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With the men in high collars and tailcoats and women in long dresses, this summer night has the air of an aristocratic garden party in the Arboretum.
That’s close to what is happening onstage in SummerFest’s production of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which runs through Sunday night. But backstage, where we are, its much more of a variety show, from card den to track meet to tailor shop to knitting circle, all played out with the hush of a library.
Backstage at the annual outdoor summer theater festival is quite different from a traditional theater, folks involved with the festival say, and not just because of the bugs and the heat.
“It’s much more communal,” says Tim Hull, who plays several roles in Pride and Prejudice. “In most theaters, everyone is off in their dressing rooms backstage and you don’t see a lot of each other. Here, we’re all out in this space, and we sort of have to stay in it.”
When offstage, the actors have to stay in a fairly confined area directly behind the stage. Otherwise, the audience might see Tom Phillips (Mr. Darcy), making funny faces at microphone technician Kim Dixon; or Stephanie Peniston (Lady Catherine) not wearing her gray wig and working a crossword puzzle.
If you were wondering if those jackets and complicated shirts are hot on the men, yes they are. When the guys came off the stage after the first scene on opening night, they fanned themselves like ladies in an un-air conditioned church.
The volumes of sweat generated by the 19th-century wardrobe styles keeps Dixon busy, as the taped-on microphones have a tendency to slip out of place on moist skin.
The one actor Dixon doesn’t have to worry about is Ellie Clark, who plays leading lady Elizabeth Bennet.
“She has two microphones, one in her hair and one on her face,” Dixon says. Clark is double-miked because, “She comes offstage so infrequently, if something goes wrong, I won’t have time to grab her whenever she does come offstage.”
When Dixon is not performing the delicate task of applying tape to slippery skin, she is knitting. So is assistant stage manager Hayley Sternberger, who is perched at the left stairs to the stage always wearing a headset that connects her to people at the control board in the amphitheater.
“It’s a good, mindless thing I can do with my hands,” she says of knitting.
Frequently she puts her work down to make big arm gestures to people who need to do things, like fellow assistant stage manager Thea Wigglesworth. She is responsible for plugging in the water pump to make an onstage fountain operate on cue. Sternberger and Wigglesworth have fun with the task, using dramatic, exaggerated expressions to communicate when it’s time to plug and unplug.
Tuesday night, at the final dress rehearsal, Dixon admitted she created some unintended drama with the fountain.
“I didn’t know what the cord was for, so I moved it over there,” she says, referring to the area under the stage. “So the first fountain cue, no one could find it.”
That night, the fountain actually drew chuckles from the crew when it miraculously sprang to life halfway through a scene.
As daylight fades, the only light backstage is provided by two industrial lights that shine onto the dressing trailers. The lights are very bright, but Dixon jokes, “they’ll get dimmer” as more bugs swarm around them.
A constant equation through the evening is that the fewer people onstage, the more people backstage, and vice versa. As the story reaches its resolution with just Clark and a few other actors playing intimate moments, the entire cast begins to assemble near the stage entrances for the curtain call.
The quicker that’s done, the quicker they can get out of the suffocating costumes.
