Drama and engineers

"Inside the Box,” a collaborative project between the drama department's play writing and directing classes and the engineering school's introductory engineering class, was, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely wild.

The process went a little something like this: students in professor Betsy Tucker's directing class were asked to make what you might call a small sensory portfolio. The portfolio consisted of three -- what's the word? -- three things that all contributed to a certain abstract idea. To give an example, mine consisted of a colorful illustration of a satyr by Picasso, a track of slightly menacing jazz music and a small capsule of plum wine. All seemed to me to come from the same sensory universe.

These portfolios were given to professor Doug Grissom's play writing students, who each chose one element from the portfolios and wrote a short play it inspired. I am also in the play writing class; I chose a picture of a pristine highway and wrote a play about a police commissioner whose car breaks down on the side of the road and who fails to receive help from any of his numerous super-hero friends.

The playwrights were required to include in their plays several pre-determined special effects, including a balloon popping, objects dropping onto the stage, objects flying across the stage and light moving across an actor's face. The completed plays were then distributed to the directing and engineering students, who collaborated on individual scripts to bring the plays to production in a two-evening showcase on December 9 and 10.

Sound confusing? I'm not finished. In addition to all of these constraints, the engineers had to control all of the effects from 20 feet away and be able to set up and take down their equipment within five minutes -- if they went overtime, their grades would be lowered. The directors were in turn forced to come up with concepts for their plays that could accommodate a rather ungainly metal grid from which all special-effects equipment was hung and operated (to say nothing of casting and rehearsing the play itself!).

One of the oldest themes of drama is the servant to multiple masters; “Inside the Box,” which required engineers to please professors and directors, writers to please directors and professors, and directors to please professors, playwrights, engineers and actors, was a drama in itself.

And all drama is based on the attempt to resolve conflict: whereas the directors' grades were determined by their ability to apply such skills as working with actors and engineers, staging and costuming scenes and bringing the playwright's vision to the stage (special effects be damned), the engineers had to be sure their effects happened -- and if some acting happened to be taking place nearby, that was fine with them. The cultural conflict of such a scenario was not as great as one might think; whenever I spoke to engineers (whom I met when I showed them my play) or directors (whom I saw in class every day), they seemed relatively happy to be working with geeks of another discipline. Problems seemed only to arise in terms of the differing goals that each group had: as the directing class’s teaching assistant Jan Mason put it, theater is the only industry absurd enough to always meet its deadlines; and as I put it, engineers come from an experimentation culture, in which failure is as acceptable and edifying as success.

What was most thrilling about the project, however, was seeing the theater people become experimenters and vice versa: during the actual performance, the engineers’ teaching assistant, Benjamin Kidd (who came up with the idea for the project) was timing the set-up and take-down of the equipment for each group. In the interest of fairness, he informed the engineers when they were at half-time, quarter-time and one minute, and then counted down the last 15 seconds. Until the third scene or so, all of the groups were well under the time limit for setting up, and the audience applauded politely when they completed their task. One group, however, had particular difficulty with some uncooperative extension cords and had to race to get all of their equipment taken care of before their five minutes (of fame?) were up. As Ben reached the number 10, the audience joined in the countdown. When we got to one, the team, in unison, shouted "DONE!" -- with what struck me as a decidedly dramatic flair. The crowd more or less went wild. Now that's theater!