My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady was the first play that I enjoyed in spite of the play itself. Personally, I don't think My Fair Lady is a very good play. But at Chapel Hill High School, we did the hell out of that show. Of all the shows that have been on Broadway over the years, My Fair Lady is the one with the greatest number of scene shifts, in which the sets change completely and you're no longer in Henry Higgins' study but in his mother's conservatory or at the horse races. We started building the set immediately after The Mousetrap was finished. We ordered floor plans from a rental house. There were some eleven large set pieces to build, and we worked long and hard. The scenic drawings required a 24-by-12 (read: huge) platform to roll up- and down-stage. This wagon, which included a fullsize spiral stair, formed part of Henry Higgins' study and certainly weighed at least 200 pounds all by itself. To form the rest of the study were two 12-by-2 platforms that were about 14 feet high. They backed up behind the 24-by-12 wagon to form the study's back wall. They were also reversible: on the other side, they appeared to be the exterior of Henry Higgins' house.

In short, the set was insane. I've just described to you three of the eleven equally-complicated set pieces that we had to build. All were huge, and all were complicated.

As one of eight stagehands, forming part of a total floor crew of about a dozen (plus at least two or three including the props crew), it was my job to help move these pieces back and forth on stage between scenes. I received specific tasks that I repeated nightly: push the 'B' wagon onstage, help another stagehand rotate the 'F' wagon into its exterior position, latch together the 'C' and 'D' platforms and lock their wheels, roll the escape stairs into place behind the 'E' wagon. The moves were carefully choreographed at the "war table," which was a scale plan of the stage with scale cutouts representing each set piece. Before each move, the floor crew, headed by crew chiefs Justen Stelly and Eric Hirsh, gathered at the war table to remember which tasks belonged to which techie. After each move, we gathered to go over ways to potentially streamline that shift the next time it came up. Although the scene shifts took place in blackout, the audience was able to appreciate them as if they were some kind of bizarre ballet with huge wooden platforms instead of dancers.

On preview night (May 2, 2002), we had our first audience. The preview shows generally have a small audience of 40-80, which gets its tickets at a significant discount because the show is still unfinished when it is viewed by a preview audience. This was a typical preview rehearsal until more than halfway through the first act. The dratted 12-by-2 platforms were remarkably cumbersome because they were so damned tall. They also rode on eight swivel casters, which made them a great deal more maneuverable but also significantly more unpredictable. On May 2, during a scene shift, while Eric Hirsh and Matt Duvall pushed one of these unwieldy platforms into position, one of its eight wheels buckled. You've seen the type of wheel before. It's a four-inch swivel caster. The wheel spins around to roll in any direction on a ring of ball bearings. These ball bearings were tired of the weight piled on top of them and jumped ship, popping out of the apparatus. The platform lurched and, in ultra-slow motion from my perspective (about ten feet away from it) crashed to the stage. Orchestra conductor David Knight has created a sign language to speak to his orchestra, which he cannot verbally speak to in the middle of a play. One signal means "get the hell out of the way, something is falling into the orchestra pit!" To my knowledge, David Knight has used this signal exactly once.

It's funny. In my memory, the falling of the platform takes place in slow motion, but the events afterward all happen in rapid succession. Within seconds, I was next to the platform, calling up to the light board for some light. It became clear from his moans of pain that Crew Chief Eric Hirsh's foot was trapped beneath the platform. A few well-meaning audience members dashed up to help lift the wagon off of Eric's leg. The floor crew ran to the downed platform and lifted it safely, but Eric's leg was injured. Although it wasn't broken, his leg had gone through a trauma, and it wouldn't be doing much more until well after My Fair Lady was over. J.T. announced to the audience that the show would continue after repairs were made to the set, and we fixed the damned thing right then and there. After about twenty minutes, the curtain went back up and we resumed the show right where we'd left off. For the rest of the evening, indeed, the rest of the show's run, we took all scene shifts very carefully. And to this day, there hangs a memorial to Eric Hirsh's right foot. It is a torn piece of plywood hanging above the door to the tool room. Written in Sharpie®, with an arrow pointing to the splintered tear, it reads, "Eric's foot: don't let this happen to you."

I've told the quintessential My Fair Lady story. Anyone involved with My Fair Lady at Hanes Theatre will tell you the same story, just like anyone involved with West Side Story will tell you about the time the scrim was torn (I wasn't there, but I've heard that story enough that I remember being right next to it as it happened). But what stands out most for me individually about the show is that I enjoyed the hell out of it. Something about having an important job and doing it well and thanklessly makes me feel good. I've said several times that I enjoyed My Fair Lady most of all the plays I've done at Chapel Hill High, and I think that's true, although it's a very difficult thing to assess.