Talking About a Revolution

To appreciate the story I am going to tell you, it is important to understand that we were a group of outsiders who came together to make theatre.

We were technicians and designers-in-training who had spent the majority of our undergraduate careers developing and realizing the visions of performers, directors and other faculty and were now going to use their tools to produce something special.

In a very real sense, it was an act of revolution; the workers were seizing the means of production and Don Childs was our leader.

The finished product was a collective creation representing a singular vision.

From the very beginning, from our very first meeting, those of us starting our college careers and learning how to make theatre were learning right along side our primary instructor. We were adjusting to college life and Don was learning how to adjust to life in a new country and how to communicate in a new language. Don taught us about design, technology and visual communication and we taught him and the staff Technical Director and fellow transplant Eric Mongerson about Montreal.

It was 1980 and a time ripe for revolution.

Ten years earlier, members of the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and the provincial Minister of Labor. Most of my classmates would have had clear memories of Canadian soldiers on the streets of Montreal with their automatic weapons at the low-ready position. There were still-fresh memories of exploding mailboxes on street corners and a growing sense that the province of Quebec needed to redefine its relationship with the rest of the country.

During the Seventies the liberation of the province and its six million French-language inhabitants evolved from armed conflict and toward the political arena. It was during this time the government moved to enact laws protecting the French language as the official language of the province. Among other things this resulted in the establishment of a de facto language police whose job it was to make sure that all signage was in French.

Despite these gains, there was a growing sense that protecting the language was not enough and the public elected the once-marginalized Parti Quebecois to govern and the primary plank in their platform was to work for the separation of the province from the rest of the country.

It was just three months before our classes began that the provincial referendum on Separation was held and, while there was a collective sense of relief at its failure, there was a clear sense that the debate was not over.

Much ink has been, and will continue to be, spilled on the subject of Quebec politics and its relationship with the rest of Canada, but it is important to understand at least this much if the rest is to make any sense.

***

The dynamics of academic theatre have much in common with the questions of identity that saturate Quebec and, indeed, the entire country: there are English and there are French, there are actors and directors, designers and technicians, onstage people and backstage people. Each of these groups is confident that theirs is the most difficult and most misunderstood of any other identity.

Further complicating the dynamics was the identity of the school, Concordia University.

The school was born out of the union between urban Sir George Williams University and the suburban Loyola College. These were commuter colleges that were the number two and three horses in a three-horse race with the more well-known McGill University. Loyola had a more traditional campus setting with detached buildings and lots of green spaces. The Sir George campus consisted of a single office tower surrounded by many repurposed brownstone-style annexes. Loyola was where the Theatre Department offices were located and Sir George had the primary performance space and was home to the design and technology students.

For most of the year, we built sets downtown free of distractions and interruptions except when the actors insisted on using those sets and, invariably, breaking them.

It was into this world that Don Childs stepped.

The first thing that you noticed about Don was actually something you heard. It was the slow gait that I associate with horses walking across flagstones. You heard the sound of his cowboy boots long before you would see the cowboy hat, the western shirt and the walrus-like mustache.

It was late August, 1980 and the new students were gathered in the D.B. Clarke Theatre for orientation. We were to be introduced to the faculty and provided some sense of what we were in for.

I remember very little of that meeting except that there was a two-sided blackboard in an oak frame on the stage and that, during his presentation, Don had promised to set it on fire. He didn't personally deliver on that promise that day, but the theatre did catch fire about a year later—but that's another story.

That first year was a blur. The first semester was especially hectic as we had to produce seven shows between September and December. The previous spring, the Department Chair, who was also its principal designer, knowing he was set for sabbatical, had agreed to a schedule that kept the shops in almost perpetual production. It was a great opportunity for the student actors and, as it turned out, it was also great for the production students because we got to know one another in a hurry and we also got to know Don and Eric.

And, as it happens in such situations, when you run out of things to talk about and have exhausted the news of the day, you begin to tell stories.

Eric had the most interesting stories about his wreck of an Opal station wagon and how little was actually holding it together. Don told stories about the places he had worked and the shows he had done.

Don had been doing theatre for as long as I had been alive. He worked in the professional theatre, summer stock, community and academic theatre. He had been a part of the fabled San Francisco Actors Workshop and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and, it seemed, as though he knew everybody who was anybody in the field up to and including the authors of two of our textbooks.

The stories Don would tell generally fell into two categories: collaboration and catastrophe. Technicians have a kind of gallows humor when it comes to their work and seem to take a certain amount of pride in topping one another with tales of Mr. Murphy and the most dramatic examples of his law at work. Don's stories were generally very funny and were quickly added to our own repertoires until they could be replaced by our own experiences.

The stories of collaboration had a different effect, they defined an ideal experience that we as students would one day be able to access; one where performer, artists and technicians would meet on the common ground of creativity and make one another's work better.

And we heard about how theatre was taught in eastern Europe and, in particular, in what was then Czechoslovakia.

What was distinctive about this work was the practice of total immersion in the reality of the script. The designers would make themselves subject matter experts in the period and styles of the play and only then seek an expression of their understanding in their design choices.

We could tell that this resonated deeply with Don. He tended not to accept lazy choices—the kind that students were likely to make in the hours, or minutes, before an assignment was due. Bold choices were acknowledged, but one that could be defended in the context of the play was truly celebrated.

This is an important point to belabor because it is easy to be taken in by the strong graphic quality of Don's designs. You could see the inspiration he drew from the Slovaks and, in particular, his mentor Ladislav Vychodil, but every choice was carefully considered in context and if it didn't serve the production it was discarded.

These case histories of collaboration resonated with me and with other students in part because they seemed worlds away from our experience. For, despite all this talk about theatre as a collaborative medium, what we were seeing were directors who demanded four doors, three windows, neutral colors and general illumination. Their focus was on directing the traffic of actors around the stage and their attitudes toward other production elements was dismissive at best.

***

As play selection came around for our final year, Don announced that he would be directing.

This caused quite a disturbance among the performance faculty both because it would cost one of them a directing opportunity and because Don was a set and lighting designer and what did he know about actors anyway? Somebody from downtown directing our students? Impossible.

This was revolutionary. The workers were seizing the means of production.

Traditionally, most academic productions are designed by faculty with the odd slot set aside for an exceptionally talented student. For Don's show, all of the design slots were given to students.

The play Don selected was also unusual. Arthur Kopit's indians was written at the height of the Vietnam war and transposed that conflict to the setting of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show one hundred years earlier.

This was unlike the mostly traditional fare we had seen before—classic texts and box sets—it was a challenging script full of allegory and history that we had a responsibility to get right.

And, in order to get it right, we started to work on the show soon after the start of the school year and some nine months before opening night.

This too was a departure from what we had come to understand as standard operating procedure. Up to this point, we had seen productions gear up about six weeks before opening with only cursory design conferences and perfunctory production meetings. We knew that all the directors really wanted was a floorplan so that they could begin rehearsal.

Don wanted more than that.

It was important to him that his design team tear into the play and really understand both the given circumstances—Buffalo Bill, the Wild West Show and the fate of the American Indian—and the inspiration—the Vietnam War circa 1968.

We read a lot.

We read books about Vietnam and we read books about Buffalo Bill and the American Indians. We learned about Wounded Knee ad My Lai. We learned about Annie Oakley and Chief Joseph, General Westmoreland and Defense Secretary McNamara. We learned about Tet and about the Sun Dance.

We were excited by the pageantry and scale of the Wild West Show and sobered by the Trail of Tears.

Along the way, we talked about how to represent the events of the play, how to convey the gravitas of the histories within the context of the Wild West Show.

For a long time, our meetings focused on the climax of the play in which one of the central characters dies during the Sun Dance. How would we make this moment have a real impact on the audience?

When the character dies, the audience should not only know, but also feel the significance of the moment.

Being children of our age, we first proposed a variety of effects that had, as their foundation, things we had seen on TV or in the movies, but these were being too realistic; outside the world of the play we were preparing.

The solution we arrived at—and it really did feel like a group decision—was to embrace the allegory of circus and consider what were some of the more death-defying acts of that world. Several were considered before we arrived at trapeze.

Once mentioned, it seemed the only rational choice.

The character would die by appearing to launch herself off the trapeze bar only to catch herself at the last minute by her feet.

A dramatic moment to be sure, but was it the most dramatic?

And then it was proposed that the moment happen downstage center and as close to over the heads of the audience as we could manage.

After she was “dead” and swinging over the audience by her ankles, the other “indians” in the cast would ceremonially lower her from the bar and bear her offstage.

Now we had a show.

***

I had volunteered to serve as stage manager for the production so it was my job to keep a record of our production meetings. I kept the notes as proposed, elaborated, incorporated or discarded.

As the process went on, I began watching Don as he listened to the student designers share what they had learned and present their interpretation. He would ask questions, solicit input, offer suggestions all without appearing to have any agenda.

And all the while he was sketching on whatever paper was in front oh him. Scrolls were a favorite subject, but as the design neared its final form, he seemed to be drawing more and more circular forms in keeping with the agreed-upon floorplan.

I should say that there were some initial misgivings about this protracted process. Surely, at some point, Don, the experienced designer, would dictate what he actually wanted.

But that is not what happened.

The final design presentations were, as I recall, made just before rehearsals were to begin.

I watched the presentations and I watched Don. I saw the confidence that real research and preparation had given to the students and I saw what I thought was a smile on Don's face and then I just knew that he didn't need to give us the answer he wanted because he had spent the entire year leading us to it.

I was the last to leave before Don and I asked him if that was indeed what had happened. To his everlasting credit, he never once confirmed my thinking, but he also never denied it.

Don had designed a show that was unlike anything else we had done and, regrettably, would ever do again while providing a learning experience that was every bit its equal. We thought we were learning from each other and truly collaborating, but, like the safety cables that kept the actor on the trapeze from losing control and crashing, we were never in any danger of falling.

That was his gift as a designer and as a teacher: he treated students as peers and no idea as stupid. He inspired us to challenge ourselves and to believe that almost anything was possible when we got together to tell each other stories in the dark.

Indians was a singular experience and one that both inspired and frustrated me and the rest of the team. Knowing how work can be created and how rare it is to find yourself among generous creative people makes it a real challenge to not be in their company. That some of my colleagues from that show went on to be instrumental in the founding of Cirque du Soleil is a testament to their talent and vision. That the rest of us continue to seek truly collaborative partners is a testament to Don's lasting impact on our lives.

***

More than a decade ago, Don and I had one of our many coffee meetings and engaged in a thought experiment about how best to teach the essential knowledge of the various live entertainment production skills areas. Stripped of the arbitrary learning modules imposed by a master schedule and just concentrating fulltime on one subject area at a time, how much time did you really need?

Course by course we broke them down and recognized that the actual contact hours of a typical semester were rarely more than forty.

That recognition ultimately led to what is now the Stagecraft Institute of Las Vegas an immersive hands-on training program lighting and scenic technologies, design and allied crafts.

Now in its tenth year, the program is a lasting tribute to Don's commitment to education and empowering students which, as it turns out, continues to be a revolutionary idea.