One of the things I like about Raleigh Little Theatre is that it has some history. Since the theatre has been in operation for 67 years, it has accumulated a lot of stuff over the years. You can see this if you walk through the theatre’s prop rooms — there are shelves and stacks of items like dishes, typewriters, brooms, luggage, and so forth, much of it recognizably from other time periods. For example, A Streetcar Named Desire is set in 1947, and our recent production of that play required props that were consistent with that date, including a tabletop radio and a telephone. The props department had no problem coming up with those.
But the larger items, especially furniture, have to be stored offsite because there just isn’t room at the theater for them. So RLT leases a warehouse a few blocks away, which is full of items like the beds, icebox, kitchen table, and sink used in Streetcar. Or at least it used to be. Sometime last week, thieves broke into the warehouse and robbed it, stealing dozens of antique and one-of-a-kind furniture pieces. They even got the king’s throne from Cinderella, which opens in less than three weeks.
This is the sort of news item that I wouldn’t have even noticed six months ago, but now it strikes pretty close to home. This theft directly affects a play I’m in, and I know all of the people being quoted in the news coverage of the crime. (Which is considerable, by the way; several Raleigh TV stations covered the story on their broadcasts last night.) In fact, I’ve actually been to the RLT warehouse. During the strike for Once Upon a Mattress, I helped the theater’s technical director move some furniture and set pieces (stuff that could be reused in other shows) to storage. So I had the opportunity to walk around inside the warehouse and see the items stored there. It was amazing. And now much of it is gone.
Marie and the kids have never been to the warehouse, but they felt the same sense of personal connection to this event. The TV news reports showed photographs of the stolen items, and when this table appeared on screen, we all recognized it. It’s Stella Kowalski’s dressing table from the RLT production of Streetcar. Ruth was a member of the props crew for that show, and it was her job to place a breakaway bottle on that table so that at the proper time, Blanche could break it and threaten Stanley with the jagged remnant. The robbers have that table now.
RLT’s property is insured, so this robbery probably won’t have a lasting financial effect on the theater. But those unique and one-of-a-kind items are going to be tough to replace. We’ll have to find another throne for Cinderella‘s king, but the play will open on schedule. (I know the king personally; we both sing baritone.)
It goes without saying that the people who did this are despicable scum. RLT is a nonprofit community theater that depends on local government grants and donations for its survival. It has a paid staff of only about a dozen, so everyone else who works on its productions is a volunteer. As our scenic designer was quoted as saying, the thieves were robbing the poor.
I still hold out hope that the stolen items can be recovered. They’re all unique and recognizable pieces, and RLT has excellent records of everything that was taken, including photographs. The thieves will have a hard time disposing of the items locally, and that many large pieces will be difficult to transport out of the area. It would be nice to see RLT get its property back and the thieves put behind bars. But whether that happens or not, the show will go on.
UPDATE: SAS Institute is donating its stockpile of set pieces and furniture (left over from the making of two computer games) to RLT. The collection is valued at about $50,000, or about three and a half times the value of the stolen items. Hooray for SAS!

So what does a light board operator (LBO) actually do? In my case, the answer turned out to be “press a button on cue.” I jokingly told my family that it was a job that a trained monkey could do. There’s a bit more to it than that, however.
My first light board experience was on Once Upon a Mattress, a musical comedy. This turned out to be an excellent show to cut my teeth on, because it didn’t require anything complicated from the LBO, but it involved two spotlight operators as well, allowing me to observe their jobs as well as my own. And because the LBO sits next to the stage manager (SM), I got to see what that job involves as well.
Raleigh Little Theatre has two booths at the back of the auditorium, on either side of the balcony. On the left side of the balcony is the light booth, where the SM and LBO sit in front of a big plate glass window that looks out on the house and the stage. The blue rectangle you can see through the window is the main curtain, which was down when I took the picture. So you can see that the LBO has an excellent view of the stage. The overhead lights (which are turned up all the way in the picture) are dimmed during a performance, so the glare on the window you see here is eliminated. The booth also has a wall speaker that plays the audio feed from microphones above the stage, so we can hear the show as well as see it. Behind the SM and LBO on a raised platform are Spotlight A and its operator. (The platform allows the spotlight beam to shine over the heads of the SM and LBO, through the window, and down to the stage.)
To the balcony’s right is the sound booth, where the sound board operator sits at a similar window, with Spot B behind him or her on another raised platform. All of these people wear headsets and microphones, so that anything said by one is heard by all the others. Also wearing headset-microphones are the two assistant stage managers (ASMs) located at stage left and stage right, who are responsible for overseeing the cast, running crew, and props crew (making sure that people, scenery, and props go on stage when they are supposed to). The house manager (in charge of seating portion of the auditorium and the lobby) has a headset-microphone as well. If you’ve seen Apollo 13, you already know how this headset communication works. It’s very similar to the “loop” used by the Mission Control personnel.
The theatrical equivalent of NASA’s flight director is the SM, who runs the show from the light booth. And I do mean runs — the SM is the absolute ruler of the theater when a play is in progress. On Mattress, the SM was a woman named Ellen, who arrived for my first rehearsal with a ring binder that turned out to contain the musical score and script for the entire play, painstakingly marked to indicate when every entrance, exit, scenery change, light or sound cue, and curtain took place. These cues were numbered in ascending order from the beginning of the play to the end. It was Ellen’s job to make sure everything happened at the proper moment by calling off these cue numbers.
For each cue, Ellen would give a warning about a minute beforehand, a “stand by” about ten seconds before, and then a “go!” Thus, a typical light board cue would go something like this:

SM: Warning for light board cue 160.
LBO: Light board warned.
[About a minute passes.]
SM: Stand by for light board cue 160.
LBO: Light board standing.
[About ten seconds pass.]
SM: Cue 160 . . . go!
[LBO presses the Go button.]

If that seems simple, remember that Ellen was also calling off sound, spotlight, and deck cues at the same time. “Deck,” meaning the stage, indicated cues for the stage right and stage left ASMs (SRASM and SLASM). So in practice, the communication on the headset loop sounded more like this:

SM: Warning for light board cues 160 and 161; deck cue 165; deck, light, and spot cues 170 and 172; and light board and deck cue 180.
LBO: Light board warned.
SLASM: Stage left warned.
SRASM: Stage right warned.
Spot A: Spot A warned.
Spot B: Spot B warned.
SM: Stand by light board cues 160 and 161 and deck cue 165.
LBO: Light board standing.
SLASM: Stage left standing.
SRASM: Stage right standing.
SM: Cue 160, go! . . . Cue 161, go! . . . Cue 165, go! . . . Stand by deck, light, and spot cues 170 and 172.
SLASM: Stage left standing.
SRASM: Stage right standing.
LBO: Light board standing.
Spot A: Spot A standing.
Spot B: Spot B standing.
SM: Cue 170, go! . . . Cue 172, go! . . . Stand by light board and deck cue 180.
LBO: Light board standing.
SLASM: Stage left standing.
SRASM: Stage right standing.
SM: Cue 180, go!

For Mattress, LBO was me. The ASMs and spotlight operators had to have printed lists of their cues, but the light board kept track of all of mine for me. All I had to do was look at the monitor to see what the current light cue was, as well as the previous one and the next two in the programmed sequence. The board knew what to do for each cue, and all I had to do was press the Go button (indicated by the red arrow) when Ellen gave the word. Most of the other controls on the board were off limits during a performance, but there were a couple of other buttons that I would have to use if I screwed up. I would press Hold if I realized that I had started a light cue prematurely; this would freeze the lights in their current state. And pressing Back would tell the board to return to the previous cue.
That’s what my job was like during Once Upon a Mattress. On the next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, things got a bit more complicated. I’ll tell you about that in part 3.

A Streetcar Named Desire is nearing the end of its run at Raleigh Little Theatre. Since this it the second play for which I’ve served on the light crew, I should probably write something about what I’ve been doing.
Before I got involved at RLT, I had never given much thought to the importance of lighting. I certainly had never thought that they might be more important in live theater than in television or film. I just assumed that the role of lights was simply to illuminate the cast and set to make them clearly visible. But even in TV and movies, lights do more than that — they are used to create a mood or tone for each scene. One example that stands out in my mind is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” in which we see an alternate-universe version of Enterprise that has been fighting a war against the Klingons for two decades. This Enterprise is superfically the same as the one we know, but it’s a warship rather than a vessel of exploration and diplomacy, and one way you can see the difference is in the lighting. On the familiar Enterprise, the bridge is a brightly-lit workplace, while Ten Forward has subdued lighting that gives it a nightclub atmosphere — fitting for the place where the crewmembers go to relax and socialize. On the warship Enterprise, those lighting choices are reversed: Ten Forward is a brightly-lit military commissary, bustling with activity, and the bridge is a dimly-lit command post with glowing displays at each station, like an air traffic control center. The sets are the same, but the lighting changes their character entirely.
In live theater, lighting is much more important because there is no camera. TV and movie directors can use camera angles and depth of field to channel the viewer’s attention and emphasize some characters or objects over everything else in the picture. For an example of this, watch the first scene of The Matrix and notice the shot in which the pay phone rings. The emphasis shifts from the phone (in the extreme foreground) to Trinity (in the background) without any movement of the camera, just by changing which object is in sharp focus. Closeups, cuts, pans, tracking . . . you can’t do any of that on stage. The audience can see the entire set all the time.
So it’s up to lighting to not only establish mood, but also indicate emphasis. This is done by shifting which areas of the set are brightly lit and which ones are dim. To emphasize a single character, you use a spotlight. Mood and tone are created mostly through the use of gels to add color, and sometimes with masks called gobos that create patterns of light and shadow (to suggest moonlight through a window, for example). All of this has to be set up ahead of time. Cinematographers can pan, tilt, track, and zoom their cameras as they shoot a scene, and rearrange their lighting between shots. On stage, the lights are static, and only their levels can be manipulated in real time. This means that for each lighting effect used in the play, a group of lights has to be hung and focused specifically to achieve that effect.
By the time I (and the rest of the light crew) get involved with a play, the lighting designer has already worked out the details of this. When we show up for the first light hang session, the designer has a light plan for the show — a kind of blueprint that shows what lights (or “instruments,” as the tech crew refers to them) go where. Specifically, it indicates the number of each type of instrument, where it is to be mounted, what circuit it should be connected to, the direction in which it should be pointed, how wide a beam it will cast, how sharp or fuzzy the edges of that beam should be, and what sort of gels or gobos are to be used. The light crew follows this plan to hang the lights in their assigned places and adjust them appropriately.
Once the instruments are hung and focused, they have to be turned on and off in groups at appropriate points in the play. This could theoretically be done by switching the various lighting circuits on and off, but you would have to know what groups of instruments are connected to each one, what their dramatic effect is, and when those effects begin and end. Lighting people used to do this sort of thing manually, but nowadays it’s all run with a computerized light board. The lighting designer programs the board with a series of lighting cues that switch circuits on and off in groups as needed to achieve the desired lighting effects. (Actually, the instruments in question are usually brightened and dimmed gradually, rather than switched abruptly on and off.) When the board is fully programmed, the lighting cues for each scene (and the transitions between them) are fully specified in the proper sequence, and you can advance from one to the next just by pressing a button. That’s where I, as light board operator, come in.
To be continued . . .