MAY
4

No Stage Lights?  No Problem!

By Edith Weiss 

Edith Weiss is the author of several published children’s plays, including six with Pioneer Drama Service.  A lot of Edith’s writing time goes into her stand-up comedy routine, which has taken her all over the country and on three overseas military tours.  Besides writing, she also acts and directs in both children’s and adult theatre. 

You’ve volunteered to direct the school play, but the theatre is in the “cafetorium.”  Worse yet, perhaps you’ve been assigned the gym, which still smells of the agony of da feet (over-used and under-washed adolescent gym socks!).  For lighting the play, there is...  (drum roll, please) ...a light switch.  Not even a dimmer switch!  Either the lights are on or they’re off.  And the gym has those old mercury bulbs that take forever to come back on once they’re turned off!  “How can I do a play if I can’t show the passage of time?!”  you scream, wondering how you’ll ever pull this off as a director.

By keeping your sense of humor and holding fast to your sense of play, it can be done.  You can add characters to the script as “time keepers” to help you.  For example, your stage directions call for night.  Have an actor come onstage, dressed in black, or even carrying a sign that says “night” and have him fall down.  Then he stands up and says, “Night fall.”  Or have an actor come onstage with the front of his body costumed in white and the back of his body in black.  He says, “Day turned to night,” then turns his back to the audience.  While this won’t work if you’re doing Ibsen, you can pull it off if you’re directing a comedy, where you have the freedom to be creative and even break a few rules.

Here are some more ways to handle the passage of time that add such a sense of playful silliness to your show you might just implement these ideas even if you have control of your lighting!

• Have one actor dressed brightly or holding a sign that says “Day,” and then have another actor, “Night,” wordlessly chase him across the stage.  Reverse the action when necessary, and it’s daytime again.  Action replaces words.  Showing is much more fun than telling.
• To show that a few hours have gone by, have an actor come onstage with a large clock (don’t panic, we’re talking cardboard) and move the clock hands forward to the time it’s supposed to be.
• Say five days have passed between scenes.  Have two actors, one the sun and one the moon, come onstage with a globe.  As one goes down behind the globe, the other comes up.  Or they could go up and down a stepladder, the moon rising as the sun comes up.  One actor holding a sun and moon mounted on sticks could do this as well.  Or an actor, let’s call him the Time Keeper, can enter between scenes and tear calendar pages.

Besides indicating the passage of time, your script probably also calls for a blackout at some point.  “It’s impossible,” you yell.  You simply cannot get a blackout in the space you’re doing this show — even when all the lights are off, it simply looks like a pale murk.  And then the lights take too long to “warm up” when you turn them back on.  Okay, so you better not stage a murder-mystery where the crime is committed during a blackout.

But again, comedies, and especially melodramas, are much more forgiving.  So, you have a couple of choices.  First, you could re-write the play a little bit.  (Assuming, of course, you have the permission of the publisher.  Pioneer Drama is great with this type of flexibility, but I don’t know about other companies.)  For example, in The Nifty Fifties, the “rock star” is supposed to be unseen, then enter the scene during a blackout.  Instead, the director got permission to disguise the rock star in a bad Elvis costume and wig, which eventually fell off to reveal the rock star.  Voila!  Problem solved!

Okay, but what if you feel you just HAVE to have a blackout?  Impossible, UNLESS...  (the tension builds) ...unless you have an actor approach the audience after the action onstage has frozen and say, “This is a blackout.  Please close your eyes.”  The audience will not only understand, they will laugh.  And after all, isn’t that what you want for your comedy?