On the Arts drama
From Page to Stage
How Pingry’s Theater Tech Students Create the World of the Play By Joseph Napolitano, Head of Technical Theater and Design
It starts with a script. From there, Pingry’s theater tech students develop solutions to an array of creative problems presented by the story. The essential questions on any given day range from “How do we produce a larger-thanlife version of Amycus, Poseidon’s son of Greek mythology, onstage?” to “How do we fit a 16-foot-wide, 24-foot-tall ship into the theatre?” These, of course, are unique to the 2021 Fall Play Argonautika, a modern adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts’ mythical quest for the golden fleece. This highly anticipated return to indoor theater marked the first mainstage production with a live audience of Pingry parents, guardians, alumni, and family in the Macrae Theatre since 2019. With a specific set of challenges unlike anything the drama students have encountered in the past three years, Argonautika was a voyage for the ages and leveraged into one fantastic production all of the special skills the theater tech students have learned. This mix of soft and hard skills that theater tech students (or “Techies” as they are affectionately called) have honed covers carpentry, scenic painting, and design theory, but also includes leadership, communication, collaboration, and problem solving. These skills, coupled with their understanding of contemporary stage craft’s tools, mechanics, and conventions, allow them to conceptualize anything indicated in the script. For Argonautika, puppetry and upcycled material served as a solution to some of the script’s fantasy requirements. Theater tech students designed the puppets out of foam, cardboard, and recycled fabric. The method of upcycling—or
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THE PINGRY REVIEW | WINTER 2021-22
creative reuse—is integrated into the theater tech crew’s process and is their first step in prototyping and modeling. These ideas are scaled into the set construction. While 60 percent of the scenic elements for Argonautika were fabricated from recycled lumber, students custom built the whole set for the production. Working drawings, elevations, and cut lists (lists of the parts needed to construct a set piece) were created while the crew began construction. Memories are embedded into some of the materials they used—luan hardwood recycled from a 2019 musical, pine from a 2020 play. There’s a sense of palimpsest and lessonslearned from past theater-making experiences. For Evan Berger ’22, the 2022 Winter Musical Urinetown is the 10th production he’s helped stage at Pingry. When he’s not leading his peers backstage in construction and rigging, he’s operating an intricate lighting system from the booth. When a challenge strikes during a performance, such as a broken set piece or missed cue, Evan knows how to solve problems creatively. “During the run of a show, it’s the crew’s job to perform their technical roles like lighting and sound, but also to ensure the actors have what they need to put on the best performance possible,” he says. During the first weeks of production for Urinetown, Evan and his team traded their drills and hammers for title blocks and T-squares. Students drafted elevations from technical drawings and assembled scale architectural models of the set. These models help the crew work through the construction and installation of the set, and serve as a tool for communication to the rest of the company. “The most
