On a recent afternoon in a fluorescent-lit rehearsal room deep in the recesses of the new Goodman Theatre complex, stage manager Joe Drummond sat perched on a chair in front of a mammoth binder holding the scripts for “House” and “Garden,” two Alan Ayckbourn plays now at the Goodman. In his hand, a black and red stopwatch ticked off seconds. A walkie-talkie sat at his right. A telephone was pressed to his ear.
In the vast space before him, an actor in Wellington boots playing Teddy was verbally sparring with the actress playing Joanna for the play “Garden.” Every few seconds, Drummond would check his stopwatch, pencil a time in the margin of the script of “Garden,” then flip to a similar place in the script for “House.”
What the actors said was of little importance to Drummond. He was more interested in the words coming across the phone line — a line that had been opened to a room down the hall where “House” was being rehearsed and where Teddy would need to be ready for his cue in roughly 30 seconds.
“House” and “Garden,” distinct yet linked plays by the prolific playwright Ayckbourn, are making their American premiere at the same time in two separate theaters in the Goodman complex. What is remarkable — and what has sent Drummond into stopwatch overdrive — is that the two plays must run at precisely the same time because both share the same 21 actors playing the same characters.
In his 25 years of stage managing plays for the Goodman Theatre, Drummond has never before juggled anything like “House” and “Garden.”
“This is like working on a musical because you’re dealing with a lot of … things at the same time,” says Drummond, citing the dancers and musicians that join the actors in a musical’s mix. ” But there are elements that have nothing to do with the play and that’s that both plays are sharing the same actors.”
This should make little difference, and won’t be obvious, to the 850 audience members who will see “House” when it is staged nightly in the Albert Ivar theater or to the 300-plus folks seated around the grassy set of “Garden” in the Owen Bruner theater. That is, until both groups gather in the lobby at their simultaneous intermission and, perhaps, exchange impressions of the Ayckbourn works. Which would apparently delight the playwright who has always been fascinated with manipulating stage time and stage space.
For Drummond, Ayckbourn has created a load of logistical challenges: How will actors departing “Garden” make their cue to head onstage in “House” if the transition time is mere seconds? How will that transition be made when it involves a trek through the building’s basement? And how can the actors remain in character when their offstage time may be spent running through the lobby rather than running through their lines?
Assembling a team of top-notch actors helps, of course. And that is what director Robert Falls, who is also the Goodman’s artistic director, has done for the two totally separate but linked comedies about marital angst. The plays are currently in previews and officially open Monday.
Putting Drummond in charge of logistics was another smart move. Drummond, who has staged managed everything from one-man shows to big musicals like the 36 performers who filled the stage for “Pal Joey,” is a master of controlled confusion.
All of this wouldn’t seem to be a big problem if the actor only needed to stroll backstage from one theater to the next.
That is not the case.
First, the theaters are separated by several hundred feet, a couple of doors and a long corridor. Second, not all the actors will be entering or exiting the stage from the wings. Some will arrive via a spiral staircase located under one stage; others will troop up to the stage through the audience after sprinting through the lobby.
“There are only maybe six [crossovers] where people have to leave the lobby area and run like mad and get to the other stage,” says Drummond, during a recent rehearsal. “We have many more that are backstage.”
And a few crossovers require climbing stairs and traversing the basement, something that the womanizing Teddy, played by actor Joel Hatch, performs several times nightly. But that isn’t the biggest challenge, according to Hatch.
“When you go on stage as an actor, you listen to the audience and [gauge] how things are going,” he says. “Should I speed things up? Should I take time with things? You play every house completely differently because no two audiences are exactly the same. “So you tailor every performance to the audience. When you are running from `House’ to `Garden’ and you don’t have a clue how the audience is, and you haven’t listened to anything and you don’t know where they are in the scene till you get there, well, you’ve got about 30 seconds to get your breath back and try to get enough wind in you. . . . It’s hard to get your wits about you.”
Adds Drummond, “Some of the things that we’ve head from actors as they come off stage [is that] when they get out in the hallways they can’t hear the play they are coming to. And that was a big issue. They said, `As soon as I leave stage, I need to hear the other show to judge how fast or slow I can run.'”
To bring the actors up to speed on what is happening in both plays, Drummond and his team set up live — but silent — video monitors in each of the backstage areas as well as speakers in some stairwells and hallways.
Costume changes are minimal because the play, set in the English countryside — in the sitting room of the Platt family home (“House”) and on the estate grounds (“Garden”) — takes place over several hours in the course of a day. Still, says Drummond, “We have it set up that if you leave `House’ and you have to wear a different costume when you enter `Garden,’ you will do your run first and then change at the location so you can hear the play and judge where you’re at.”
Because the pacing of each play is so crucial, Drummond had hoped for a bit more coaching from the team in London, where the twin Ayckbourn plays were the hit of the season last summer.
“We did get some notes from the London stage management staff that said they never told the company to hurry or slow down if the show got out of sync time-wise,” says Drummond, who adds it was the London team who suggested providing the actors with video monitors.
The one page of London notes did not explain how Drummond could communicate with actors on stage to let them know someone might be running late. “We sort of joked that if somebody was late we would play one particular bird sound so that when the actors on stage heard this bird sound they knew that the actor wasn’t going to be there,” he says.
It’s not an inconsequential problem. The other day during rehearsal, Hatch/Teddy found himself awaiting the delayed arrival of the actress playing Lucille. Hatch recalls he busied himself in the study making a drink and gazing out the window until she made her entrance.
Crazy? You bet. But through it all, Drummond has been focused and cool. The stopwatch is the first thing he puts on when he enters the theater. He is rarely without a headset that connects him to his stage managers for each play — Kim Osgood for “Garden” and Tim Lynch for “House.” Throughout the play, Osgood and Lynch will sit at their monitors calling out light and sound cues.
Drummond, just as the supervisor in an airport control tower tracks the skies and each controller, will keep tabs on everything from when the last audience member gets settled in his seat to the location of the 18 children who will perform a maypole dance in a scene for “Garden,” and whether or not lobby security doors are open for the actors.
“We will make sure that certain doors are unlocked because with security, we can’t trust that security is going to be there to get that person through, and if that person has to wait for security, then we’re really sunk,” Drummond says. “We are going to have to station two people at certain times to be there to have their foot in the door. “
Electronic gizmos will help get actors to their places onstage, things like tiny LED lights imbedded in the stage or an infrared camera that allows stage managers to check actors positioning in the dark. Drummond and team will also count on such old reliables as flashlights and glow tape.
One thing that will be tough to control: the time needed for breathers (er, bathroom breaks).
“As one of them found out, you got to make sure you used the facilities before we start,” Drummond says.
“As soon as that curtain comes down, we have a whole company of the people running for the restrooms,” says Hatch, who has a six-minute break in act one and an eight-minute timeout in act two.
Beyond the bathroom breaks, Hatch says, the tight timing in some ways is probably good. “I am learning something as an actor. Actors are guilty of thinking way too much and never just showing up and responding to a scene as it is. This is forcing me to do otherwise. . . . There is no time to sit offstage and second guess yourself.”
The playwright might argue otherwise. During a recent visit to the Goodman complex, Ayckbourn pronounced the logistical situation utterly manageable and quipped to Drummond:
“Your actors are going to read books between the two.”
Tell that to Hatch.
