Collections - 18. Chapter 18 -- KultureMix

KultureMix

No whining. Just the facts. Though they're only theater stories.

I took the job at the university for two reasons: On their website, the theater faculty looked good. And they offered to pay me seventy grand.

At my interview, I was asked what was most important to me. I said, "Communication." At orientation, the other new teachers were amazed I'd gotten a job there on my first shot. Many of them had been teaching part-time for ten or fifteen years. They asked what department I was in. I said, "Theater." They said, "Oh."

I quickly discovered the theater department couldn't have had a worse reputation. "I've been here since '74," a music prof. told me, "and it was a mess then." For nearly two dozen-years, the department had been ruled by a reportedly-wicked chairman who, unfortunately for me, was also their scene designer. Which explained why, at the first faculty meeting, I was hit with a four-page, single-spaced list of what I could and could not do.

Among other things, I was expected to clean the dressing room johns. Honest. Plus, I was supposed to work thirteen seven-day weeks -- out of a sixteen-week semester. That broke down to my teaching five days a week, running the scene shop weekday afternoons, being there for each night of the four productions -- which ran two weekends each -- and coordinating a tech weekend before each production. And I had to baby-sit the Dance Company.

Also, the theater -- though it only seated three-hundred people -- was used for several dozen other university events. And I had to both fit them all into our busy schedule and baby-sit them.

The first theater department faculty meeting also turned out to be the last, though it seemed many of the other departments didn't have regular meetings. So said our dean. That's because almost half of the university faculty is part-time, as were six of our teachers. And the four who were full-time largely worked days, so couldn't coordinate with the six who worked nights.

A vampire theater department.

There were also four classified staff people, which gave us a third caste. Within this lowest group, there was one forty-hour-a-week guy, one twenty-hour-a-week guy, and two ten-hour-a-week guys.

Lotsa guys in this department, though there were also four women. And the only thing they all agreed on was the previous scene designer had been a dick.

"He never told us anything," one colleague confided. "No budgets, or schedules, or teaching assignments."

"He ran the place any way he wanted," another put in. "And you wouldn't believe the nuts he hired for the shop -- some of them lived out of their lockers. When they weren't on the street."

"And there was no organization."

So you'd think everyone would have been delighted to have weekly production meetings.

"Oops, sorry, I can't be there that day. Is that all right?"

"You'll just have to manage without me."

"I know everything you're gonna talk about anyhow. I have a Ph.D. And I've been doing this for nineteen years."

We had one production meeting, with five faculty members present, including me. That broke down to three full-time folks and two part-timers. Plus, two of the four classified staff -- the forty and a ten.

It was a rout. I was jumped on for not wanting to have tech weekends, though I explained I'd always been successful with Monday-through-Thursday tech nights. Plus, the shows simply weren't that complicated, and I was trying to cut my work schedule to merely nine seven-day weeks. Still, the biggest problem was that I had no students to work crews. Each class at the university was supposed to have a minimum of twenty students, but my daytime tech class only had nine, and my nighttime section three. And nearly all the students had jobs, most full-time. So almost no one had fifty-six hours, spread over two weeks and three weekends, to work a show. Let alone repeat that for five productions. All for a three-credit course.

When I told the faculty this, they replied, "The previous designer did it." (Actually, they called him by name, which they fairly spit out. But I'm trying to keep names out of this.)

I reminded them that the previous designer had grossly overworked his staff -- the forty-, twenty-, and ten-hour guys. (The forty-hour guy was the lighting designer. The twenty, the shop foreman. The ten, the sound designer. The other ten was one of two costume designers, the second being part-time faculty because he had a Ph.D.)

Still with me? It hasn't started getting complicated.

The first production was Ibsen's Ghosts, done in a month's time. But it had a good director, and we collaborated well. The costumes were okay: some were built; most were rented. The sound designer was weak -- the director and I had to chase down music, and the sound guy never even read the script. The night before first tech, he asked the director, "Can you tell me, in ten words, what this play's about?" The lighting designer was also a disappointment, somewhat less than inspired -- though he was a really nice guy. And I'd designed a set that should have been a lighting designer's playground.

Still, my portfolio pictures looked fine. After Photoshop.

The second production was KultureMix, the eighth annual version, and I was all for it. The university had almost forty-thousand students, and very few of them could be considered traditionally white. Because of this, at one point I joked to the department chair that next year's season should have no plays written before 1990, with no parts for white folk. She wasn't amused.

KultureMix also had a month's rehearsal and started into production with fifteen scripts. Eight were ten-minute monologues. Four were fifteen-minute plays. Two were short stories, waiting to be adapted. The last was a two-hour comedy.

You do the math. We had, at least, Long Day's Journey Into Night.

"Oh, I always cut things," grinned the director, and she wasn't lying. At our next production meeting, one week later -- just the director and me, no one else could make it -- half the original scripts were gone. But there were seven new ones.

"Kind of hard to design," I smiled. "We open in three weeks."

"And I'm not sure I can cast all these," the director smiled back. Indeed, the next week, there were new scripts. Then, some old ones returned. Then disappeared again. Over the course of the month, we had nearly thirty scripts in play.

"When do you think they'll stabilize?" I asked, still heartily. "I'm kinda building scenery." Which is why the previous designer, for KultureMix I through VII, supplied mainly a bare stage.

"They never really stabilize," the lighting designer warned me. "She's been know to cut things opening night."

But bare stages depend on really good lighting. And when you have a lighting designer -- did I mention what a really nice guy he is? -- who can't tell gel from hair goop, that kind of puts you in a black hole.

Second tech, we finally settled on ten pieces. Third tech, one almost vanished -- to be replaced by a play that had been axed two weeks earlier. And the director was still recasting. "You know, you'd be really good in that part," I was suddenly told.

But we opened, without my local acting debut. And the few students who saw it -- we averaged a hundred a night -- loved it, which made me feel better. It's weird, but that same hundred-students-a-night probably saw Ghosts. The theater department teaches a thousand students a semester, but none can be required to see the productions -- because students can't be required to attend anything that costs money.

"Can't we comp them?" I asked. "A free audience is better than none."

"If we comped them," I was told, "it would kill our ticket sales."

The third production was called Three Cubed -- nine plays, by nine playwrights, directed by nine different student directors.

Run!

It gets worse: when I added up the running times of these, we were talking Long Day's Journey Into Next Week. And, in fact, one of the cuttings was from Long Day's Journey.

Also, we were actually doing ten plays, but the posters had already been printed. It seems one young actor hadn't been cast, and the department chair -- a nurturing mother who was also coordinating this extravaganza -- had promised him a decent role. So she decided to direct him in a piece of O'Neill.

"It won't take anything," she assured me. "Just a table and chair. And a whisky bottle and glass. And a book. And some cigarettes. And can you get me..."

At one point, I was thinking of changing the title to Eleven -- it had a better ring. I planned to direct one of my carpenters in a cutting from Elephant Man. The lights would come up. He'd say, "I am not an animal." Blackout.

Later, as I began to realize how disorganized the whole project was -- the supposed coordinator had never seen any of the rehearsals and was having trouble even finding places for all the directors to work -- we changed my piece to a cutting from True West. The lights would come up. My carpenter would kick the shit out of a toaster. Blackout.

Finally, taking into account the hysterically dysfunctional prop team who'd manned the open changes for KultureMix -- and were being bribed to do the same for Cubed (one of them was scrawnily hyperactive, the other heavily molasses) -- we settled on a cutting from American Buffalo. For twenty minutes, these two demi-pros would load the stage with every piece of furniture and bric-a-brac we had in prop storage. The lights would come up. My carpenter would yell Fuck! Blackout. Then for another twenty minutes, the pros would unload the stage.

As it happened, the one who yelled Fuck! was me -- well, technically, I avoided profanity. But even before we started tech rehearsals, the plays had been split into two evenings: one group of five would play Friday nights; the other five, Saturdays. That meant each group would get only two tech rehearsals. (Yeah, yeah, this would have been a great time to break my rule and schedule a tech weekend. But none of the plays was ready for even a Sunday evening tech, and my tiny crew wasn't available anyway.)

There was another problem: Monday afternoon, the department chair -- the supposed coordinator -- told me she wouldn't be at either of the first two techs -- because she had to teach those nights. Well, I had two evening classes as well, but my students were assigned to come and watch rehearsals (what education?). It also turned out the department chair still hadn't seen most of the plays, so after an impossibly long rehearsal that ended at midnight, I got to tell her answering machine how awful they were. For example, the expected 20-minute cutting from David Henry Hwang's F.O.B. ran almost two hours.

The second night, the department chair nicely canceled her class just to be there. But, trying steadily to help -- as the lighting designer and I set light cues and levels for the first time with inexperienced, undecided directors -- her unrelenting, off-the-wall suggestions finally pushed me over the edge.

"JUST LET ME DO MY JOB!" at one point I howled.

"She doesn't understand how tech works," I was told way-too-late afterward to save myself. "She thinks you call, ‘Cue one,' the first time, it works perfectly without preparation, then you call, ‘Cue two.' She understands that actors need a month to rehearse, but thinks tech happens spontaneously." After two hours of spasmodic, humiliating, shouting, alternating with my calmly trying to tech five shows, I turned to my amazingly-still-nice lighting designer and said, "Either I'm quitting in the morning, or I'm filing a complaint against her." Five minutes later, I left a message on the dean's voice mail saying, "I'm through."

I've never been so unnecessarily pissed off for so long in my life. My pulse reached one-thirty sometime near nine o'clock and jammed there till after eleven. By eleven-thirty, we still hadn't reached the last, meandering play -- an unfocused, new script. Then, the actors rebelled. The department chair had schedule all twenty of them to come in at six, then just hang out.

The next morning, I formally resigned to the dean, saying once I'd gone off a cliff, I couldn't go back -- I was useless to the students. He, being a former director, said, "Well, you know theater people. They yell, but it doesn't mean anything." I said, "I've done all the yelling I plan to do in my life." Still, after much tense discussion among the dean, the department chair, and me, a compromise was reached, suggested by one of the part-time folks who hadn't even been in the meeting. "Just walk away," she suggested. "I'm a mom. I know. Sometimes you just need to do that."

"I did walk away," I said. "I quit."

"But that only hurts the rest of us. You're doing good things for the department. We all want to work with you. Just walk away from this show and do the others."

"I can't do that."

"Why?"

The only answer was "Because," which wasn't an answer. "Who's going to finish?" I asked instead.

"That's not your problem. Let them figure it out."

They did -- they being the dean and the department chair. The department chair unhappily took over the production. Wednesday night, I hung out in my office, finishing a couple props and offering friendly, surreptitious advice. Thursday night, I was doing the same thing when the lights went out.

Big lightning storm. Trees down. No power. Which was okay, since the sound designer -- the one who, by then, hadn't read over forty scripts -- had been home Monday night trying to buck the flu. Tuesday night, he was still recovering. Wednesday, he was there and gropingly-prepared. Thursday, he was saved by Nature.

Friday night, part one opened with a tech-rehearsal-and-a-half. Saturday, parts of evening two opened with no tech rehearsal at all. Sunday of the second weekend, they ran all ten plays in a five-hour marathon.

No one finished.

I didn't care. I wasn't around. The Monday after, we quickly struck the set so Dance Company could start tech rehearsals late that afternoon. The dance show also had ten pieces, but merely by eight choreographers. The best piece was really good. The worst was fifty-clods tap dancing. In between, there were cheerleaders.

There was also one piece rehearsed -- a swing dance featuring four couples -- in which none of the women showed. It was Parents Without Partners.

During Monday night's rehearsal, my evening tech class watched -- again, because I had to teach that night. (I also taught for three hours Wednesday nights: whoever scheduled things clearly didn't think the tech director might actually have to be at tech rehearsals.) Theoretically -- which is to say desperately -- I was showing my tech students how dance lighting differed from theater lighting. And once we ignored the huge shadow puppets cast by the side lights on the theater walls, we tried analyzing the rest. Back in the safety of the shop -- where we could talk without hurting the feelings of that really nice lighting designer -- one of my students asked, "How come this florescent light is more interesting than anything we just saw on stage?"

The last show of this long semester was a new musical based on the lives of what's described in the program as "America's most literary couple." It's called Scotty and Zelda -- not to be confused with any books, or movies, about this pair. Six years ago, the department also produced an opera about them, and there have been several plays. Why? Because the lobby of the theater contains an astonishing collection of Fitzgerald memorabilia.

It was donated to the university in 1941, for the planned library. Then WWII hit, all nonessential construction was halted, and everything went into storage. To save the collection from disintegrating in a damp warehouse, in 1960, elaborate, glassed-in bookcases were temporarily installed in the new theater. In 1995, when the college library was finally being built, the collection was supposed to move -- and there's a charming reading room at the base of a five-story atrium where the memorabilia belongs. But no insurance company would insure the move, and no one wanted to risk moving it without insurance, so they simply renamed the theater for Fitzgerald. The collection stayed, attracting bad scripts.

The musical Scotty and Zelda was only the most recent of these, and it's so bad, in so many ways, it's not even worth discussing. Still, the theater department doesn't choose the musicals -- it has an obligation to produce one each semester. Why? Because the music department has 3000 students, and that department pays the salaries of the theater's lighting and part-time sound designers, plus the half-time shop foreman. The trade-off is that no one ever cares if the musicals are good. They just need large choruses.

"They're really embarrassing," the dean told me soon after I started. "I can't even get my partner to go."

To make matters worse, the director -- who was actually the theater department's part-time faculty costume designer (because no one else wanted to direct the show) -- started our supposed collaboration by handing me a complete set design for the show. That, it turned out, was how, for nearly two-dozen years, the department's directors got the scenery they wanted from the previous designer. I didn't care: I didn't need another design credit, and certainly not for this, especially muddy, set.

"It looks just like what he used for West Side Story," the lighting designer laughed when he saw the rendering. "Without the chain link fence."

It also looked like the Chicago Opera's set for Summer and Smoke -- for some reason, the department had adapted that when it presented the Fitzgerald-inspired opera. And the fact that we still had some of those costumes available helped approve the new musical. Over the month's rehearsal, I tweaked the design some, and the director allowed more and more changes. So it finally ended up looking like Grover's Corners, in blue. Though since the director also insisted all the furniture be yellow, it had a certain Cub Scout feel. I never did talk him out of the huge, two-dimensional trelliswork he painted on bed sheets and hung as a false proscenium. But that was a tiny problem compared to others.

Mainly, Zelda couldn't sing. Or dance. Or act. And she didn't look like Zelda. And Scotty, even in a dilapidated tux, was a good-looking young man, not the fortyish sot he was shown to be in preshow slides. The actress's spotty soprano was supposed to be miked, then wasn't, because the actor had a terrific voice. And the music director didn't feel that Scotty's voice should come from Scotty, and Zelda's from speakers above the stage.

Not that it would have mattered: in reality, Scotty and Zelda might have been people who sang and danced all the time -- though after she started shock treatments that seems unlikely. But they never would have mouthed this dialogue or sung these songs. They made "Tea for Two" sound intellectual.

"Satire is what closes on Saturday night," George S. Kaufman said. But that's when this show opened. To crown that, the director blew his costume budget, by more than twice.

Unfortunately, while this was still unraveling, I was in negotiations with the next director, for spring semester's Gross Indecency. I'd been looking forward to this: the guy reportedly knew what he was doing, though someone else in the department -- who I'd learned to trust -- described him as, "A man whose compass never points true north." He'd also arrived with a fully-designed set, this one a color model. But he wasn't budging. "I have a Ph.D.," he reminded me. "And I'm also getting an M.F.A. in design."

"He'd better get it fast," the dean replied, on hearing this. "If he wants your job." After my meltdown on Cubed, I'd told the dean, and everyone else, that I was in no way interested in trying for a second year. Still, the dean forbade me from using this director's set, not that I wanted to build his Victorian dollhouse. "If you do nothing else," the dean insisted, "you have to teach this faculty how to work with a real designer."

Using what for incentive? The second show spring semester was a pair of weak Noel Coward one-acts, originally part of Tonight at 8:30. Our director had splintered them, then shuffled the pieces to form one long play. Usually, the one-acts were performed by a company of eight actors, but the director planned to use sixteen people. "To give everyone a chance," she smiled. In the same way, Indecency, written for as small a cast, was being done with thirty-two actors. "And I won't use any professionals," that director sniped. "Like in Ghosts."

Ah, department wars.

I was also having increasing problems with the lazy, passive/aggressive shop foreman and the blustery sound designer. "He always blows up like that," one of the directors told me. "It wouldn't break my heart if I never had to work with him again." The shop foreman constantly opened outside doors I wanted shut, claiming he needed fresh air. Though he seemed to resent the fact we'd scraped black paint off three huge skylights, letting natural light reach the shop in places it hadn't for twenty years. Meanwhile, the sound designer kept locking doors I wanted left open -- like our shared office. "I'm going to report you to the dean," he threatened, certain all our ragged tools would be stolen. In four months, I couldn't even give away a screwdriver.

"Why did you hire me?" I finally asked the dean.

"Because we thought you could control The Lost Boys," he replied -- that's what the directors all called the tech staff. (What the tech staff called the directors is only predictable.) "I tried," I explained. "I keep the shop foreman in a cage, the sound designer on a very short leash, and I let the lighting designer run free, but only in the theater."

Still, everyone was surprised when I announced I wasn't coming back second semester. Because the previous designer had quit mid-spring, I'd just been hired temporarily, so could easily slip my contract. It was a lousy thing to do, but I couldn't face another semester -- especially one ending with A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, an early 50's musical no one wanted to do. I like teaching students, but hate having to teach colleagues. One of my very bright, if very earnest, students told me, "You need to learn to work with fools." But why?

As it happens, I'm not only leaving this job, I'm also taking a break from theater. I'll miss design, and theater's still very important to me -- I have the same intensity for I did in high school. But as I've told a couple of friends recently, "I love collaboration. But fuck it."