The culmination of Chekhov Lizardbrain arrived in New York City this week. It's our final stop (excursion? It was a non-continuous tour), and our highest-stakes. And the most challenging.
You'd think that New York theaters would be well-equipped and hospitable. Well, the Broadway ones probably are, but they're union houses and for-profit businesses. There are other types of theaters in New York. And those are the ones we inhabit. 'We' being the non-profit, art-oriented companies, less focused on mass entertainment and more focused on message and artistic and intellectual content.
And those theaters are not easy to work in.
Our venue was a converted public school, with crumbling 13' ceilings and black columns dispersed throughout the space.
And non-profit theater is like the most stubborn mountain climber, persevering through steep and slick, making the completion of even the most difficult tasks inevitable.
I broke my wrist loading the truck, as we prepped to drive the set up to New York City. Luckily, I had the 6 hours to spare to sit in the emergency room, and was able to spend a quiet evening in the ER hallway, reading a book.
After a 5am wake-up, we were off to New York in the company van and the rented box truck. A smooth drive up there started the day of load-in, with 4 truck loads of rental equipment meeting us at the venue. We spent the first 8 hours building a theater inside the venue, installing audience risers, constructing a monstrous cage of aluminum truss to support the set's rigging, building our own lighting positions and putting up walls to make a backstage and audience area. Finally, after a regular work day's worth of work, we were able to start loading in our show.
A week of 16-hour days followed, and our company succeeding in doing the seemingly-insurmountable: we opened on Thursday to a group of international presenters shopping for productions to sponsor and companies to commission.
The story sounds exotic and mundane at the same time. Technical theater is a mystery of magic-making to the layperson, and a grueling but much-loved process for the participants. Every show is fraught with problems. Every show is exhausting. Some more so than others, but even the smoothest process is impossible at some split-second. And the number one rule of theater is that it always happens. Every process is possible.
Eventually, the ground stops rising and there's no more mountain. We can keep climbing for longer than the obstacles in front of us keep arising.
James Sugg in Pig Iron Theater Company's Chekhov Lizardbrain
