Stage Directions • October 2017 • Stage Management

“I talk about it as being a performance about performance. It’s an opportunity to see what’s on the other side; what’s beyond the footlights and what’s on the other side the facade of this crazy thing that is theater, which is both full of truth and full of lies. And it’s also a love song; a love song to theater and theater makers.”

That’s how Zach Morris, Co-Artistic Director of Third Rail Projects, describes the company’s latest production, Ghost Light. A site-specific, immersive piece that merges dance and theater with the ephemeral nature of creating a production and which brings the audience behind the curtain.

Morris, along with fellow artistic directors, Tom Pearson, and Jennine Willett, and the ensemble of performers have built Third Rail Projects into an award-winning company. They were especially excited by the idea of being invited to create a piece at Lincoln Center. “The company has been around for 17 years now,” explains Morris. “So, we have spent a lot of time thinking about what a performance’s relationship to the space is, that’s one of the things that’s most inspiring to us. When the opportunity to work at the Claire Tow Theater arose we were very excited about the notion of what it meant to inhabit all the parts of a theater itself. It was a delightful challenge to think outside of the proscenium for everyone involved. To discover what were the ways that they could literally animate every nook and cranny of the Tow.”

As to the challenges of the space, Morris notes, “Some of the challenges were certainly logistical. Looking at how all the spaces work and moving between each because you know the entire performance is meticulously timed and designed so there needs to be a lot of very careful coordination done with all the performers, the crew, and stage management. Everyone had to quite literally be thinking outside of the black box to figure out the ways in which you can have simultaneous performances happening in many areas of the theater; many areas which were never designed to have performances or audience in them.”

Development of Ghost Light took place over the course of a year. Moving from a series of workshop iterations that developed content in various pieces not necessarily knowing how it all would intersect. “As we moved towards production we started putting those puzzle pieces together,” describes Morris. “Figuring out what the audience’s experience through the space was going to be. Once we understood what would go where and how the audience was going to move through the space then we needed to really start thinking about what those logistics actually were. That was where Kristina [Vnook, Stage Manager] and her team very much came into play in terms of figuring out how to move the audience, how to coordinate the structure and the timing.”

Vnook, has worked with Third Rail on previous productions so she understands their creative process and the need to merge all the different roles of a production into a single performance unit. “The stage management team is me and three assistant stage managers,” she describes, “but actually I also consider our whole crew part of my team because everyone is so integral in the show. So, it’s actually the four stage managers plus the three run-crew, two board operators and the three Lincoln Center ushers, who are actually extremely important, all working as a team. I have strategically placed stage managers throughout the show to oversee a specific areas and locations.”

She continues, “We do runs with test audiences, people who are close to the company come in and we run through the audience routes. One day we had a big group of people come in where we didn’t do any content, we moved them back and forth from this room into that room, until we honed in on the right flow. It’s a lot of careful coordination between performers being extremely specific, and our stage management team until it’s like clockwork.”

Morris adds, “I think the craftsmanship that goes into this from everyone is extraordinary and there’s actually a lot of bleed between performers, stage managers, and crew. Our stage managers are also saying lines and they’re performing actions in front of the audience. They’re every bit as onstage as the performers are so there’s a beautiful blurring of the lines that happens while everybody is holding a different part of the production; everyone is seamlessly working together. For instance, in a particular scene there are two people who are in black shirts in the dressing room hallway. One of them is an actual stage manager, the other is a performer. They’re doing almost identical actions, yet one has a fake headset and one has a real headset.”

With so many scenes playing at once and performers crossing in and out of various scenes and space, it was important to have that clockwork timing rehearsed and to identify the challenging points as early as possible. Vnook notes, “We do much of our rehearsal process in the actual space because every scene is so custom-made to each room. Right from the get go we would have a midday production meeting with the production manager and then slowly folded in as many designers that were available to come for that meeting as possible. Once we got into tech there was as much scheduling ahead of time as possible to make sure that we got to all the rooms and all the scenes. We went room by room, having our designers watch those scenes and doing really the finetuning that put it all together. That’s when you see all the scenes running in tandem. Then the designers can see, ‘oh this light is out in here but there is actually still a transition happening with the audience.’”

Ghost Light is by Third Rail Projects presented by LCT3 so the company worked very closely with the Lincoln Center production management team as well. “They were extraordinary,” states Morris. “The whole Lincoln Center crew were incredible and so helpful; they were integral to the success of the show.”

LCT’s Associate PM Kevin Orzechowski talks integrating Ghost Light into the Claire Tow Theater

If I were speaking with another PM about working with an immersive theater company, I’d say that your space is already established and there are numerous considerations to keep in mind. Unlike other spaces that Third Rail has worked in in the past, which are blank slates like a warehouse, our theater is a traditional proscenium stage. You have to let the idea of what your space is go. The biggest challenge is to embrace their format and what they were going to need in the space. You should embrace that and throw away your expectations of how you usually use the space.

Typically, you get a script which is the foundation that everything springs from, but with this show they started with ideas, shapes, and images. We did a few workshops prior to starting where they found what would work; what wouldn’t; and how they were going to move through the space. We had a lot of conversations about how the audience would flow throughout the spaces. The real organization happened with the stage managers and the performers; we responded to what they wanted to try.

We were diligent right from the outset when it came time to thinking about the audiences that moved throughout the whole theater space—including technical areas. Primary considerations when we created these spaces were that they needed to be accessible; we needed to be meeting codes; and of course, it has to look great, but aesthetics cannot compromise what we needed to do. Once the performers started moving in the performances spaces; that started to define where the audience could be; and that decided where egress would be.

Regarding technical considerations of power, audio, lighting, etc., from the very beginning, it was clear that the scope of this was much bigger than what we were accustomed to and reaching out into those ancillary spaces, stairwells and hallways, was going to be a huge part of the show. One of our first questions for Facilities, was ‘Do you mind if we put holes through the walls of this brand-new space?’ Everybody here was great, working together to make things happen. We didn’t destroy the building and everything’s been restored. Because the Tow was relatively new construction, it went online in 2012, there were a lot of resources that were already built-in. There’s a good house sound system out in the lobbies; it reaches out into the dressing rooms; and the rehearsal space. You can patch into the rehearsal space and control that from the booth.

Power for lighting was a bit more challenging. Our master technician and production electrician spent a lot of time going through different ways to distribute power. We have two company switches that we fed out to power distros around the space and then to dimmer packs. Ultimately it worked well; it was all very thoughtful. Our technicians worked closely with the lighting and sound designers and created a successful infrastructure that supported the whole show.

Again, for other spaces considering an immersive piece, there are a lot of considerations for the facility; for the institution; for the people. There are a lot of variables to keep in view. And a lot of times those don’t reveal themselves until you’ve already started the process. A lot of things came into view as we were going along. You have to be ready to adapt.

For us at Lincoln Center, It was a wonderful production; Third Rail were wonderful to work with. To have something so different in our space—it was a little terrifying but it was refreshing also. My wife says that I’ve aged in the past year. But it was worth it as the audience had a great time and we got to share our space in such a new way.