Backstage Business at ‘Enron’ and ‘The Motherfucker with the Hat’
For theatre design/technology students, the repertory shows fostered collaboration, with a few bumps along the way.
By Kaelin Viera
The theatre conservatory’s fall festival, featuring senior acting company 51, closed this past weekend after an eventful run alternating show dates in the same space.
The two plays, “The Motherfucker with the Hat” and “Enron,” vary dramatically in plot and design. The former: a dark comedy of lust, addiction and betrayal set in three colorful New York City apartments; the latter: a sterile and surrealist corruption story about the collapse of the Texas energy corporation of the same name. Yet, both teams needed to work together to fit their visions in the small second-floor theatre space in the Center for Media, Film, and Theatre.
“Communication is always the biggest issue,” said production manager and technical director Noe Defranco. “Teams not talking to each other, teams not talking within their teams, and it’s my job to get everybody together like a family.”
But families don’t always get along, especially faced with a lack of resources. The fall festival is what Defranco and other theatre design/technology students call “unsupported,” meaning they did not custom-build set pieces. Scenic designers Analiz Corona and Kris Sorano were limited to what was already in stock and to what could be easily adapted for both shows.
“As much as we are friends, we definitely did butt heads and had some tension,” said Sorano, the scenic designer for “Enron.”
The pair’s initial designs involved a wall of hats and a three-tiered office landscape. In the end, they landed on a base structure of one raised platform on a deck with two side walls. “The Motherfucker with the Hat” also had a door, picture frames and a hanging light fixture that could be stored away during the other show.
To achieve this end product, Corona said the compromise over the gray floor took two weeks of comparing their design research, and they got down to specific Pantone colors for the blank walls.
“I cannot deal with an urban white; we have to go to cloudy white,” she recalled thinking.
For “Enron,” Sorano was further restricted by the script. They said Lucy Prebble’s play specifically calls for projections, which is not a department within the theatre conservatory. When the show did finally find a projections designer, students said that person quit the first day of tech, where all the departments come together in the theater for the first time.
While new designers eventually joined, Sorano was dissatisfied with how the projections were handled. The projections determined Sorano’s set design, making it so they could not have a back wall, but Sorano said they were told they had no say in what the actual images looked like.
“God, some of these projections were really ugly, I can’t even lie,” Sorano said, especially of those that mimicked actual rooms. “I don’t hide that at all from anyone.”
Beyond creating a design challenge, the projections proved to be a technical difficulty. Jenna Newberg, the production stage manager for “Enron,” explained that, on opening night, a “black box” appeared to cover their electoral map projection for a scene depicting the 2000 presidential election.
“Luckily, it was just for that moment,” said Newberg. “Even when something was going wrong, I still felt very calm. If I start freaking out, then everyone else is going to start freaking out.”
Newberg’s grounded attitude carried over to their next performance, where a dropped tray of plastic champagne glasses, filled with water, prompted a complete show stop. After Newberg got on the overhead microphone to tell the actors to exit the stage, one audience member joked that they thought it was intermission, while the stage manager swept the floor to multiple rounds of audience applause. Then, the actors restarted the scene completely, sans champagne.
The incident came after a tech period where many of the show’s rehearsals were cancelled, according to Newberg. Since the two plays were sharing one space, the schedule allowed each to have one technical rehearsal in the theater, then one elsewhere the following day. Director Desiree Sanchez called these “contingency rehearsals.”
Newberg said the cancellations were intentional to not “overwork” the actors, but Raymond LaVare, the production stage manager for “The Motherfucker with the Hat,” brought the opposite mindset to his in-between-day rehearsals.
“These rehearsal runs keep the actors focused and together,” LaVare said. “We’re so worried about the tech of it, but we don’t want to neglect our actors. We want to make sure that we’re still connected to each other, and are still working and playing.”
In “Enron,” the focus on discovery might have begun earlier. Thomas Robbins, who plays multiple roles, said, “One thing that surprised us as a company was how little table work we did up front, and how fast we jumped into staging.”
Robbins attributed this to Sanchez’s movement background and focus on collaboration.
“I am one prone to want to over-rehearse a show,” he said. “Now, having it pay off, I think has changed my outlook on certain ways rehearsals run.”
While Sanchez’s style may have worked in the rehearsal room, some crew members admitted challenges with her outside of it.
“It was hard for her to understand that we’re a professional training program, but we’re still in school,” said Defranco. “She’s been challenging to work with only because, as the TD/PM [technical director/production manager], you’re the person who says, ‘No, you can’t have this.’”
Defranco called himself the “guinea pig” of his combined role, since BFA shows have not had a student production manager in the past. His responsibilities included sticking to the budget and timeline, communicating between shows and holding a “realist mentality.”
“A big lesson learned and implemented is under-promise, over-deliver,” he said.
Sorano also said Sanchez’s teaching job prevented her from coming to any production meetings, though they appreciated the freedom she gave them with the set.
“The cast, designers, and crew approached everything very professionally,” Sanchez wrote in a statement to The Beat. “We had more time than I have ever had to put on a show so no complaints there.”
While both directors were new to Purchase, Martín Solá made his theatrical directing debut with “The Motherfucker with the Hat.” Defranco and LaVare commended him for how open he was to change.
“I didn’t feel like I was working with students,” Solá said of his cast and crew. “I felt like I was working with really young artists who brought a lot of skill and creativity to the table, and I would say we all learned together.”
By the end of the plays’ runs, the crews got the hang of working with each other. They’d drag out the other show’s furniture from the storage closet at the back of the theater and stuff their own in. They’d keep the one key to the dressing rooms in a shared hiding spot.
Now, much of the crew is already working on their next show, while the cast prepares for spring semester auditions.
“That was the biggest issue, just reminding everybody that it’s just a production,” said Defranco. “It’s gonna go up and it’s gonna come down, and we’re all gonna sing Kumbaya or something and have a good time.”
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