from the Rep's intern blog:

Hello! I just got back from Indiana... where it was -5 degrees with a -30 wind chill. I remember looking at my family, my hair frozen, and saying, "There are places where this doesn’t happen!" So, all of you future interns from cities where snow on the ground is NORMAL all winter long, be prepared to get some laughs at the expense of those native Seattleites who squeal in pain when the temperature ventures into those "unimaginably cold" lower 30s. Anyway, I was fortunate to avoid any snow-related travel cancellations, although I’m sad to have missed the excitement at the Rep. Apparently there were a few sleepovers on the days when traveling home for the night would have been the equivalent of flirting with death. Those nights would have been fun!

Also, boom closed while I was gone. Courtney was able to take over my job for the last week of the run so I could leave, as I had bought my plane tickets before boom got extended. My jobs (and then Courtney’s jobs!) during each show consisted of the following: checking the prop and costume preset, collecting and locking up valuables from the actors, changing the backstage paging system, cuing an actress to enter at the top of the show, bringing an actress water and Kleenex during her one time offstage in the entire show, and helping actors offstage with a flashlight.

The paging system (the PCP) is used so actors and offstage crew members can hear pages backstage before the show. ("Attention members of the boom company! This is your 5-minute call. 5 minutes to the top of the show. 5 minutes!") The PCP settings also control when what’s happening onstage can be heard backstage and throughout the lobby. For example, this can be embarrassing if for some reason someone complains loudly about an actor onstage and the monitor is piping that complaint directly into said actor’s dressing room, and that actor's easily-agitated significant other hears the same thing in the lobby...etc.

The PCP is much less complicated in the Leo K than in the Bagley. There’s a multiple-page chart of the correct settings of the Bagley PCP in the Rep’s stage management handbook, if that makes its complexity any clearer. It’s so complicated it’s not even an intern job—the equity ASM gets to handle it. Ha. What this really means is that the hardest part of changing the Leo K PCP is remembering to do so. Nonetheless, I needed some reminder signs for myself with the letters PCP in 400pt font…

My next show will also be in the Leo K theatre. I’ll be working on Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, thus continuing my now two-show streak of working on plays with one-word titles. Preproduction for Betrayal officially begins the week of January 19th, so from now until then, I will be getting as much of the preproduction paperwork (props list, scene breakdown, calendar, artist welcome letters…) done as possible in this pre-preproduction phase… and being very open to random distractions, such as helping lead a tour of high school students around the building, or taking a day trip to Portland for a Voodoo Doughnut. It’s all part of living the dream!