I earned my Actors' Equity card more than 40 years ago, December 1976, as the Assistant Stage Manager for a musical at the Forum Theatre in Summit, Illinois. It was an African-American retelling of a fairy tale called Cinderella Brown. I had been building and painting sets at the University of Chicago's Court Theatre – back when that was still outdoors in Hutchinson Court, with a stage built every summer on top of the fountain. The designer at Court was doing the sets for Cinderella Brown and put out a distress call to all of us on Court's crew to help finish painting the sets, on the afternoon of opening. Things were that bad.
The scenery was still all wet paint as the show opened. I watched from the wings, as the untrained but well-meaning stagehands stumbled from set change to set change. None had flashlights, there was no “choreography” for the changes, nobody knew exactly what the other was doing or what they had to accomplish at each scene change. Sets would fly in then have to fly out again because they had trapped sofas and tables inside walls before the furniture had been struck. I could hear them frantically whisper “Who's gonna strike that sofa?” Some set changes lasted a full 20 minutes. The show ran almost four hours, a good portion of it spent behind closed curtains in set changes.
After the show, I went up to the distraught producer and gave him a list of things he needed to do to fix things backstage. He looked at me for a moment, then said, “You're hired, please fix it.” I signed my first Equity contract the next morning as the show’s Assistant Stage Manager. I then went out and bought a dozen new flashlights and held set change rehearsals with the crew all that afternoon. We were ready to open that evening.
I've been an Accidental Stage Manager ever since.
Originally published in Equity News, Summer 2017.
