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September 07, 2005
Comments from Kathy Kohl
I was at Rarig during those heady Three-Prong Designer years, when design students were required to fulfill competency requirements in set, costume and lighting design. My memories of that time tend to be filled in tiny vignettes because we were constantly sprinting to keep up with assignments and productions. I know we all felt that, after Rarig, the real design world would be much, much easier. I believe we were correct!
I suspect I won the prize for the lighting department’s example of “what not to do when lighting a show.” For my MFA senior project (JB Priestley’s TIME AND THE CONWAYS), I was given a show with detailed sets and costumes and a notoriously simple lighting plot (the faculty had spotted my weakness as soon as I walked through the doors) performed in the Areana, my favorite theater at Rarig. Thinking I was utilizing materials and instruments very efficiently, I emptied the barrels and used every single cable available for the Arena. The lighting students wouldn’t speak to me for several weeks afterwards without making cracks about “spaghetti in the sky….”
We had drawing class at a humorless 8 am twice a week with Lance Brockman. It was actually a wonderful, relaxing class and we could come out of it totally in our right brains (remember that?) and very foggy. One assignment was to find a detail of architecture to sketch within Rarig. After a few months in that building, we were all so tired of concrete that this was an extremely trying assignment. I did finally find one intriguingly angled and braced corner of the upstairs ceiling that spoke to me, serving to remind me of the passion behind this architecture of the brutal. I added grey to my basic 80’s black wardrobe the very next day.
My tenure at Rarig also included serving as rehearsal accompanist for the department. We were holding auditions in the proscenium for “Working” by Studs Terkel on particularly star-crossed evening, and had had a spateful of creaky auditionees. Our final act, the one who totally shut us down, was a man who had himself grandly introduced by his “manager,” handed me his music (“The Candyman”) and proceeded to deliver this inane piece, complete with props. I slowed to a finish after the proscribed eight bars, but he slipped the clutch and drove the whole seven verses. The student director closed the doors immediately after he left, there was a brief silence, then we laughed until we cried.
Other quickie memories:
--Dave Doersch (our resident stage combat freak) (sorry, Dave) jumping from the second balcony down to the Pit cushions (a lovely orange naugahyde in those days);
--my son, Aaron, one of the resident Child Actors for the department during this time, supplementing his meager allowance with change he collected by crawling under the vending machines (yuch);
--my older son Bryan enraged that he had to attend school sporting a ‘20s-style wedge haircut for his “Six Characters in Search of an Author” role; the next year, a year too late in his books, the style was the trend;
--taking advantage of a low Mississippi River in 1988 that caused the Showboat stage to list several degrees to one side, and playing the accompaniment faster when the singers had to climb up the rake in the oleos, heh, heh.
— Kathy Kohl’s memories of Rarig, 1984-1987
Posted by utheatre at September 7, 2005 10:18 PM | Memories of former students