Fall Semester

So Fall semester is coming to a close (eventually). It's been a pretty good semester though, as usual, busy.

Classes are going fine, it's the other stuff that's been occupying most of my time this semester. Both of my third year grad students did their thesis shows on the mainstage this fall. So I kept track of those projects, and my second year grad student's second season project, as well as directed a smaller project of my own.

For years (ten or more according to my colleagues who've been working here longer than I have) we've been promised a second performance space in an old auditorium in the basement of a dorm on campus. Two years ago we started to make plans to at least use the space for classes, but those were thwarted when the engineering department got a big gift to upgrade their facilities, and they took over the space to use it for temporary office space while their building was being worked on. The bad news is we lost the space for 2 more years, the good news is that the University had to make some changes to the space (including "separating" it from the rest of the dorm with a secured door) that we would have needed to do anyway. So the engineers moved out this last spring, and we started to move into the space this fall.

Since I wasn't directing a mainstage show this fall we decided I'd direct a smaller show in the new space. We knew going in things were going to be unpredictable, and we were right. When we were finally "given" the space, we didn't get the entire space, so first they had to build walls inside the auditorium to create a 40'x40' room for the theater space. This took some time, and kept us from rehearsing in there early on. The show I chose to do had a minimal set requirements, so that was ok, and the lighting requirements were pretty much lights up/lights down.

When we finally did get to move into the space (a couple of days before our opening) we started at noon on a Monday with an empty room. By 6 the set was in, the lights (included rented equipment) were up, the sound equipment (borrowed from University Media Services) was up and we were ready to go. We used the light board from the mainstage space to run the lights and my laptop to run the sound.

The show went well. We had about 30-40 people for the Thursday and Saturday night performances. On Friday we filled the place to capacity (the way it was set up) with 94.

A couple of more weeks this semester, and then it's on to spring.