Blocking Notes: Tech Week

Tech week can be a bitter sweet portion of the production process. Many associate it with impending disaster and late stressful nights. I've been fairly lucky with my tech weeks, and this one is no exception, though not without it's hiccups. We only have our dress rehearsal this evening and then we will have survived the infamous tech week.

Andrea as "Laura" with her favourite piece
from her menagerie.

Some of the highlights of the tech week for Glass Menagerie include:

A love seat that my stage manager and I carried up the stairs from the basement of the Staircase, and then after turning it pretty much every way possible realized it would not fit through the wings of the space, so we had to carry it outside and bring it up through the loading door. Not a big deal.
Realizing that the original lamp I wanted to hang in the 'dining room' has a European plug so I took the lamp from my mother's kitchen to use.
Moving a ladder inch by inch, as Danielle my stage manager, fed and flung extension cords over dusty poles in the ceiling. She also used a large blue plastic crayon somehow to help this process along.
I broke the unicorn. The delicate, fragile unicorn that lost it's tail during shipping. The unicorn that has been very carefully wrapped in about three scarves, and bubble wrap and carried in a box. The one that needs to seem like the horn is broken off in the show, but isn't and doesn't get broken for our three week run. I broke the horn off the unicorn on Tuesday.
"Tom" couldn't be at the first rehearsal in the space, so my boyfriend was kind enough to sit in the dark with me and read in his lines from a script he's never read. Did I mention this was in the dark?

However, tech week has been successful and enjoyable. I always love getting in the theatre and seeing all the pieces you've been working on for two months come together. The actors' performances reach another level when you add costumes, lights, music etc. It's difficult to explain what it's like to see all these elements come together in a way that you envisioned from the start, but somehow it always looks different in the end than it did in your head. Usually better. And that's how it is with this show. Somehow, with a tiny stage, eight or nine lights, and a unicorn that was once a reindeer, the show looks great. The actors have worked so hard and humoured me by somehow making sense of the ridiculous notes I give, and through my muddled way of explaining things, they have created beautiful and real characters in this show. They are what makes this production worth seeing.