cues they don’t really remember because they’re just damn tired. The audio guys don’t quite know their levels, and the lighting designer just found a blackout in a place there definitely shouldn’t be a blackout. Also, the director isn’t happy, again, so the dress rehearsal stops 6 times. A microphone cable snaps, we have to replace the entire thing, again. We stay after the rehearsal, again.
It’s the day before the show. The stage manager is pumped up on coffee, their cue book is something only they can read, but they’re completely sure they can run the show. But how can they run the show when our clear-com system doesn’t work? The techies come early and fix it, but nobody knows what we’re talking about anyway. Okay, here we go, it’s the last dress rehearsal. The costumes are done, the props are done, everything is set up! We’re going to do this without any stops! Okay! So here we go, the stage manger starts calling the show. They sit up in the booth with the techies, the techies are following the script, and they’re following their cues. But ow, that microphone was loud, and that light was a little late, and the stage manager kind of forgot a few cues. But hey, we did it. We got through a rehearsal. Now we can go… No, no we’re staying late to fix one more light, because it will bug us and we want the show to be perfect.

We go home, we dream of the show, we look at our cues. The week of the show goes by, we make a few mistakes because life just happens. Mistakes happen. We’re not professionals, but we try our hardest. On the last night we’re the happiest people in the world, we know our cues by heart now, and we perform our own show in the booth, because we know every single fucking line. We know every single song, and we make sure you can hear us singing it. When everybody claps at the end, we pretend it’s for us, but we know it’s for those on the stage. It’s okay, we know how hard we worked. Well, we’re not done yet, we have to strike the set the next day. So we do, and we clean up all our cables, we fix our lights, and we’re sweeping up long after everybody else has gone home.

And what do we do on Monday? We get right back in the theatre to run an assembly for the school.

Please don’t look me in the face and tell me we don’t care, or that we’re not part of the show. We are not the old lighting crew you are thinking of. We are damn hard workers, and we love the school show. But we’re not professionals, and we make mistakes. Why can you only remember us for our mistakes, and not our achievements?

I had an upsetting day with somebody who should know all of this. The show goes on and I will be working on it because I love my school, and our school shows are awesome. I’m going to meet people like this in the future, but I just have to learn how to work around this complete and utter bullshit. What’s important is that I know that techies work hard, because they do.

The show goes on! And the only reason it does is because we’re the ones pulling the strings behind the curtains. Remember, without us you perform on dark stage, where nobody can hear or see you, you’re not in costume, you don’t have a set, and you’re not even performing for an audience.

When it’s all done and over, I’m sure you’ll hear about it, and that’s all for now.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.