I remember theatres as dark, warm places, near the action, full of promise, empty seats waiting to be filled and deep silences I know how to light up. The Adams Memorial Theatre at Williams College, a big stage with about four hundred red plush seats in a shallow rake, is the first theatre I came to know well. I know the way into the ceiling where the lights are, the way up to the hanging grid eighty feet above the stage at the top of the high tower where you kick the shivs around and where the ropes and heavy wires run for the raising and lowering of the sometimes huge painted canvas backdrops. This is a classic wing and drop theatre as I later learned in drama school, brought to perfection in nineteenth century Italy to fulfill the demands of grand opera as practiced by Verdi and his like, capable of taking audiences anywhere in space and time by running scenery on carts in from the wings and on drops down from the above, a technology functioning to this day on Broadway stages and around the world.
I remember a night in Williamstown, or more likely one very early morning, we were rigging a backdrop intended for the Brush Up Your Shakespeare number in Kiss Me Kate, There were four or five of us hanging old flats from a pipe we had lowered to a level of about twelve feet above the stage. The idea was to represent a backstage space where the two charming thugs would be inspired to launch into their soft shoe. Each individual flat, made of canvas stretched taught on a stout wooden frame and hung with simple iron hardware from the pipe that stretched across the stage, weighed at the most a hundred pounds, but our plan was to hang up to a couple of dozen of them from the pipe to create a wall. We had therefore placed more than a ton of lead weights in one of the arbors in the stage left rigging, and when we had lowered in the pipe, the arbor had ascended eighty feet above the stage, locked there and waiting to counterbalance the load we were now in the process of attaching to the pipe.
As we worked the pipe began to move, very slowly inching upward. We froze. Each of us knew without speaking what was happening. The clamps on the wire lines holding the stack of lead weights were slipping, losing their grip. The pipe began rising faster and suddenly seemed to be flying upward. We ran. I jumped into the orchestra pit, my friend John leaped all the way from the stage across the pit into the audience. The rack of weights hit the iron arbor rail at stage level with a bang that made out ears ring and burst open throwing the weights about. High in the air the pipe and the few flats we had attached, flew into the steel grid and broke apart. Bits of lumber and hardware fell and wind-milled down from the top of the grid, smashing onto the now deserted stage.
Then silence, followed by gasps and cries and laughter. I can't recall the consequences. I imagine we got it cleaned up by daylight. John had sprained his ankle, but we rigged another pipe, with certain modifications, in time for dress rehearsal. I learned once again that the show must go on. I learned why theatrical workmans' comp insurance rates are, with farming, the most expensive. And I learned where boyish adolescent pleasure had a place in adult life.
Earlier that summer I remember the arrival of the equity actors suddenly rocking the place with their noisy laughter, high spirits and incredibly vulgar language. They seemed larger than life, a breed apart. Olympia Dukakis, Frank Langella, Lou Zorich, Tony Capidolupo were none of them famous then or at least not very, but we apprentices knew who they were and what they were. The real thing. Watching them in rehearsal, or from backstage in performance, and even, astonishingly, on stage with them in the chorus or in butler's weeds handing one a envelope or a teacup was to know the real-time magic of the mundane turning bright, significant, electric, awesome before our eyes, in our hands.
