The Director Sector

All of my life I’ve loved learning.  From the day I realized that letters on a page corresponded to words that we could hear and speak, I’ve loved reading.  I still remember the first book I ever read.  A Berenstein Bears book.

I’ve already relayed my terrifying and horrible public speaking experiences in a previous post, so I won’t rehash it now.  Despite my fear of speaking in front of people, I always enjoyed school.  I loved being around people and stuffing my brain with as much knowledge as I could.  Some classes weren’t as interesting as others (coughcalculuscough), but I still tried my best to know as much as I could.

My sophomore year of college, the summer after I switched from a Computer Science major to a Drama major, I got a job in North Carolina at the Roanoke Island Festival Park as a “historical interpreter.”  In other words, I was a living history re-enactor.  I spent all day dressed up in 16th century garb in 100+ degree heat, talking to visitors about the history of Roanoke Island and how life was back then.  Towards the end of the summer, I had grown comfortable with explaining esoteric topics to visitors and breaking down complex historical facts into entertaining stories.

When I got back to college, I continued developing my acting chops and performed on stage every chance I could get.  My best friends were techies, so I spent a lot of time talking to them about technical stuff and offering my actor point of view on some topics.  I learned a little bit of everything, from set design to lighting design, from prop-making to running the sound board.

Shortly after graduating, I went back to school to get my masters.  During the Fall term, there were two shows with auditions back-to-back.  Of course, I auditioned for both shows.  It turned out that each show had 6 and 12 people in it respectively.  The first show’s cast was almost entirely freshmen, with two upper classmen, while the second show only had three majors in the entire show — the rest were made up of non-majors who happened to be taking Acting that semester.  Professor McPsycho (you might remember her from “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait“) directed that one, and she almost always casts exclusively from her acting classes.

For two weeks after the casting notices went up, the actors of the department griped and complained.  Out of sixty performance majors, only 9 had been cast in a show that semester.  The other fifty-one didn’t have anything to do.  To be fair, maybe 15-20 of those 50 majors weren’t very active in the department.  Still, that left almost 30 actors without something to do!

Thomas Jefferson once said, “and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  This is precisely what happened.  Rather than fixing the problem, the actors chose to bitch and moan about not having a part.  Rather than putting something together themselves, they sat around and complained.

Well, I wasn’t going to do that.  I wanted to be active in the theatre and by the beard of Zeus, it was going to happen.  I went to the department head and asked for permission to produce a show.  He asked who was going to direct it.  I shrugged and said, “I’ll do it.”  He agreed and gave me instructions on putting together a proper proposal.  I spent the next three days in his personal library reading through dozens of plays.  I finally settled on a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984″.

I received final approval of the production in the third week of October, along with a notice that opening night would be November 30th.  That gave me about five and a half weeks to get together a cast, a crew, rehearse, build sets, etc.

Shit.

I got my best friend, a very experienced and knowledgeable techie, to be my stage manager, and I held auditions two days later.  The show could have been done with 8 people, with doubled up parts, but in the interest of student-actor experience, I cast each part individually. I was under a lot of pressure to get this done.  I had no budget, I had no help from the faculty, and I had a very limited time frame (2 hours rehearsal per night, tops).

When all was said and done, the show was a success.  The cast came together and gave stellar performances to sold out houses.

That’s when I discovered I’d been bitten by the directing bug.

I enjoyed the whole learning process, researching the script, putting the set pieces together, blocking, character development, making sure the lights were perfect, the sound cues spot on, advertising.  It was challenging beyond belief, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle.  And in the end, we came together as a team and delivered George Orwell’s 1984 to an audience that loved it.

I loved it, too.