Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1978 - 23

it would fall down if no one was on it. They had worked out a
system to brace it, but one time the stage crew forgot the
change. They had been warned, but they didn't come up. The
people that did come up ran around to do the scene change,
but they couldn't set the braces, so they had to stay onstage.
They had to lay on the floor behind it and hold it down. They
were very angry-you heard some very loud Italian words
after that." Eventually, the train station had to be discarded.
Venice was the last city it was used in, and the company left
the entire piece in Europe.
The second stop on the tour was Belgrade. where they
were booked in a theatre that was entirely too small for the
show, and a great deal of the scenery could not be used at all.
Only half of the set for the trial scene, for instance. would fit
onstage. There was no fly space, either, so all of the drops
had to be rolled. "When a drop had to be changed," says
Beverly Emmons, "the stage hands would all go solemnly out
onto the stage, and the pipe with the drop rolled up on it came
in. They'd untie it and take it up so everybody could look at it
for a while. Then the stage hands came back out and solemnly bundled it up again and took it out. It was the only way
to do it. I'm sure the people in Yugoslavia thought that was the
way it was supposed to be."
There were similar problems everywhere. The climax of the
first train scene came when a strip of light appeared at the top
of the backdrop and descended slowly unitl it stretched all
the way to the floor. "That was about forty feet long," recalls
Kurt Munkacsi, who designed the sound system. "It was a
wooden box with a plexiglass front and fl uorescent tubes
inside of it, that just came down behind the drop. Opening
night in Brussels, it fell. Somehow the rope that was holding it
onto the pipe got caught on a piece of metal or something.
We were in the pit, and the rod of light started coming down,

and we heard this huge crash onstage and the rod of light
goes out. We all just looked at each other in the pit, and we
just started laughing!"
In Paris, the theatre was set up in such a way that to get
from the stage to the pit you had to go down one flight of
stairs and then back up two flights. There were times when
the performers had to do a scene onstage and the very next
scene in the pit. "The dancers would finish this dance, and
then they'd have to be in the pit immediately afterwards."
recalls Munkacsi, "They'd go off and change costumes and
they'd all get to the pit just panting and staggering in and have
to sing this a capello kneeplay." That theatre also had only a
few feet of wing space on either side, but there were several
large flats that had to be moved on and off from the wings.
"You heard all this banging and crashing and saw the crew
guys dragging a piece of scenery around the bend."
Julia Gillett. the stage manager, directed the handling of
the scenery backstage. "We were literally fighting with it all
the way," she recalls. "We used to say that we'd begin the
show with the score zero to zero, and by the end of the show,
usually, the scenery won." Among her biggest problems was
trying to deal with the foreign crews, for which she had to pick
up as much of their languages as possible. "It's funny. you
learn the adverbs. You learn 'up.' 'down,' 'over,' 'above,' 'below'-then you learn the cue verbs. The other thing you have
to learn is qualitative adverbs-the most important is 'gently.'
and the second most important might be 'faster.' " In addition
to learning their languages, she sometimes had to teach them
her systems. In Belgrade, for instance, the lighting director
was accustomed to running the lights from a small box, like a
prompter's box, right on the stage. "He would just run lights
according to what was happening onstage. He would not have
cues. Well, we had to close his box because we needed the

Act I, Scene 1: Vertical bar 01 light descending.

USITT/Spring, 1978

Photo: Ted Shank

Theatre Design & Technology

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