Just another day in the shadows

 

Out on stage the actors are telling a story.  They stand where they should, use the props they need to use and follow a script night after night.  The audience gets caught up in the make believe.  If it’s a good story, everyone goes home happy at the end of the evening.

Somewhere, behind the stage, down a dark and twisted hallway is a little room.  That’s where I sit.  I run the sound booth.  It is full of wires and switches, buttons and levers.  It is my job to follow the script, word for word, as it is being played out on stage.

I can’t see the actors.  All I can do is hear them say their lines.  Then, at the appropriate time I make the phone ring, or the doorbell chime.  If there is a radio that needs to come on, I flip the radio switch.  Then, still following the dialog, when it needs to be turned off, I turn it off.  Anything on stage that requires sound is my job.  The timing needs to be perfect.  As the actor picks up the phone receiver, the phone has to stop ringing.   If there is a storm raging outside, the sound of thunder must land right on its mark, nothing can be off.

It is up to the prop manager to make sure everything is where it should be on stage, just as it is the responsibility of the lighting guy to flash the lightening on cue, or turn up the house lights at intermission.  Everything is coordinated, and timed perfectly.

In New York or Chicago, the theatres might be automated.  Everything I have described could be computerized, but here, in small town America, where the leading man in the play works during the day as the high school janitor, or the glamorous actress is really Larry’s mother just down the street, its all unpolished and bumpy.

The audience knows everyone on stage and the actors know them. The butterflies are real, even back in that dark little sound booth, as I drag my finger across each line as it is said out on stage, following along, waiting for the cue to press a button or turn a knob, hoping nothing gets missed.

My name doesn’t appear in the credits and there isn’t an 8 by 10 glossy of me in the lobby.  I don’t take a bow at the end of the play, I simply walk out to my car and drive home.

Off in the distance a flash of heat lightening lights up a cloud momentarily.  I click the radio on for a little music.  There’s almost no traffic.  My thoughts flash back to that box of doughnuts in the dressing room.  I should have had one.  I’m a little hungry.