The Mousetrap

It was my freshman year. I'd gotten one show (Children of Eden) under my belt, and I was ready for my second show. I volunteered for the light board job on The Mousetrap because I was convinced that it was a really important job, in which I would get to manipulate a ton of sliders and look really important. Had I known the intricacies of our lighting system (notably its significant automation) I might have thought twice about committing two and a half weeks of afternoons and evenings to Hanes Theatre. You see, the ETC Express 250 is a computerized console; it remembers up to 600 sets of precise levels (that is, 600 cue states) for each of 250 dimmers and plays them back in sequence. A manual board would have more closely resembled my fantasy light board operator experience, and I finally realized that fantasy during Metamorphoses three years later.

For The Mousetrap, though, my job was to press the Go button at precise moments throughout the show under the direction of Production Stage Manager Adele Williams. Adele was a senior, and an awesome techie. For this show, she assumed the dual role of Stage Manager and Lighting Designer, a lot of responsibility for one person to assume. I remember sitting next to her and pushing the button right on command. Lighting-wise, the show wasn't very complicated. I pushed the button a total of about twenty-six times during the course of the two-act play. The only real challenge for me was that a few of these cues had to be precisely synchronized with stage actions (i.e. an actor walks to a desk lamp and turns it on). For such cues, Adele allowed me to take the visual cue without waiting for her "Go".

As a play, The Mousetrap was somewhat enjoyable. It is an Agatha Christie murder mystery. A woman dies, after which the seven remaining characters, who are completely isolated in their mountain vacation home during a severe blizzard, must determine which of them committed the act. It was moderately well-acted, but the actors had very serious trouble with two things: projection and memorization. Few of their words could be heard clearly from my station at the rear of the orchestra section, and many words were completely missing. In performance one day, they skipped over a good two pages of important dialogue without covering.

It was a play, though, and as it was my second play, I got a kind of high off my job. The headset, the flashing lights before me, the buttons and sliders; even though I didn't get to do anything with them, their very presence made me feel important. It was my first show of five "behind the console," which means that even if I wasn't doing much, I was in the thick of the action. Seated alongside the stage manager, I heard her cue the sound operator, the stagehands, and her assistants whenever anything was about to happen. The feeling of being in the middle of everything is quite infectious, and I tried to be behind the console for as many shows as possible.