The Tartan

This piece is dedicated to the design and production major in the School of Drama, without whom this could not have been attempted, much less written.

You wouldn’t think there’s much similarity between the dusty backstages of a theater and the recesses of a ship. One is designed to survive the harsh weathers and the strange tossings and turnings of the first and greatest expanse humanity ever explored, and the other is a place to tell a story with lights and music and whatever else it takes. Yet it is amongst the sailors that theaters found their first stagehands.

If you’ve ever poked around those dusty backstages, you’d see the remnants of sailors past everywhere you looked. 

It’s in the rigging, the knots, and the ways that technicians keep the parts of a set working. Something goes up, a counterweight goes down, and somewhere off where a sailor intends to find himself, someone’s screaming that the knot isn’t the same one they learned from Peg Leg Cabot in 1673.

To some extent, theater is an industry that inherited the sailor’s penchant for, well, too much. 

There are the obvious parts, those I’ve spoken to, but there are the bits that remain less obvious. Sailors are a superstitious bunch — I’ve yet to see someone get more out of the entrails of an albatross who does not consider their primary career to be supernatural — but those tendencies seem to follow where the sailors went. There are plays whose names you don’t say on a stage, there are little traditions and ways you’re supposed to do something. 

There’s a ghost light that you leave on at night, when wind howls, lightning flashes, and Pittsburgh does its best to drown the city and the stage itself. There’s an offering to the ghosts that haunt the halls and holes of a stage, an offering to the spirits of theater past. We offer light, and in exchange, we ask for your blessing.

“A Little Night Music,” presented by students in the School of Drama, opens with the emergence of spirits from a trap door that is operated by one student, setting up the moving parts so that from below stage, through a locked case almost like a Pandora’s box, the spirits of something past escape.

It’s the Quintet. They’re the chorus of this show, the storytelling backbone, a dramatic — or more correctly, farcical — narrator whom we accompany.

They’re part of the opening acts to one of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. Just saying “one of” does him a disservice. Sondheim is an integral part of musical theater and will stand the test of time. His literary masterpieces are shown in high schools and acting group performances across the country.

That is to say, a lot of people have done “A Little Night Music,” and the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama took a crack at it this semester.

I cannot make this a review. I’m also, if I’m completely honest, not interested in the aspects that are presented to the public. There were incredible musical talents in the performance, but that’s not what I’m here to discuss. We all know about the musical theater majors and how selective the program is. 

What I want to talk about is the technicians who ran the whole thing, top to bottom. The descendants of sailors past, no longer exploring raging waters and unpleasant skies, now left to the dim and dreary hallways of the Purnell Center for the Arts.

I am in a bit of a precarious position, in that case. “A Little Night Music” is the second “big production” the School of Drama does. 

The first, “Passage,” is meant for the acting program, and is a traditional play. It doesn’t need you to sing, dance, or do anything of the sort, and it is something I wrote about already. This is the musical. The designers and technicians that make up the design and production program are split between the two shows.

This leads me to Jess Williams, Lighting Manager. Well, I don’t think her legal name includes Lighting Manager, but I was in fact, told about her as Jess Williams, Lighting Manager, so that is how I’ll introduce her to you.

At the onset, her job is quite simple: Somewhere out there is a lighting designer, and if one prods a lighting designer with enough notes about a play, they’ll produce a plot of a design.

And it is Jess’s job to make the design a reality.

Simple enough, right? 

Here’s the thing: this isn’t a two-way street. The lighting designer, in their infinite wisdom, returns to the turtle shell after designing. Then, barring financial or physical inability, the lighting manager, a production technology major, must implement all the designs on their own. 

By the way, there are only two production technology majors. Two. So next time you wish there were more people in your major, remember that the School of Drama exists and that they think single-digit enrollment is “higher than expected.”

Back to “A Little Night Music.” Have you ever heard the phrase “a comedy of errors”? It originates from the title of a Shakespeare play, and it relies on misunderstandings to tell a compelling story — namely that everyone involved is an idiot and there’s no saving them. Hilarious.

“A Little Night Music” is not just a comedy of errors, it’s more of a bunch of errors that keep spiraling and spiraling and expanding until it’s infeasible for the universe of the story itself to contain them. 

It’s a farce that refuses to let you take it seriously for more than a minute, whether by setting up a strange heir with his stepmother (Henrik and Ann do make a cute couple, though), or by managing to have half the story kick-started by a man screaming someone else’s name in bed.

There are so many moving parts that when a friend of mine tried to explain the plot to me, I pulled out a notebook, a pen, and I still don’t think I fully understand what happened. I have a few notes I’m glancing at as I write this, and the phrases “incest!!” and “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” is about all I can decipher.

But with so many moving parts, it’s only fitting that the production itself was its own special subsection of hell. Every moving part has to be lit, wired, cabled, set up, and controlled and if a single thing goes wrong — poof, there’s a small explosion and a new landmark for campus.

Once again, this falls on the lighting manager. 

If a piece is on wheels, it must move without the wiring tangling, or, if possible, with the wiring removed. Various items will have lights attached in strategic locations to make them more visible by the audience. Other pieces, flown in from riggings that make me scared to look up as I walk on stage and controlled by what I can only assume are frantic first-years running on caffeine, have their own lighting intricacies. 

We can’t easily pretend there’s a sky outside, so we’ve got to put some lighting behind a window to represent it. And that window? Now that we’ve taken a lighting box and strapped some decorations to it, we better make sure it’s wired up, in the right spot, and fully rigged to make sure it comes down when we want it and not on the head of Musical Theatre Major #6 before she goes off on a grand tour on Broadway.

So, yeah, there’s quite a bit going into the musical. This one, apparently, was upped in magnitude, with people coming in from outside to design or direct. It gives the project a sense of scale — for the seniors, this is their capstone. This is the project that goes out in the world and is recognized. 

It absolutely delivers, because the lighting effects and the work that lighting manager Jess Williams, Lighting Manager put in, were absolutely amazing. 

“A Little Night Music” is a play obsessed with remembering. There are the flashy moments, the innumerable sex scenes that are somehow instrumental to the plot (who knew carnal pleasures could be so … literary?) There are the great reveals and the even greater songs, but “A Little Night Music” keeps asking us to remember something, anything. Remember when? Remember how? Remember me?

It’s not hard, in the hubbub of a musical, to focus too much on the product on stage. It’s very easy, in fact, to think about the actors and the music and the pit, because those are the things we’re geared to think about. There is a person, on stage, belting a note, and our minds are drawn to that.

It’s another matter entirely to forget about the hours and hours and hours put into productions from the technicians. Jess estimated she put in 35 to 40 hours a week on this project since mid-February. 

The designers have had this since at the very least fall of last year, if not dealing with work in the previous spring. Every single prop, costume, set, backdrop, cog in the wheel is run over and over again, just to make sure it all works. Lights are run and checked and rechecked, from a booth that overlooks a theater and age old machines that whimper and whine and boxes that make you look like a telephone operator from a bygone era. It all runs through technicians, and without them, there wouldn’t be a play. There’d be a bunch of people, in a dark theater with nothing to look at and no decorations, singing.

So remember the technician. Remember the sailors. And remember “A Little Night Music” the next time you scream your ex’s name in bed — it was a reference, I swear.