So, tech happened. 

Yep, it sure did.

Damn, there's a lot of stuff in this show.

You see, we here at Perpetual Motion have a bad history of putting in a lot of stuff that seems simple at first and quickly balloons into complex procedures that require incredible timing and luck.

In our 2005 outing, Common Frequency, we had virtually no set.  The idea was that we left the space open for actors and props to move fluidly and paint the rest in with sound.  Simple concept, eh?  It became a long, hard experiment in putting wheels on every single piece of furniture that we used (including a bed, which is much harder than it looks), tracking the complex movements of props across three storylines, and creating a soundtrack that kept expanding until we had 96 sound cues from two separate sources in a 55-minute show.  I thought our stage manager's head was going to explode.

In 2006, we rolled out The Depth of the Ocean, which had such a pristine, simple stage picture: one raft and one backdrop.  No scene changes, no light changes, only 4 sound cues.  Simple, right?  No.  This plunged us into a months-long field study in the chaotic dynamics of keeping a goddamn raft still on water.  Four or five complicated rigging systems resulted in an elaborate underwater network of ropes and weights, and the raft still moved around somewhat willy-nilly.  Add to that the fact that we had to retrofit this and a 40-foot-long backdrop into a pool and set up seating everynight, and it kind of made me wish for a quick drowning some nights.

In 2007, we took The Depth of the Ocean up to Toronto, and we thought we had all the kinks worked out and there would be no trouble.  Then Eric dropped a board on his head, the pool started making gigantic sucking noises, our raft sprung a leak, and we realized that nothing we had set up in the Minneapolis Y was going to work in the U of Toronto's Athletic Centre. 

Now, here we are doing it to ourselves again.  We thought it would be cool to have a pair of ropes traveling over our heads.  It would be a simple, visually interesting convention for flying in props, signs, lights, and whatever else we could hang on a rope.  Such a simple little idea...  Now we have four 8-foot-tall uprights we have to cram into each vom at the Arena Stage, each one supporting a wheel that will rotate and feet those simple little lines on and off, the whole works held in place by 50-pound bags of sand.  And then we decided to light some scenes only with flashlights.  And then we decided to have a bunch of sound cues.  And then there was the Billy the Big-Mouth Bass... (but that's a whole other blog entry on it's own)

Anyway, we survived tech with some timing and luck.  The timing was snagging a great tech slot on a Sunday evening, when it's easy to get in and out of the Rarig.  The luck was snagging a stage manager who ended up also being one of the official Fringe Techs at our venue.  We didn't plan this.  It just happened.  And it was awesome.

So, Jenny Moeller, our wonderful Stage Manager, to you we say:

Please don't hate us!

Oh, and you rock.