the timboucher experience

Stage hands, or “techies”, depending on who’s doing the describing are more or less univerally known for their ability to see in the dark. I don’t know if it’s something we bring genetically going into the game, or if it’s something that can be developed in anyone who works backstage. My guess is probably the latter. Although maybe there would be some small merit in looking at the typical actor genome versus the tech one.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the director of The Cherry Orchard began one day during rehearsal, “but Tim can see really well in the dark.”

Everyone started laughing; it’s kind of an absurd statement. But the plan - before the plan was changed - was for me to come on during a blackout after the character Firs, an aged manservant, falls to the floor dead and forgotten and help him up and offstage before the curtain call. I doubted it when he said it, but the director was right, I discovered I could see – or maybe sense, because I knew the layout of the stage (having built it) well enough to move out there in pitch black and help the old man up. But of course, they cut it – they always cut it. Unless they don’t.

The thing about actors – though not so much on the professional level, moreso on the college-amateur level – is that they don’t have this mysterious ability to see in the dark. They can and will trip over, step on or run into any and every thing which you as a techie have carefully arranged just so backstage for the next scene. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the lights, of course. The lights when you’re on stage are so bright that they can be blinding. To step out of a full intensely lit situation into almost complete darkness backstage, you’re bound to experience moments of temporary almost blindness. Until your eyes adjust though, they always adjust. Especially if you’ve been doing this sort of work for years, it seems. You become accustomed to sudden radical shifts in your perceptual and behavioral systems, so that – hopefully – you don’t trip over things anymore backstage.

The headsman comes on just before the end of Act I during Yeomen, and remains up on the headsman’s block until the main rag closes and intermission begins. So this means that you go from full lights down to total blackout in an instant. I had ascended four large stairs during my scene to get to the block. When the lights went out, I suddenly found myself alone in the dark halfway up a huge staircase with a prop and set piece to carry off to stage right. All that and I was completely hooded, with only eye-slits to navigate by. Not that it mattered any in the dark. They didn’t help. I might as well have had my eyes closed. But I didn’t panic, though I heard from below one of the actors freaking out over the same problem from a less treacherous vantage point. What I did was just slide my feet forward slowly until I found the edge of each stair, took my time and got offstage without a hitch. Maybe I was born to be a techie, after all.

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