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November 17, 2009

Packing for Stage Management

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:36 am

Tomorrow is the big day for me and Nick. Not the day we leave, not the day we pack our shirts, socks, and portable gaming devices. No, this is stage management packing day.

It’s a two-part process. Because we’re rehearsing at the Guthrie for a month before our truck gets there, we need to get a lot of our supplies there without having our road box. Yes, I did walk into the GM’s office and ask if shipping the road box whole was a possibility, and to her credit, she did not laugh in my face. But nevertheless, it was financially impractical, so we will have to do what we did last year, and ship a cardboard box of our most needed supplies through the regular channels that people use to ship things that don’t weigh hundreds of pounds.

So tomorrow Nick and I are meeting at the office. To the office we will bring anything from home that we intend to ship either in the box to the Guthrie, or to put in the road box for later use in tech, or on the road. Things that are going in the cardboard box are tape measures (one from each of us), my kit, pencil case, two big binders (because life is too short to use cheap binders), and our printer, which is in the road box.

Which comes to the problem that some of the stuff we need is in the road box. So we have to make a trip to Jersey, where our road boxes are stored at Spoon Group. We will then drop off our personal headsets in the box, and maybe some other stuff, and head back to the office with the things we need to ship to the Guthrie (our printer, some special paper, sheet protectors, electric pencil sharpener, another tape measure, labler, pencils, one of the four or five first aid kits, and a few other things.)

Our road box halfway through the tour last year:

Then back at the office, we will pack up the box for the Guthrie and back slowly away while other people worry about how it gets there.

Our departure date has changed recently, we’re now going Nov. 30th instead of Dec. 1. With first rehearsal on the 4th, we now have so much time that I think we’ll wind up with our arrival day off (after getting in on one of the Guthrie’s Monday grocery runs), and then maybe even another day off if we don’t totally screw up taping the floor. I just did the measurements on the ground plan tonight, and while everything is on some funky angle, the set is largely square to itself, which I guess is an improvement from the half-circle-but-not-in-the-mathematical-sense that was the Henry / Spy set last year.

I’m still working hard to finish the new stage management database before first rehearsal. I’d feel better with more time on that, but I think I’m at least pretty far ahead in my packing. I actually have a database to track what compartment of what bag all my belongings are going to be in.