Making the Most of the Mundane: On Being a Stagehand

We are on Show number 100 and I now know every beat of this play. Each note, dance move, pause for laughter…they have been so deeply engrained in my mind and body they have become part of me. Operating the spotlight has drifted away from something that takes energy and mental capacity and has become a reflex. Eight times a week, for an hour and a half at a time, I do exactly the same thing. I no longer have to think about when to widen the iris or dim the rheostat, my body does it for me. My hands move the instrument where it needs to go, where they know the actors are or will be soon. Next to me the light board operator sits at his computer watching the Patriots game progress in (slightly delayed) real time. He never looks at the stage yet keeps one hand on the Go button, pressing it in rhythm with the Stage Manager’s cues. When there is not a football or baseball game to watch, Juice scribbles in a giant book of Sudoku puzzles. In between spotlight cues I sit next to him, filling in blank crossword boxes or writing ideas down in my notebook. The two of us spend a total of ten and a half hours a week in the dark, making the most of the mundane.

But professional theater is by and large far from mundane. A “good day at the theater”, a day where everything goes well, where no lamps burn out or props break (or go mysteriously missing) is a boring day. These are the days where we have a decent audience, the band plays well and the actors hit all the right notes. These are the most boring days of our lives. For me, a great day at work is when things go wrong, when an actor calls out at the last minute and we have to scramble to prepare for the understudy to come on. When I walk into work and find that a prop has been completely destroyed and, sink or swim, I only have one hour to fix it or come up with some solution, I have a good day. When a set piece comes loose and we have to hold the house for fifteen minutes while we get it back in place and make sure it is safer than it ever was (because an actor has to climb on top of it and do a back flip), I think it is a fantastic day at work. The best days, however, are the days when it seems like every single department is dealing with a major crisis but (allow me to indulge this one cliché) the show must go on.