Interview: Theatre Life with the Stage Management Team of ANGELS IN AMERICA at Round House Theatre

Today's subjects are living their theatre lives overseeing the nightly operations for one of the most ambitious productions the area has ever seen. It's so big that it took two theatres to co-produce it. I'm speaking of Round House Theatre and Olney Theatre Center's production of Angels in America, Tony Kushner's two-part, nearly-seven-hour Tony Award-winning magnum opus. Millennium Approaches (Part 1) and Perestroika (Part 2) run in repertory through October 30th and are performed at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, MD.

Keeping a show this big running smoothly falls on the shoulders of a stage management (SM) team that is like no other. It takes a special breed of person to be an effective stage manager because you have to deal with many different personalities and the quirks that every actor has. In this case, the SM team not only has to have a lot of patience and extremely solid people skills, but also has to be ready to deal with an abundance of technical challenges. This production includes smoke, snow, and an actress who flies. In fact, it has basically everything you might imagine in a large-scale production except for a bucket loader and a green faced actress singing '"Defying Gravity" - so that just adds to the list of things that could go wrong. My point here is with a lesser SM team, this production could have been bedlam during the tech process.

The woman charged with overseeing the show nightly - while keeping the directors visions intact - from her perch in the booth is the super production stage manager (PSM) Marne Anderson. With all of the moving parts in this show, nothing can move, execute, or shift without Marne giving the crew a GO!! Lights, sound, or scenic shifts, nothing happens without Marne's say so during a performance.

Moving stage left we have Che Wernsman. She is the deck stage manager for this production tasked with troubleshooting things that might come up during a performance, running the automation, and keeping track of who does what with some immaculately kept run sheets.

On stage right, Jack Riley is billed as the production assistant (PA), but it's really an assistant stage manager position. He is responsible for running one of the manual winch palettes that moves furniture pieces on and off the stage and keeping crew members - such as yours truly - in line.

Jack came to the show from Olney Theatre Center, and because he is a PA for their whole season, yesterday was his last performance of Angels in America. He is now back at Olney Theatre Center brushing up on his "Step in Time" steps (not really but he does have an onstage cameo) as he prepares to open Mary Poppins.

Taking over Jack's track is Jessica Short. Keep in mind, Jack has been with Angels in America since July. Jessica learned the tracks for both parts in just over a week. If you have or are going to see the show, you'll realize that is a huge accomplishment.

Angels in America is a huge show for no matter who produces it. The fact that Round House Theatre and Olney Theatre Center came together to produce it says that both houses thought that even after 25 years, this play needed to still be seen. The fact that they put together a stage management team that consists of two vets and two newcomers that act like vets proves that both theatres knew what needed to be done going in if the production was going to succeed. In the words of Elaine Stritch, "Everybody Rise" and give Marne, Che, Jack and Jessica a well-deserved, though not often received, round of applause. It's because of these folks that you are wowed when sitting in the darkened theatre. "The messenger has arrived!!"

Where did each of you get your SM training and had any of you been working as something else before getting into this profession?

Marne- I attended University of North Carolina School of the Arts and majored in Stage Management. I've been pretty fortunate to have stage management as my full time job since graduation. I moved to DC for a fellowship at Arena Stage and have stayed in the area working in numerous theatres in the area ever since.

Che- I came to stage managing more from the experience track than from the education track. I got my degree at Virginia Tech in Psychology with minors in Sociology and Theatre. I stage managed only one production in college, but quickly fell into local theatre in Norfolk, VA where my husband was stationed with the Navy and where I worked as a civil servant. The Generic Theatre in Norfolk was my training ground, theatrical home for five years, and where I discovered my passion for stage managing. We transferred overseas to the United Kingdom for three years and there I was able to work with a local theatre group and introduce them to the "American" way of stage managing, opening a door for me into teaching. When I returned to the United States, I was fortunate enough to get to work with the Virginia Shakespeare Festival in Williamsburg, which cemented my desire to work professionally as a stage manager. Rep Stage in Columbia, Maryland was my first Equity contract and I've been working in the DC/Baltimore area ever since. Stage management is also a lifetime of training - we learn something with every production, every cast and crew, and every theatre. And we teach others by example (good and bad!) and by mentoring throughout our careers.

Jack- I graduated from the University of Maryland's (UMD) School of Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies this past May. During my time there, I stage managed a slew of theatre, dance, and opera productions under the tutelage of Round House Theatre's former Resident PSM, Cary Gillett. Last summer, I completed the SM internship at Studio Theatre and worked on their production of Silence! The Musical. Currently, I'm continuing my training as one of the SM apprentices at Olney Theatre Center, which is how I ended up here!

Working in the theatre has always sort of been on my trajectory, although I was very briefly studying broadcast journalism in college. At 22, being backstage is where I think I'm meant to be.

Jessica- I graduated in 2013 from James Madison University with a BA in Theatre. After school I completed two stage management internships with Weston Playhouse and Florida Repertory Theatre before settling down in DC in summer of 2014. Over the past two years, I have had the pleasure of working as part of the stage management team or crew at several theatres in town such as the Kennedy Center (Theatre for Young Audiences), Arena Stage, Signature Theatre, Round House Theatre, Forum Theatre, 1st Stage Theatre, Anacostia Playhouse, and Flying V Theatre.

Marne and Che, you have both worked on some pretty large-scale shows in and around the DC area. Is Angels in America the most challenging production you've run across, or have there been others that top it for complexity?

Marne- Angels in America has had its challenges, but I think it's on par with some other shows I've worked on. I just recently worked on All the Way at Arena Stage. It was a cast of seventeen playing one to seven characters each, a turn table with a donut, and scene changes galore all in the round. It presented its own challenges, but once we got into a rhythm it was a piece of cake. When dealing with a show like this with so many moving pieces all the preshow checks become that much more important - making sure all the tracks are functioning properly, everything is preset where it needs to be. It's a machine that works best when all the cogs are in line. The one element that makes this show feel very large is the flying of an actor, and that has been the largest learning curve for us all on this production.

Che- Angels ranks pretty high up there for me. I think Mame at the Kennedy Center was the most complex show I've worked on so far just based on sheer size of the production. But these two shows combined are quite the challenge.

Angels in America has the same cast in both parts, but two different directors. Can you please tell us what the rehearsal process was like and how you schedule rehearsal time for two separate directors with the same cast?

Marne- The rehearsal schedule was mapped out by Ryan [Rilette], Jason [Loewith], Round House, and stage management months before we even went into rehearsal. We started with a week of reading and discussing both parts of Angels then we focused on Millennium Approaches alone for two weeks of staging. After that week, we started staging Perestroika with a few Millennium Approaches rehearsals sprinkled in to make sure it all stayed fresh. We had some difficulties jumping back and forth between Perestroika and Millennium Approaches when trying to stage Part 2. We flipped around some of our rehearsals to ensure that every rehearsal day was productive for the directors and actors.

Jack, this is one of your first professional theatre credits after recently graduating from UMD. Did you think that you would be working this size show so early in your professional career? Has it been a learning experience for you? If so, what have you learned?

Jack- To be frank, it's pretty mind boggling to me that I'm working on this show. Coincidentally, Angels is the play that made me decide to commit to studying theatre in college. During winter break of my sophomore year, the HBO mini-series was on TV and I was totally transfixed by it. I found a copy of the play at the library the next day and devoured it in a couple of hours. I was pretty lost at that point in school, and Angels sort of opened my eyes to what I was missing out on. I declared the theatre major very soon after and haven't looked back since.

Yes, this has been a huge learning experience! Angels, for me, is really stage management boot camp. Two plays in repertory, flying effects, automated set pieces, countless quick changes, a plethora of props and furniture to store in our postage stamp of a backstage... the list goes on and on. While it's good for me to be exposed to these technical elements so early in my career, the most important lessons I've learned from Che, Marne and John have been the soft skills of managing people. My biggest takeaway from this experience will be their lessons in taking care of actors and crew backstage. Being the ally backstage whom your personnel know they can count on consistently is something I always strive for as a SM and will continue to reach for moving forward in my career.

Che, you were PSMing another show during the rehearsals of Angels in America. Were you able to do both shows at the same time or was there another SM at Angels until you could join full time?

Che- John Keith Hall started with the Angels SM team in rehearsals until I was done with The Little Mermaid at Imagination Stage. We worked out a turnover and then I took over the backstage SM duties about a week before the company moved to stage. John created a great foundation for me and made the turnover very easy. I'm very grateful for all his hard work and that of Jack & Marne, too!

Marne, as the one that is overseeing the entire production nightly, what were some of the biggest challenges involved in getting this show open that you wouldn't encounter on, say, a three-character-and-a -chair play?

Marne- This show has so many moving pieces. We were in tech for a month; that is not very typical for a regional theatre production. We opened Millennium Approaches and we still had another show to get tech'd and open. Perestroika was theoretically the more challenging show, but the tech went much smoother. The designers and crew already had one show under their belt. The base of our set doesn't change, we all knew how the moving pieces work, and the vocabulary was already created. Those are usually the things that slow you down the most during tech. Now that we're open, I get to watch the show nightly and make sure it stays consistent with what we set during tech.

Jessica, you are coming as a takeover SM so Jack can return to Olney Theatre Center. Is it a bit daunting walking into such a large show and being asked to pick up everything in such a short time or is it just part of the job?

Jessica- This is definitely the largest project I've had to take on in such a short period of time. With the total run time between the two shows clocking in at around seven hours, it can seem a bit daunting at times, but I feel incredibly supported by the entire SM team and crew. This is also my first show working with a flying rig, and I'm incredibly excited to work with that element. It helps that I tend to pick things up pretty quickly, but my main priorities have been taking notes and asking tons of questions before my counterpart leaves on Sunday. What makes my job much easier is starting out with the great foundation of paperwork created by the team, and then I can add reminders to my run sheet that work specifically for me. I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the run with the team!

Some theatergoers might think seven hours of theatre is too much for them. What would each of you say to a person that is skeptical about seeing Angels in America to get them to attend?

Marne- Kimberly Gilbert keeps comparing coming to see both parts as "binge-watching" theatre. I think that's a pretty fair analogy. Though AIDS is not the same epidemic that it used to be the themes and relationships in the show still ring so true. I feel so privileged to watch each and every one of these actors onstage every night giving phenomenal performances.

Che- It would certainly be time well spent! The cast is superb, the stories deeply moving and technically the show is fantastic - although I might be biased a bit there. See Millennium Approaches and you'll want to come back to see Perestroika.

Special Thanks to Round House Theatre's Associate Director of Marketing & Communications Sarah Pressler Randall for her assistance in coordinating the multiple interviews for this piece.

Theatre Life logo designed by Kevin Laughon.

To post a comment, you must register and login.