The Arts in New York City

For the past three weeks, I had the opportunity to work on Anton Chekhov’s critically acclaimed play “The Seagull” at Brooklyn College. Not as an actress however, but as a crewmember. I was assigned the job of the “sound operator”. This was totally unfamiliar territory to me, but over the course of three weeks I experienced the complex and often stressful job of the people who truly take care of bringing the authenticity of a play to life – the crew. As an audience, one gets to enjoy the captivating performances of the actors and take in the marvelous set, lights, sound, period costumes and props. These components, which at times we don’t give enough credit to, let one engage and find a connection to the circumstances of the play. What is going on behind the scenes however does not reflect the beauty of art and theater at all – it certainly posed a new challenge and experience to me. During shows, I sat on a headset in a small, dark sound booth, waiting for my stage manager to call the next cue. I realized that I didn’t perceive “The Seagull” as a beautiful play filled with great characters anymore, but it turned into a technical piece of text to which I didn’t have any emotional connection and merely dissected it into cues, breaks and “stand-by’s”. It was enriching as an actor to make this experience of being a crewmember. I believe it broadened my horizon to the extent that I now understand the complexity and huge undertaking of only one play – the people, technicalities and money that is involved; something that the audience and even actors mostly don’t pay much attention to.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Anna-Maja Rappard, WRITING ASSIGNMENTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.