Difficulties of Tech Theater

One of the major obstacles I imagine theaters face when it comes to the technicals is the available space and budget. This is obvious when comparing, say, our school's performance of Les Miserables last season, versus when we went to see it at the Bushnell Theater. We didn’t have moving spotlights, a green screen to play special effects of off when Javert jumped off of the bridge, a barricade that could be fully rotated to show off the bodies of the dead students, etc. Because of all this, our adaptation was not able to have quite the epic scale that the Bushnell did, and that’s something that had to be worked around going in.

Another difficulty which can arise from technical theater is trying to consolidate the visions of all of the different people working on the show. The director is ultimately the one with the full vision that the show will embody, but they also have to give the people in charge of the costumes, lights, sound, and set to use their own talents to bring those visions to life. Sometimes the director’s vision is impractical, self-contradictory in places, or doesn’t jive well with the material. If not developed in harmony, you can have aspects that fail to form a cohesive whole - for example, without prior arrangements being made, the color pallets of the lights, set, and costumes might end up clashing. Cooperation and communication is key. 

After doing this unit on technical theater, the aspect of it which I think is the most difficult to nail is set design. You have to physically transform the space into the world of the show, providing enough detail to make it feel immersive but not so much as to get in the way of or overshadow the actors. Building on this, most shows have multiple locations, which means that the set has to be easily changeable so as to waste the audience’s time with scene changes as little as possible. Aspects that can’t be moved on and off stage mid-performance have to be crafted to not seem out of place in any of the scenes. Productions with a lower budget will also have less supplies to use for crafting unique elements and will have to rely on pre-existing materials a lot of the time.

To go back to our past production of Les Miserables as an example, the play required us to have a bridge as a set piece for Javert’s suicide; however, we would not be able to bring it on and off stage, so it had to be against the back wall for the whole show. To make up for this, we had a set of five giant wooden triangular prisms painted with a different background on each side, which could he wheeled on and off stage during scene changes to block the bridge from view and create the illusion of being indoors (or in a garden). The main problem with this approach was that, with both the bridge and triangles on stage at the same time, there was much less space for the actors to work in, so we used the triangles as little as possible, with a painted backdrop of a generic setting-appropriate city at night on the wall behind the bridge fitting the mood and serving the “outdoor” scenes well enough. The river over which the bridge supposedly ran was also included in the backdrop to give the bridge some context and make it fit in the scenes. The other major element of our set was the barricade, crafted from found elements and built on three separate platforms to make it easier to hide backstage during the first act.