A whale of a tale or two
'Bout the flappin' fish and the girls I've loved
On nights like this with the moon above
A whale of a tale and it's all true
I swear by my tattoo
Back in March, while ACT was closed for our renovation, Carina and I moved to UNCA to co-produce Peter and the Starcatcher, directed by Chanda Calentine. I designed the set, and worked in the scene shop building it with the students while Carina did the same in the costume shop. It was a very cool experience for us because we are both graduates from the UNCA Drama department. I graduated in 2009 and Carina in 2015.
Because ACT was also staging it's youth productions on the same stage and set (that we just kept repainting) the schedule was tightly booked and there weren't many days the stage was clear for an entire 12 hours. So on the Saturday night before tech, we found ourselves in a bit of a pickle. I had a detailed floor treatment I needed to complete and seal in one night before the actor's shoes ruined the paint the next day. And Carina needed the entire stage floor to size and sew a 60' long mermaid tail.
The only solution was teamwork. And a lot of coffee.
And apparently a lot of potatoes.
Carina calls anything that can be used as a fabric weight a potato. In this case, a pipe cutter.
The tail was the brain child of Chanda and Carina. The character is a mermaid transformed from a salmon by starstuff. Now she's the wisest mermaid on the island, and mentors Peter when he falls into her golden water filled grotto. The plan was that Missy would be wheeled out holding the fabric and drop it, to be spread out the by entire ensemble, who would then gently flutter it up and down while Peter tumbled and floated.
The parachute material was donated to us by local Mills Manufacturing, and created the perfect canvas for our lighting designer Rob Bowen to paint with beautiful undulating golden light.
Back to Saturday night. Because she needed to drape perfectly white fabric over the space I needed to paint, we had to make a finely structured schedule, where I'd paint a section and rapidly dry it while she'd sew two panels of parachute fabric together at 40-60' long seams. Which luckily for me takes a minute. Because I was working on a 4 step treatment. I'd have to work in spurts on whatever areas I thought I could dry in time, at whatever step I'd left off on. I spent the majority of the night jumping up to run to the paint shop and repeatedly wash my brushes so they wouldn't harden during my pauses and bouncing between steps. And because I was mainly dry brushing, I had to keep smacking my brushes dry like Bob Ross.
After Carina had completed a panel, she would come out with her tail, and I'd act as her fit model. To do this I'd stand on the ladder that Missy, our actress, would stand on, and try not to drift off to sleep as Carina rolled out the material and pinned together the next seam. Because of the massive length and her concerns of running out, she had to work with the roll still attached, either dragging behind her until it got stuck in the doorway of the costume shop or rolling off in the valms. An umbilical cord attaching her to the stage while her machine whirled at speeds it probably wasn't manufactured for.
Taken at roughly 3 AM. Note all the potatos.
By 4 AM we were both fading. I was down to my last treatment step-- completing the lining on the planked compass. I chose to line by hand rather than by bamboo stick for better accuracy, which unfortunately requires gliding the the side of my knuckles and palm against the floor to steady my hand. It left my hands, already cracked from all the brush washing, raw and sore, as I hunched over the stage floor on my bad knees to see my guide lines.
At that point Carina discovered she'd sewn a panel with the seam facing the wrong direction. As I lined, Carina meticulously pulled out her seam and all the little threads so she could re-do it. And in that lurch, we had to rally. Because the night was no longer young, and she had to finish fitting that tail before I sealed the floor and if I didn't seal it by 8AM it wouldn't be dry for rehearsal.
Around seven she had gotten far enough that were able to pre-pin the remaining panels and I got to sealing the floor. I cleaned up my paints and prepped the space for tech the following day and finally left at 8:30 AM to return in two hours after a short nap. Carina chose to stay and work through until rehearsal. We were both zombies when the actors gleefully showed up for our day of tech rehearsal. But we'd succeeded.
All our hard work definitely paid off. I was very pleased with the result of my floor treatment, and the mermaid tail was a magical moment in the show. It took a lot of rehearsal for us to find the perfect way to fold it for a seamless and untwisted reveal, and a lot of trial and error to figure out the fastest and safest way to get it off stage at the end of the scene. Luckily Carina's partner, Ezra, had a lot of experience folding giant football field sized flags and walked us through the process--which took almost the entire cast and crew. As for the exit, we figured out we had to funnel the fabric down if we'd ever get it off without tripping actors or smacking audience member's faces. We eventually worked out the system of Missy unclipping the tail, sprinting off stage, passing Conner, who was holding a metal ring that Missy would loop the fabric through, then continue sprinting offstage. I stood directly off stage waiting until she passed me to start pulling and gathering as fast as I could. And with the three of us, combined with strobing lights and fog, the tail disappeared off stage as magically as it unfolded.