Merely Players tech week begins

Yesterday was the beginning of Merely Players tech week. I was tired going in, due to the fact that I'd spent the weekend finishing my enormous final grad school assignment for the semester, but I always seem to kick into gear once the urgency of the final days of production sets in. I like the energy of tech week, the feeling of everyone involved focusing in on their tasks to put the show together. It doesn't matter how tired I am, I go into CREATIVE ADRENALINE HYPERDRIVE MODE and off we go, getting things done. And of course these Hold Thy Peace one-act side projects have the best tech weeks. The shorter the show and the smaller the cast, the easier it is to get everything prepared ahead of time and hit the ground running once we get into the theater. For To Think of Nothing it was perfect, like a series of well-designed gears clicking together and snapping into place. For Merely Players it's a little rougher due to the space; tech and set has to be minimal in a lousy performance space like Schwartz Auditorium, but we still had to arrange the lights and set the stage to suit our purposes. For us load-in consisted primary of moving our mountain of costumes and props into the theater; a hallmark of the first night of tech week for me is spending an hour beforehand packing all our stuff into my car and feeling so grateful that we can just leave it in the space until we're done. We got three lovely techies, Elena, Sari, and Samantha-- real techies, not the actors-playing-techies in the show --to come and help, and we set cast and crew alike to setting up the lights and putting together the costume rack and seeing that the prop tables were all properly laid out. On Bernie's suggestion we first did a walk-through of all the blocking in the new space. I think that was extremely helpful for the actors to get their bearings, because the first full run was smoother than even I'd hoped. We still have a bit of polishing of the timing and spacing to get down, but by and large they were very comfortable and the run was very strong. I am so pleased and proud of them. If we keep this up, by opening night this Friday we are going to do a fantastic performance of the first actually funny comedy HTP has done since Comedy of Errors my junior year.