Okay, not really.  Lighting a fire in a crowded theater would be dangerous.  Theaters are flammable.  So are crowds.  The whole thing would be a disaster.

Paxton Whitehead and Jon Patrick Walker in She Stoops to Conquer. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

So what do you do when the designer (the illustrious David Korins) designs a set that features a big old fireplace in a big old country mansion?  Okay, the best thing to do is to build a propane fire.  Propane fires tend to get hot and burn down sets, so you should make sure you build your set out of fireproof materials-things like concrete and heavy duty sheet rock.  Also, you’ll need a very very friendly local Fire Marshall.  And maybe some fire extinguishers on hand, just to be safe.  If you don’t the time, money, or structural integrity in your stage floor to hold up all that concrete, then the next best thing is to have some of McCarter’s ingenious electricians (like Paul Kilsdonk and Todd Loyd) build you a home-made electric fireplace from materials they happen to have in stock.  That’s what we did.

Paul and Todd started by thinking about all the places in a fireplace that generate light.  There’s the ember bed below the logs (which is probably glowing red and orange), there are the logs themselves (which probably have some embers on them that are similarly colored), there are the flames (which flicker red, yellow, orange and blue), and then there is the light that all this casts on the fire box around it (the chimney is probably glowing, etc).  All of these elements are probably flickering a bit and subtly changing colors, so you’ll need a lot of electrical channels to pull this off-the fireplace in She Stoops to Conquer uses about 20.

Here’s how they did it:

(more…)

Kristine Nielsen, Brooks Ashmanskas and Rebecca Brooksher in She Stoops to Conquer. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Have you seen She Stoops to Conquer?  What did you think?  Did you think it was the bee’s knees?  Do you agree with the newspaper reviews, or disagree? Favorite parts of the show? Things that weren’t to your taste?  Did you see the production in 1963?

Post an “audience response” or read what other people are saying by clicking on the “comments” link below. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

So I was over at Princeton University’s Mudd Library (which houses McCarter Theatre’s archives), looking for some archival photos of Nicholas Martin—the director of the upcoming production of She Stoops to Conquer.  Nicholas started out in the profession as an actor, and he earned his equity card while performing at McCarter in the 1960’s.  I was searching for a picture of him in the 1960 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I think I found some!), but while I was there I also stumbled into the archives for the 1963 McCarter production of She Stoops to Conquer (after Nicholas had left McCarter).

It was fascinating!  The archives included the program, the advertisements, the stage manager’s promptbook (with the 1963 blocking), the set design groundplan, a hand-drawn illustration for the show curtain, the lighting design (hand-written on two pieces of yellow legal paper!), and lots of pictures.  The show ran in repertory with another play, and I noticed in the calendar that the November 16th 8:30pm perforamnce was followed by a midnight concert by “America’s fastest-rising young folksinger”—yup, you guessed it, Bob Dylan!

According to the program, “illumination” was “created by Mr. Gilbert V. Hemsley, Jr.”.  The show featured a grand total of 17 light cues—undoubtedly a far cry from the hundreds that lighting designer Ben Stanton will create for our 2009 production.  Of course, Ben has the advantage of computerized lighting operation, while poor Gilbert had to design the show to be run on three “two-scene preset” manually faded boards (and according to his notes, the light board operator had to sometimes take breaks to help with scene changes).

The cast included: Karl Light (as Mr. Hardcastle), Anne Murray (as Mrs. Hardcastle), Clarence Felder (as Tony Lumpkin), Christine Pickles (as Miss Kate Hardcastle), Angela Thornton (as Miss Neville), Grenville Cuyler (as Sligo), Donald Moffat (as Young Marlow—and also the director of the production!), Edward Zang as Mr. Hastings, Edward Groves as Diggory, Virginia DeAngelis as Pimple, Edward Grover as Sir Charles, and an ensemble of Jack Dreifert, Apollo Dukakis, Dennis Gilliland, William Smith and James Stripp.

As I was flipping through the program, I noticed something very, very familiar.  An ad for Lahiere’s!  Forty-six years later, this Princeton restaurant is still one of our regular program advertisers.  Thanks, Lahiere’s, for your sustained support of the arts in your community.  Some things never change.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

I had the great good fortune last week of listening to two of this season’s plays being read aloud.  First, I heard a reading of Fetch Clay, Make Man that we produced in NYC.  This was the third or fourth reading of the play that I have heard, and it’s a revelation every time.  And then on Friday, I was able to stay for the first read-through of Having Our Say.  A few months ago I saw an archival video of McCarter’s 1995 production of Having Our Say, but this was the first time I’ve been able to hear that play read live.

Hearing these two plays in dialogue with each other made me think about some of the themes that run through all of the plays in our season.  For me, one of the most powerful and resonant themes is of how we shape (or try to shape) our own self-images.  The characters in this season’s plays are interested in creating a version of themselves for others to see, and a great deal of the dramatic tension in this year’s plays comes out of the distance and dissonance between the characters themselves and the image they are trying to create.  In Having Our Say, as Bessie and Sadie Delany reflect on their lives one hears a difference in how they speak about each other and how they speak about themselves.  As African-American women living through 100 years of American history, their lives were filled with situations in which they had to forge a public identity of themselves that doesn’t always match the inner woman.   In She Stoops to Conquer, characters disguise themselves, pretending to be lower class in order to, well, conquer.  Fetch Clay, Make Man examines very literally what happens to people as they shape their public images—Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali, Lincoln Perry becomes Stepin Fetchit, and even the supporting characters (Sonji Clay, William Fox and Brother Rashid) are in the process of re-shaping their images.  They are changing their names and putting on metaphorical masks as they make the man (or woman!) that they will become.  American Buffalo concerns three small-time crooks as they posture for each other and negotiate their relationships, and Take Flight tells the story of four pioneers of aviation, trying to shape their legacies.

So I started to wonder why this theme felt so present this season (in a way that it didn’t, for example, last season).  Of course, part of it is that three of this season’s plays are about historical characters (the Delany Sisters, Fetchit, Ali, Fox and Clay, and of course the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh).  In writing these characters drawn from America’s history book, the playwrights are naturally intrigued by the questions of identity and legacy–who was the private person underneath the public, etc.  But perhaps also maybe there’s something about this moment, at least for us here at McCarter, that drew us (unconsiously, I’m sure) to stories that share in an exploration of shaping self-image.  As we enter our artistic director’s 20th season and start our first full season with a new managing director, we’ve all spent a lot of time thinking about who we are as a theater right now, and what our identity is in the world and our own community.  And as our nation has undergone a massive shift, with democrats winning two of the three branches of our government, and with a president who represents, for many, a very new (and welcome) idea of the image of American leadership, it seems natural that we would be thinking about these questions.  Frankly, as America starts to look toward our sister nations and say: “we are a different country  now than we were a year ago,” perhaps we are all thinking about identity differently.

What do you think?  Coincidence, or is there an underlying trend here?

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre