Chapter Four: Childhood Drama
In the years, before my folks divorced, my father worked as Professor of Drama at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Charles Randall carried with him the reputation of being one of the best directors in the Department of Theater Arts. Students faced long waiting lists if they wished to enroll in his classes.
Final exams came in the form of full-court performances of major plays such as The King and me, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, Brigadoon, Our Town, and more.
Every play featured all the elements of an actual Broadway production: actors acted, set designers designed, and make-up artists did their thing. A full-sized Symphony Orchestra supplied by students from the School of Music accompanied each performance.
I got a front row seat to everything. I sat or slept through scores of first readings and hundreds of rehearsals and dress rehearsals.
My dad loved the theater, and he hoped if he plunged me headfirst into his world I would grow to love drama as he did.
The theater-company became my second set of parents. Bedtime was whenever I fell asleep. Much to the delight of my frugal father, the actors and extras served as an unpaid babysitting detail.
My father drafted me, at age six, to play an extra in the King and I. My tiny part required hours of makeup application to change my pale complexion to the olive tan hue of a native child of Siam. With makeup and costume, I became one of the children whom Anna had been hired to teach.
I still remember my lines: "Please Miss Anna do not go to England."
Over dinner the evening before opening night, my father chatted about the play and made a passing reference to the actor who played the king.
The man had been born with a genetic condition resulting in his birth with six fingers and six toes. Surgeons removed the extra fingers, but the doctors left the surplus toes intact.
Such a thing must be impossible. My dad must have been pulling my leg.
On opening night, I was one of five or six children on stage bowing down prostrate before the barefoot king.
When the star of the show planted his foot a few inches in front of my nose, I counted and in shocked amazement, yelled out, "Holy Crap! He's got six toes!"
The unauthorized line brought the house down and an abrupt end to my fledgling acting career. At the age of six, I was fired from my first job.
Either by osmosis or by proximity, I absorbed the background, culture, and flavor of the performing arts. I had almost unlimited access to all the workings behind the curtain. My childhood experiences gave me a level of cultural literacy far beyond my peers.
Watching costume designers stitch wardrobes from scratch, and scenery designers create elaborate sets using nothing but paint, plywood, imagination, and canvas is an amazing experience.
A director's kid, I sat in on makeup artists transforming young college female students into elderly spinsters or beautiful women. Charles directed and guided every aspect of each production.
Production meetings were amazing experiences. I sat in on the blocking and choreographing of special effects. One complex closing scene required the hero to shoot a bottle of whiskey off a fence post.
On opening night, the actor who played a recovering drunk set an unopened bottle of whiskey on a fence post walked back to the rear of the set and picked up a rifle.
He stood at center stage with the split rail fence and bottle between him and the audience. He removed a cartridge from his belt and loaded the weapon, drew back the hammer on the rifle, adjusted his aim and pulled the trigger.
The report of the gun sounded like thunder as flame and smoke shot out of the muzzle, and the whiskey bottle exploded into a cloud of broken glass and amber fluid. Members of the audience in his line of fire screamed, ducked and cringed.
Pure genius was the secret of shooting a bottle off a fence post without killing any of the audience behind the target. Hidden in the base of the fence post was an electric solenoid.
The actor fired the rifle, and at the same moment, an assistant out of public view stomped down on a power switch and fired the solenoid. An iron pin slammed into the base of the bottle. Groves filed into the glass weakened the bottle and the container shattered.
Another time in another play, Brigadoon, the cast was back in a bar in New York City. Behind the bar was a huge mirror. As the stage lights dimmed, the mirror came alive with the characters from the magical land of Brigadoon singing and calling for their American friends to return.
The fantastic and impossible effect was a simple matter of light and painted cheesecloth. While the lights were on in the foreground, the silver painted cheesecloth appeared to be a mirror.
But, when the front lights dimmed as the lights behind the cheesecloth shroud brightened, the actors behind the 'mirror' became visible, and the mirror appears to vanish. The effect always elicited a shocked gasp of delight from the audience.
In the world of the theater, the only difference between God and a director is God would be embarrassed to wield such power.