There was just a week until Dracula, A Comedy of Errors opened at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater (812 E Rollins St Lowndes Shakespeare Center Orlando, FL) I got a call from Jim Helsinger letting me know that the stagehands were shorthanded. My virtual teaching courses at Elite Animation Academy had dried up, so I jumped at the chance to fill in as a stagehand. My roommate was also available for work, so I passed along the information. I did this sketch over multiple 15 minute breaks on the job.
The first day I met Alex K the TD for the production. He gave me a little blue spiral bound notebook, which I kept in my pocket to check off notes I had addressed. I added bendy board up above the central arched doorways to keep backstage light from seeping through. Even with the bendy board in place there were gaps which were addressed by another stage hand later on. My experience with power tools was limited in that I have done some work around the house, but I have never had to build a house from scratch.
There were two coffin shaped doors at either side of the stage. The doors lead to a wall. They could open but only partially. I was given the task of adding small door jams at the base to keep them from fully opening. Lighting strips were later added around the inner edge of the doors that allowed them to glow blood red. So far I was doing fine since I was just driving in some screws.
Alex assigned Carpenter, Miguel, and I with putting up the dimensional edging and shelves for a fake bookcase. We worked from the top arches downward to get the slats in place. We kept running into issues with the edging not lining up right. We later realized that it was better to build from the bottom upwards, which solved many of the leveling issues.
I then spent the rest of the day putting purple baseboards along the bottom of all the stage walls. This was made more complicated by the coffin doors which also had the molding at the base. It took some trail and error to get the angles on the baseboards to match the angles of the coffin. If I cut the baseboards to close to the door then opening the door could be problematic. The stage was a constant traffic jam of ladders as stagehands and the lighting crew did their work in a rush for the opening only a few days away.
Late in the day, I was told that the wood grain on the baseboards had to run horizontally. This was a note I had not been given. Most of the boards had to be removed since they had vertical grain. Luckily, I had made another mistake in using staples that were a bit too short to secure the boards to the walls. Since the staples extended into the wall only a quarter inch, the boards came off easily and I cut new boards quickly using the old boards as samples. All the new boards had horizontal wood grain. With the second install of the baseboards, I added much longer staples.
My next job was to add wood panel edging to a section of a wall. All the corners were cut at 45-degree angles to make the panel frames. This had me working the table saw and circular saws to get all the bits and pieces cut. I started gluing the corners but then learned that it would be easier to just staple the pieces to the wall. The circular saw tended to chip the wood, but the table saw gave much cleaner cuts. I didn’t use the table saw for angles cuts since I could not find a guide that allowed me to feed the boards at the needed 45 degree angle. I used a metal triangle running in the slot on top of the table saw when I needed angles cuts. I learned that the job is made or broken from the moment the first piece of wood is stapled to the wall. I had drawn a chalk pattern using a T-square to get the horizontal and vertical lines in place. Getting at the rectangular box corners to line up needed adjustments. I found myself running back and forth to the scene shop multiple times to re-cut pieces to get them to look square. It was part measurements and part eyeballing how it looked. I was pleased when it was finally done. I felt it was my first day on the job masterpiece.
The next day there was a note that the panels I had obsessed over were not level. Another stagehand dismantled much of my work and put it back together. One thing that many people say to me when they see me sketching is, “I can’t draw a straight line.” It turns out I could not see a straight line if it kicked me in the head. The level is my new best friend. The main thing is that I am learning from every mistake, or so I hope.