Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1992 - 29

the stage. Then the architect, following
Mr. Barbour's advice, created a
wraparound plaster cyclorama in the
form of a quarter of a sphere which he
placed on the stage with its downstage
bottom edge three feet, six inches from
the plaster line. He also specified a hand
winch-operated light bridge just upstage
of the act curtain. The proscenium opening was about 26 feet in width with the
curtain open. Access to the stage was over
the footlights or through doors down
right and left measuring three feet in
width by seven feet, three and five
eighths inches in height. I shall never forget those dimensions. It was a great hall
for chamber music.

or five years, I designed and
built four productions a year
and made that tiny stage work.
You get used to the small number of square feet at your disposal by accepting them as a given. I
don't have much to say about the lighting
positions except that the architect had
never paid any arrention to them. Many
times I wondered what might have happened if he had talked to Stanley
McCandless instead of Phillip Barbour.
The switchboard in the hall was something else! A couple of years before I
arrived, the university had, at the strong
urging of Bob Kase, department chairman, done something about the old resistance board installed in 1929. They purchased from George Izenour and his
electro-mechanical lab at Yale the fourth
production model of his ten-preset,
remote control, thyratron dimmer
boards. The board was simple and fun to
operate. In addition to the manual master and preset crossfader, there was a
timer-fader for those long sunsets or
moonrises. nfortunately, it had never
worked very well and you could have a
devil of a time keeping the dimmers
curves constant. It could be nerve wracking when you were lighting a show
remembering that dimmer 23 really
didn't give you anything at all until the
controller hit four and one half. Because
of the board's quirky behavior, George
Izenour visi ted on several occasions to set
th ings righ t. We became good friends
and I know he tried to make a true
believer out of me. I admire his vision
and his passion for making the technological leap out of the past, but at the
same time I want all of that electromechanical stuff to behave itself and let
me and my collaborators get on with the
most important thing: making a good
production without technical distractIons.

Five years at UD and other challenges
beckoned. The first priority was a doctorate if academe was to fully embrace
me. So back to Cleveland and a threeyear recharge working and studying wi th
Hank Kurth again, this time as his TO
for two years. We did some wonderful
things with copper pipe for Mlllder in the
Cathedral and I managed to harness an
MFA as a preface to the Ph.D.
After three years, an initial membership in USITT, and a dissertation on theatre architecture and planning, it was off
to SU Y Buffalo a year after the small,
urban University of Buffalo had merged
with the State of ew York system. The
year I was hired as designer/TO/director
of theatre, the College of Arts and
Science hired 150 new faculty members!
Yes, sports fans, those were the days! But,
once again, I had to face a very low tech
stage. Most of the time, it was the music
department's performance space in a
bomb shelter modern structure: basically
250 seats facing an end stage platform
with double doors up right and left large
enough to admit a grand piano and all
surrounded by bare, bare, reinforced concrete walls.
Ah, I said to myself, every good
designer needs fresh challenges, and I did
some rather inreresting productions in
the next three years ranging from The
Lady's Not for Burning through The
Firebugs to The Birthday Party and The
Balcony The city was home to a number
of good arts institutions and we did our
damndest to hold up our end.

fter those three years, a new
campus and new theatre(s)
seemed farther away than
when I had been hired. Bob
Kase, my former chair at
Delaware, had decided to pass his administrative burden on to another and was I
inrerested in the job? In the six years I
had been away they had remodeled the
stage in Mitchell Hall. Gone was that
plaster obscenity and the organ. They
had added a shop wing off right and an
office wing off left plus a cockamamie
counrerweight system where the organ
pipes had lived. One had to see it to
believe it. The stage also conrained tWO
small auto show turntables and was six
inches higher than the off stage areas
because the turn tables were located and
purchased after the stage sub floor slab
had been poured. The turntables had 3/4
ply surfaces and some of the plywood
had those football shaped voids. I'll never
forget the day when the front leg of our
resident 12-foot Steinway pierced the
deck and really wedged itself in.

I sat in the chairperson's position for
seven years and then turned it over to
younger and spryer minds. As I prepared
to step down I took on the editorship of
Theatre Design & Technology. It was
another challenge, for it forced me to
think about, and do, things which were
foreign to my production-oriented mentality. It took me tWO and one-half years
before Fred Wolf and Eddie Kook
stopped screaming at the appearance of
each new issue, bur I persevered. Both
joined me in raising our journal's standards. My only regret now is that I did
not have the computer technology available today. The time I could have saved ...

eing out of the chair was a
blessing. We traveled to
Bri tain one summer and
spent part of the next one
vacationing on Block Island,
RI. Lois and the two daughters-Susan
came along in 1954-found the island a
special place. By the end of the '70s, I
was designing two or three major productions a year and teaching the
advanced lighting class each spring. I
reserved the last third of the term for a
practicum in dance lighting. The Students and I collaborated on lighting the
annual dance performances which closed
out the university theatre season. I think
I raised some good lighting designers.
In the spring of 1985, after the final
dance performance, we packed up and
moved to Block Island as permanent,
retired, and environmenrally conscious
residenrs. It would be untruthful to say I
don't miss the theatre. I miss it terribly! I
have an almost constant dream in which
I'm on one of the many stages that were a
part of my past, trying to resolve some
production glitch or other. Somehow the
problem is fixed, the curtain goes up and
I wake up. I never see the show!
\X!hich brings me to the title and some
concluding thoughts about history, technology, and me. Looking back on it all, it
seems to me that I have been very lucky.
First, I was very fortunate to study with
Hank Kurth, Hans Sondheimer, and others who never let theatre technology, no
marrer how exotic, rule the way they did
things. They always made do with what
they had and their own creative juices.
By circumstance and timing I have also
had to work most of my career on stages
that presented more technical problems
than their "technology" solved. As I've
said, "You cope!" You learn to trip the
black and blue scrims, which are both on
the same pipe batten because you need all
the others for other things, when you
want to use the white one. You explain
TD&T

1992 SUMMER

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1992