The Playground on Church Street

(Governor Tom's Note: I wrote this short story in February 1995, during the second semester of my freshman year at Temple University, for consideration to be included in a student-run literary magazine. The gal who ran it was an English major named Jennifer. I think she was an English major. If memory serves, the office where I first met her was the English department's main office. Anyway, she was quirky and all, decked out in what looked to be a Salvation Army dress with pastel colors and these huge black boots that reminded me of Frankenstein.

In thinking of a story to write, I recalled a dream I'd had recently. The vast majority of the dream is lost to the ether, but I remember the end of it. This tall bony fortysomething guy named Sal, who worked in the same department store I did at the time, was walking down the middle of a small town main street in the dead of night. A traffic light loomed ahead. I think he was pushing a cart or something. The only thing I remember him saying was, "My life's after the light." And then I woke up. This story is, I suppose, an extrapolation of that dream, my attempt to fill in all the stuff I can't remember. Sort of. I reassigned Sal's line to the main character Terry Ship.

The punch line is that Jennifer rejected the story. When I went to pick it up at the English department main office (again, I think that's where she and this magazine were based), I read the comments on the back. I'm not sure if she wrote them or if one of the other student editors did. Anyway, I'll never forget how the editor said my story was another clichéd Catholic parable. They didn't expand much on that.

Now I have a punch line of my own that I never told Jennifer: I'm not Catholic. Indeed I'm the least religious person you'll ever meet. I wish Jennifer or whoever read it had expanded on the Catholicism they saw in this story because, truly, that fascinates me. Of course I could've just asked her. But nah. Truth is, I didn't have the time. I took full course loads and worked at night at that department store I mentioned above. Jennifer said I'd still get a copy of the inaugural issue when it was published. I never did. I never saw or spoke to her again or submitted anything else to her.

If I were to judge my story now, I'd call it a flunkie Twilight Zone episode. Nonetheless I hope it entertains you.)
__________

Terry Ship didn't want to admit it, but he had to. He was lost. He'd been wandering the city for an hour now, trying to find his friend's house, doing his best to remember the directions. Of course the party was probably over. If Terry ever got there, all he’d find would be people passed out, perhaps pairs of plastered lovers scattered about the house in their secret hiding places, asleep after the sloppy making of drunken love. Or maybe not. It was only one-thirty in the morning. He’d been to plenty of parties that went until sunup.

That still didn't change the fact that he was lost. While stopped at a red light, his wipers set to interval speed to keep the drizzle at bay, Terry reached over to the passenger seat and sifted through the mess of unfolded maps. He didn't know how many times he'd done this by now, but it was quickly becoming annoying to look at all the symbols, the lines, the dots. He picked up the one he'd gotten at the gas station a few miles back, the only one with residential street names, and glanced up at the street sign on the corner: Church St. Spreading the map across his steering wheel, Terry scanned it several times before admitting to himself that Church St. wasn’t on it. "God damn it.” He threw the map aside. Where the hell was he? He hadn’t eaten since lunch twelve hours ago. Each of his stomach’s growls seemed louder than the last.

While contemplating his next move, the wipers squeaking across his beleaguered gaze every few seconds, his attention was suddenly caught by rapid footsteps. He whipped around for the source until discerning a figure running along the sidewalk. The grimy amber street lights weren't strong enough to reveal much about the figure. Maybe this person could help, though. The silhouette started crossing the street. Terry hopped out and hurried over to the sidewalk to cut it off. As he came nearer, he saw it was a male, probably sixteen or seventeen.

"Excuse me," Terry said. The kid didn't answer. "Excuse me!" He ran onto the sidewalk to block the teen's path. "Wait a second."

The teenager stopped abruptly, panting heavily and staring at Terry with wild eyes. His skin was remarkably pale, the lips dark blue, almost black in the gloom. His expression was one of anger, as if he couldn't believe Terry would dare stop him. What stood out more than anything else, however, was a putrid stench, a marriage of rot and feces. Terry backed up a few steps while his stomach churned.

The boy’s eyes watered, the murky amber sparkling in them. "What are you doing?" he shouted. "Why are you here?"

Terry was caught off-guard by the boy's shriek. He didn't know what to say. The first thing that came to mind was, "I'm lost."

"Why won't you let me play? I'm only trying to play."

"Excuse me?"

The boy continued on, this time not walking so much as lumbering, his arms dangling at his sides while he sobbed. "Why can't I just play?" he asked himself. "I can't do anything anymore. Why won't the suffering just end?”

Terry was too baffled to block him again. What the hell was going on? "Hey!" he managed to call out by the time the boy was at the end of the block, his whimpers still audible. "Hey!" The boy wandered out into the middle of the dead quiet street.

That was when Terry noticed something he swore hadn't been there before. At the intersection through which he'd just driven minutes ago was what appeared to be a crude swing-set. Crude because the bars that formed the frame were badly warped, and the seats were uneven, creaking back and forth in a phantom wind. "What the hell?" Terry whispered. Adjacent to the swings stood a curved slide. Because of its substantial sideways tilt, anyone who tried it would probably fall off.

Terry couldn’t take any more of this. In the past minute he'd been bombarded by enough weirdness to make him dizzy. He hurried back into his car and slammed the door. The light was still red. "You've got to be kidding." He was about to drive through anyway, but before he could shift gears, the street lamps, as well as the traffic lights, flickered out.

And then his engine died.

The darkness and silence were all but complete.

“No!” He turned the key but got no response. His engine didn’t even have the juice to struggle. It was flat dead. Terry sat back and chuckled in disbelief. The only light came from the feeble glow of the moon behind the thick clouds. The drizzle accumulated on his windows.

Now what? Hitchhike? No one else was on the road tonight. But wait, he had his cell phone. Maybe he could call his friend. Terry chuckled as he pulled it out. He knew the battery would be inexplicably dead before he confirmed as much by pressing the unresponsive power button.

Something slammed against his roof. His heart must’ve jumped higher than he did. Through the rearview mirror he saw it wasn’t something, but someone. A boy, no older than ten, giggled as he scrambled off the back and ran away, his form distorted through the wet glass.

Terry jumped out and was about to chase him when someone shouted from behind: “Hey! What are you doing on our playground?"

He whipped around to meet the glares of two girls, also about ten, standing in front of his car. The stench punched him again, stronger than ever. He placed his hand on his stomach. One of the girls spoke. "I said, what are you doing on our playground?” Their faces were masked by the murk. He barely made out the outlines of their dresses and shoulder-length hair.

"What happened to the lights?" was all he could think of saying.

"Never mind that. Who are you?"

"Terry Ship."

"Well listen, Terry Ship," the girl said, very mature for her young age. "You're on our playground, and we'd like you to leave now."

"Playground? This is a God damned street."

"Look behind you."

Terry hesitated, then turned. In addition to the warped slide and swings, a carousel and what looked to be a sandbox had joined the setup. People swarmed the playground, at least twenty or thirty, some of them kids, others, adults, the latter clearly distinguishable in the darkness by both their larger silhouettes and deeper laughter.

"This doesn't make any sense." He turned back to the girls. "This doesn’t make any God damned sense."

"It’s our playground," the girl said louder than before, clearly frustrated at having to repeat herself. "We come here at night when the living are asleep."

Terry was about to ask her who she was before he grasped what she'd just said. When the living are asleep? The girls approached him, their faces revealed only a little by the moonlight, as if the moon were teasing him. Like the teenager from the sidewalk, their eyes were saucers, their skin white as the crosswalk.

Her manner and tone abruptly became much more consoling. "You have to go. I'm sorry. But you don't belong here. It's the rules."

"My car... My car’s dead."

The girls just stared. The only noise came from the playground throng.

And then the girl who hitherto hadn’t spoken leaned over and whispered in the other’s ear. “She says you should talk to Sal."

"Sal?"

"Our guardian."

"Sal."

"Sal!" she called out over her shoulder.

Terry squinted into the darkness. Sure enough, someone was approaching from behind the girls. The first thing Terry noticed about this guy was his height. Even at thirty yards in the darkness, this guy Sal was obviously a tower, seven or eight feet tall, and quite slender. His strides swiftly closed the distance. His peanut-shaped head had very little hair, just a few strands on the pointed top.

"You still haven't gotten rid of this guy?" Sal said. Despite his ominous stature and the nature of the question, his voice was soft, almost soporific. "He's not supposed to be here."

"He says his car broke down."

"Then he'll have to stay."

"What is this place?" Terry said.

"It’s a playground, Mr. Ship," Sal said. "When the world goes to sleep, we wake up. This is where we come to play."

"Who?" Terry asked. "Who comes to play?"

"The dead," Sal said. "Every night we come down the street to play here. It's how we entertain ourselves. As you can see, even grownups like to play."

Terry rubbed his heavy eyes. "I must be dreaming.” He laughed again. "This is just one huge nightmare--"

"No," Sal interrupted. "This is no dream, Mr. Ship."

"But it doesn’t make any sense."

"Here..."

Before Terry could react or defend himself, Sal stepped up to him and slid his lanky index and middle fingers into his mouth. Like a pair of snakes, the soft fingers slithered down Terry’s esophagus and into his guts. Terry grabbed Sal’s arm to push it away, but it was stiff and steadfast as a monkey bar.

Terry could still breathe while the fingers twisted and turned through his body. But then one of the fingers reached his lungs. It tapped and probed here and there before extending fully across the inner lining of his chest. The air cut off.

The girls started giggling. Their laughter seemed to get louder commensurate with Terry’s struggles to extract Sal’s fingers. Sal, all the while, remained perfectly tranquil. He simply stood there and probed every nook and cranny of Terry’s insides. Wait a second. Was Sal smiling now? His phone pole frame blurred behind the tears.

That's when the people behind him, the grownups and children alike, began to laugh. Their laughter got louder. Were they all heading his way? In no time their laughter merged with that of the girls. Tears streamed down Terry’s cold, ballooning face. He no longer had the strength to grip Sal’s arm. It was all he could do not to collapse. His head drummed. Through the dimness of fading consciousness he could just make out the throng of laughing dead surrounding him. Was Sal saying something?

Terry’s last thought before blacking out was that he’d never smelled anything in his life so utterly reprehensible.

___

When he woke up on the wet street, the first thing he knew was nausea. He turned over on his side just in time to puke all over the asphalt. Its greasy gleam told him the street lamps had come back on. The traffic light was green. The playground was gone. So was his car.

Keeping one hand to his sore stomach, Terry regained his feet gingerly. Without knowing why, he started for the intersection at which he’d stopped before spotting the teenager. The nausea ebbed. He stopped and waited for it to go away completely, but it wouldn’t. Terry renewed his pace towards the intersection, and the nausea grew yet weaker.

Of course he figured out why. Terry knew where he had to go.

Before he could reach the intersection, a drunk elderly homeless man bumped into him. "Got any change for coffee?" His breath reeked almost as foul as Terry's dead flesh.

He considered the old man's feeble grip on his cold forearm. "Let me go," he said, easily slipping out of the grip and continuing towards the intersection and the consoling darkness beyond. "My life's after the light.”

Terry disappeared after crossing the intersection (something the old man would attribute to the booze). He would have a new home now. But more importantly, he would always have a place to play.

Opera League: Backstage Magic

And now for the Opera League's annual Backstage Magic seminar. It was a pleasant early spring night for it too. Okay it's not technically spring yet, but close enough. Every year about this time, the Opera League of Los Angeles, the official fan club, if you will, of LA Opera, puts on this thing called Backstage Magic. Not to be confused with those Saturday seminars I've blogged about. Those are far more ambitious and usually last several hours, half a day or so. The Backstage Magic seminars, on the other hand, are usually on a weeknight and are accordingly shorter. In fact, the first event I attended after joining the League two years ago was a Backstage Magic seminar, which I blogged about if you want to go back in time (April 2008). That seminar featured a presentation by LA Opera's technical director Jeff Kleeman. He gave us the lowdown on what's involved in going from design to production, and all the plates he's gotta keep spinning, especially since LA Opera has a thing for staging two operas simultaneously. The examples he used were the two one-act operas The Broken Jug and The Dwarf, which had just been staged a couple months earlier and which were part of Music Director James Conlon's Recovered Voices project, the annual series whereby Maestro will hand-pick one opera to include in the second half of the season that was written by a Jewish composer whose work (and sometimes life) was censored by the Nazis.

Last year's Backstage Magic seminar was pretty cool. I blogged about that as well (April 2009). Production Stage Manager Lyla Forlani took us on a literal backstage tour. And front stage tour. It was pretty awesome. They were in the midst of doing Die Walküre (part two of the Ring Cycle), and so the stage was all set up with that giant rake. I've been going to operas at the Dorothy Chandler for a decade now so it was pretty sweet to stand up there and look out at the audience. What a view, man. And it was awesome seeing the workstation where Lyla stands during each production and issues edicts through her headset. I left the Chandler that night with a whole new appreciation for stage managers. Calling in sick is simply not an option with that job.

Like last year, tonight's Backstage Magic seminar was Ring Cycle centric. They're still staging that opus. They did part three, Siegfried, last September, and they're now gearing up for the fourth and final installment, Götterdämmerung, which will be staged next month. As is LA Opera's wont, they'll be putting that sucker on simultaneous with the next installment in Maestro Conlon's Recovered Voices project, Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized). And like two years ago, our main speaker tonight was good ol' Jeff Kleeman, his beard just as long as it was then. No kidding, you know how people talk about the fifth Beatle? Well, Jeff's the fourth ZZ Topper.

Make no mistake, Jeff's a friggin' genius. After graduating from Cal Arts in the spring of 1986, he started that fall with LA Opera as a production intern. The timing couldn't've been better, as the fall of '86 marked the inaugural season of Los Angeles Opera. For the first time ever, Los Angeles had its own resident opera company and no longer had to depend on folks from the Met and San Fran and so on bringing their productions to the Shrine Auditorium or the Dorothy Chandler. True, LA Opera had to share the Dorothy Chandler with the LA Philharmonic, but at least we had our own company, right? And besides, since the fall of 2003, LA Opera has had the Chandler pretty much to itself. It was that October when the Walt Disney Concert Hall became the LA Phil's new home.

Jeff climbed the ranks pretty quickly. Check it out: By the fall of 1990, when LA Opera was kicking off its fifth season, he'd gone from pimply intern to the wise long-bearded technical director, the position he still holds today. Tonight the topic of his talk was lighting, with special emphasis on the way they've been lighting the Ring Cycle with those tubes. If you read my recent League seminar post on Götterdämmerung and Achim Freyer, you'll know that Achim, stage director for LA Opera's Ring Cycle, has a penchant for light tubes. Until tonight, I didn't know those light tubes were nicknamed Tony tubes, after Tony Bechtel, LA Opera's resident lighting tech wizard. He joined Jeff tonight as co-presenter.

The invitation said the whole shindig would kick off at five o'clock with a pre-seminar reception of wine and snacks and whatnot up in the fifth floor banquet hall, which is where they usually have those more ambitious Saturday seminars. Well, as I think I mentioned, today's a weekday. It's Wednesday, my work-from-home day. As convenient as that is, I still can't muster the discipline to start my shift early enough so I can finish early and get to the Chandler by five. That said, I did get there around quarter to six or thereabouts, plenty enough time to take the elevator from Grand Avenue up to the fifth floor and register with the fine folks sitting at that table at the banquet hall entrance, the same folks who sit there on Saturdays, including that Austrian kat Britta, who ended up sitting a couple seats from me during Jeff and Tony's lecture.

It was just as well I missed snack hour. I had a late lunch and so wasn't all that hungry. Actually today wasn't a normal work-from-home day. I had to go to work this morning for a brown bag on this year's new way of doing focal reviews. That's right, boys and girls, it's focal season, everyone's favorite time of the year, second perhaps only to tax time. Anyway, I stood around in the banquet hall for five or ten minutes, and then one of those cute young blonde volunteers told us it was time to head down to the first floor for Jeff and Tony's lecture. The Chandler only has two elevators, and tonight saw quite a crowd, a good two hundred fifty people. Suffice it to say it took a few minutes to get everyone downstairs and into the auditorium.

While Britta sat a couple seats to my left, to my immediate right was Ed Shaff, who serves on the League's executive committee as the Communications Chair, and who usually contributes at least one article to Bravo, the League's quarterly newsletter. He's kind of a burly fellow, sixty or so, with slicked back graying hair, red face, puffy eyes, and a faint whiff of booze. While we waited for the program to start, he asked me if I'd ever seen the Ring Cycle before. I told him that, while the Ring was new to me, I have been going to all the Ring productions LA Opera has put on so far: Das Rheingold and Die Walküre this time last year and Siegfried last fall. And I told him I was all set for both Götterdämmerung next month and the entire Cycle all over again this June as part of Ring Festival Los Angeles. Ed was pleasantly surprised and was like, "So you're a hardcore Wagnerite." I was like, "Meh." Compared to most people I know, perhaps I do seem hardcore, but compared to folks like Ed and, it seems, most opera goers and League members, I feel like a downright amateur. And I said as much to Ed. I told him I always felt like the greenest in the room at any given League event. But then this other middle-aged guy sitting on the other side of Ed chimed in and was like, "Well the Ring Cycle's new to everyone here. It's never been done in L.A. before."

Ed told me he's seen the entire Ring Cycle five times, not counting this summer's Ring Festival. Let's see, considering that he's around sixtyish, that's a decent pace. Once every decade. Honestly, how could anyone stomach something so humongous like Wagner's Ring Cycle more often that that? I asked Ed if he'd ever seen it at Bayreuth. If you don't know, Bayreuth's this town in the southern German state of Bavaria. When Wagner was still alive, he had a theater built there specifically for the Ring Cycle because, in his humble opinion, there didn't exist at that time a single theater on the planet that could handle his seventeen-hour monstrosity. Ever since that theater opened in 1876, they've had a Ring Festival there every summer. Sure, things sort of slowed down during World War II. Most of Bayreuth, like most of Germany, was completely destroyed, but the festival kept on going. I've known of it for a while now, since I studied German in high school. My German teacher, a local Jersey boy named Dave Wallace, introduced us to the Ring Cycle and Bayreuth. Since then I've always thought it would be kind of neat to experience Bayreuth at least once. I think once in a lifetime for something like that would be enough. For some people it would be more than enough. I reckon it's on my bucket list. Ed only made it to Bayreuth for the first time last summer.

So how did he like it? "I hated it," he said. At first I was waiting for the "Just kidding!" But no, Ed did not enjoy himself at all. The thing about Bayreuth, they often have a different stage director every year. As we're seeing now with LA's Ring Cycle, Achim Freyer is infusing his own personal vision. That can backfire, Ed said. In the last twenty years or so, according to Ed here, opera has become the director's medium instead of the composer's medium, which of course is what opera really is. Classical operas are being given these very modern twists. At the centennial Bayreuth Festival in 1976, the Ring was directed by a young Frenchman named Patrice Chéreau. As I wrote in my January League seminar post, what Patrice did was, he set the Ring Cycle during the Industrial Revolution. In lieu of the Rhine, you had a hydroelectric dam. Everyone wore suits and carried briefcases. Most of the sets were the factory bowels, very dank and grimy. The initial reaction was condemnation. People hated it because it wasn't the "traditional" Ring, whatever that means. Again, as I wrote in January, getting into a discussion about a "traditional" Ring Cycle opens a can of nightcrawlers. Anyway, Patrice's version definitely grew on people. At the final performance in 1980 it received no less than a ninety-minute standing ovation. As someone who's given standing ovations before, ninety goddam minutes is unfathomable. Didn't their arms get tired?

The way Ed sounded, though, it doesn't appear last year's version of the Ring is going to grow on anybody. He didn't say who the director was, but the modern spin included making all of the deities a bunch of punk teenagers with torn T-shirts and jeans and skateboards and what have you. Yeah, I can see Ed's point. That would've alienated me as well. What's more, the soprano they got to play Brünnhilde, Linda Watson, is the same gal playing Brünnhilde in LA Opera's current Ring production. However, according to Ed, she sounded terrible at Bayreuth. Hmmm, that's interesting. She's been doing just fine here. I mean I'm no expert on opera singing. Ed agreed with me, though. Linda's been brilliant for us. He thinks her shrillness was caused by the stress of being involved in such a goofy-ass production.

Ed really vented about why opera shouldn't be a director's medium. As another example, he cited LA Opera's production of Lohengrin a few years ago, which I had the bad luck of sitting through. Director Robert Wilson, who did such a brilliant job with Butterfly that LA Opera brought it back two more times, was tapped to do Wagner's Lohengrin. To this day it ranks as one of the longest nights of my life. One thing I didn't know until tonight was that when Robert Wilson signed on to do it, the first thing he did was throw out Wagner's libretto and write his own. That surprises me. Why would Placido Domingo, LA Opera's general director who also, by the way, starred in that particular production, let anyone rewrite librettos? Librettos by Wagner, no less. Interesting. I mean yeah, Achim Freyer is definitely leaving his signature on LA Opera's Ring Cycle, but dude hasn't touched the librettos. So far as I've gleaned from the Ring Cycle seminars I've attended, what he's changing is the look, how it's lighted, what the actors wear, the stage directions a little perhaps. But the story of the Ring is what it is. He obviously isn't changing that or why do it at all? Unfortunately Ed and I didn't have time to discuss this further. It was time for the main event.

During her introduction tonight, Opera League President Judy Lieb talked about this new deal the League signed with Ralphs. For you out-of-towners, Ralphs is a local chain of grocery stores. Seriously, they're everywhere. I've got one literally half a block from my place. Like a lot of grocery chains, Ralphs has a discount card. I've had one since I moved out here. Literally my first week of living in LA, in August of 1998, Mom and I found a Ralphs near USC. They asked if I wanted to become a member. I said sure. I've been a member ever since. One thing I didn't know until tonight is that Ralphs has a community partnership program whereby, if you have their discount card, you can tell them to donate proceeds from your purchases to nonprofits of your choosing. Well, the Opera League of Los Angeles, a nonprofit member-supported group, is now part of the Ralphs card program. Either you can log onto your Ralphs club card account on ralphs.com and link your account to the League, or simply take the form League volunteers were handing out tonight and bring it to Ralphs the next time you go. Give it to the cashier upon checkout and they'll link your card to the Opera League. Too bad I'm not a Ralphs regular, though. I much prefer Gelson's. It's four miles away versus Ralphs' half a block, but the quality and service are much better. No matter, I still go to Ralphs now and again. I'll definitely link my card to the League.


After Judy's intro, Jeff Kleeman and Tony Bechtel took the floor. They were pretty taken aback by the size of tonight's crowd, perhaps as taken aback as I was inspired by it. It was awesome. The first four rows of the auditorium were completely full. When you consider how many seats each row has in this massive place, you're talking upwards of two hundred fifty people. Amazing. I guarantee you there were nowhere near this many attendees at the past two Backstage Magic seminars. What's more, a lot of them were not much older than me. Some looked younger. Why is that noteworthy, you ask? Well, at those Saturday lecture seminars up on the fifth floor, you could probably count on one hand the number of people who are not retirees. Seriously. I mean yeah, at first I felt kind of awkward, but as tonight's event seemed to imply, perhaps I'm at the vanguard of a new trend of LA Opera attracting a younger demographic. It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues.

As I said above, Jeff Kleeman's been with LA Opera since the company was founded, which coincided with his finishing school. His entire working life has been with this company. That's so rare nowadays, isn't it? Working for the same employer for so long? LA Opera, like just about everyone else these past couple of years, has had to scale back. The number of productions per year has dropped, and their staff has accordingly been slashed. Among the casualties, apparently, was this gal Lisa Stone, a Long Islander I met at the Backstage Magic seminar two years ago. She was one of three design managers working for Jeff. While Jeff did the majority of the talking at that seminar, Lisa was there in the front row chiming in now and again. And she hung around afterward. She was cool. I chatted with her as well as Jeff, and they even let me take home some of their design specs for The Dwarf and The Broken Jug. The next opera I went to after that, I looked in the program where they have the names of all the various crew members. A ton of names all on one page in tiny font. I'm sure most people gloss over it. But since I'd just met Jeff and Lisa, I checked it and, sure enough, there they were. However, when I looked at that same page in the operas I've been to this year, Lisa's name hasn't been there. It sort of makes me sick that she'd've been one of the layoff casualties. She was so nice and seemed devoted to her craft. I remember how excited she was to be back in the stage design game after having taken five years off to be a full-time mom. And now two years on, she's out of work. Here's hoping she landed on her feet somewhere.

Jeff's big claim to theatrical fame is a prop called the GamTorch. Gam is the name of a special effects company here in LA. They started in the Valley in the mid seventies and built themselves up slowly but steadily. In 2003 they relocated to more spacious quarters down in L.A. proper on Pico Blvd. Well, back in the nineties, Jeff figured out how you could have torches on stage that were real but perfectly safe and harmless. You do it using these fuel pellets that Gam makes, mixed with Jeff's special sauce, whatever that is. Just as when he talked about it two years ago, he was kind of coy about what exactly he does to make the torch work. The fuel pellets aren't his, they're a Gam product that can be used for many kinds of pyrotechnical effects. But the GamTorch is Jeff's baby. He's got the patent on it. So any time anyone on the planet wants to use those very realistic torches, he gets a few pennies. I actually saw the GamTorches in action before I had any idea who Jeff or Gam were. Back in the fall of 2004 the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, famous for hosting the Oscars, staged The Ten Commandments musical with none other than Val Kilmer playing Moses. That's right, Batman himself. I forget how many different sets there were, but at least one or two were inside the Pharaoh's quarters or what have you, where they had torches on the wall. This one set, I think it was the first one, had a massive stone wall with torches and hieroglyphics. I wish I had photos, it was pretty spectacular. The musical itself? Eh. So so. Nothing against Val, he can sing 'n all. He proved that in Top Secret as well as when he played Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors. I don't know, the story seemed kind of stilted, although I don't think it deserved the harsh D Entertainment Weekly gave it. Anyway, Jeff's GamTorches are real torches. The flames are real, but somehow he makes them smokeless, odorless, non-toxic, and clean. It's real fire, but it's harmless, if that makes any sense. It's perfectly safe for actors to handle on stage. Again, I wish Jeff had gone a bit further into the science of the GamTorches. You figure he could've managed that without betraying the secret ingredients. He also doesn't betray his wealth. Dude's obviously made a fortune on GamTorches, but you wouldn't know it to look at him. Like most stagehands you see, not that I see very many, he dresses very casual. I'm being euphemistic. He looks like a schlub. No I don't mean because of his ZZ Top beard and ponytail. I mean his style of clothing. Or lack thereof. But again, the man does manual labor all day so I reckon the fact that he looks like Paul Bunyon's much skinnier brother shouldn't be too surprising.

Now the other speaker tonight, Tony Bechtel, goes back even further than Jeff. While Jeff's in his mid forties or so, Tony's got to be a good ten years older. He's been involved in LA operas since before there was an LA Opera. Before we had a resident opera company, other companies would include LA as a tour stop, such as San Fran, the Met, London, Paris, Vienna, Cologne, you name it. And whenever they came here, the crew was local. Well, Tony was part of the crew. His forte is lighting technology, official title, assistant electrician. I think he works for Jeff. I wonder if that's awkward for him. Why didn't he climb the ranks? Tony never said where he went to college so maybe he didn't go at all. Two years ago as well as tonight Jeff Kleeman talked about Cal Arts, and Judy Lieb mentioned it in her intro. And at last year's Backstage Magic seminar, then League president Dorothy Wait introduced Lyla Forlani as being an alumna of Indiana University. But no one ever said where Tony went. While he may work for Jeff, I definitely got the sense that Jeff lets Tony do his own thing. There's a section backstage called Tony World, where he works his magic.

Tony made no bones about it tonight: Working on Achim Freyer's Ring Cycle has really drained the juice out of him. When someone in the audience asked him if he'd stay with the Ring Cycle if it went on tour, Tony said he's really praying he'll be retired if and when that ever happens. Don't get him wrong, he's having a ball with the Ring. The results have been spectacular and no doubt their own reward. He just needs to move on when it's over. I can understand. Part of loving my job means working on a lot of really neat and challenging projects. The "challenging" part, though, always translates into grueling hours and a lot of sweat. When the project's over, you want to move onto the next one, not do the same grueling work all over again.

The first thing that strikes you about Achim Freyer's Ring, whether you see these things in person or just production stills in the newspaper or online, are the light tubes of various colors that the characters carry as swords or staffs, and that line the stage. Seriously, Achim's become renowned for these friggin' light tubes. They're everywhere.



Jeff and Tony started their lecture by talking about the Tony tubes, as they're popularly known. Officially they're called Versa TUBES. Yes, the second word is all caps, that's how it's trademarked. You've probably seen them before. Versa TUBES are often used in big arena rock concerts. Usually a shitload of tubes form a wall of light behind the performers, and throughout the concert they can shift brightness and color, to the point of being so damned bright you have to squint just to see the band in silhouette, an effect they usually do at the very end of the concert. You know what I'm talking about, right? Well, that's what Achim's using here.

Someone in the audience asked how Achim came up with the idea of using the TUBES. Jeff said Achim was inspired by LA Opera's production of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny). Ever hear of that one? It's a German opera by Kurt Weill with a libretto by none other than Bertolt Brecht, awesome German playwright with whom Achim Freyer actually got to work for a couple years before Bertolt passed away in '56. Mahagonny came out in 1930, a couple years after Kurt and Bertolt did the very successful Threepenny Opera. Mahagonny wasn't as successful, but it does have the "Alabama Song," which has been covered by the likes of The Doors and Bowie. Even when Mahagonny is performed with Bertolt's original German libretto, "Alabama Song" is always sung in English. That's how Bertolt wanted it. When LA Opera staged it in February 2007, the whole opera was in English. And instead of 1930, it was set in the present day. They had big video screens suspended above the stage. I can't quite remember everything those screens were used for, but sometimes they'd show closeups of the performers that were intentionally grainy. As for the Versa TUBES, which I knew nothing about at the time, I recall they were used to form this wall of lights in the background. Again, like at rock concerts. The story is about these three fugitives who build a town called Mahagonny near a harbor where ships are on their way home from gold fields up north. The fugitives want Mahagonny to be a city for pleasure and pleasure only because, as far as they're concerned, pleasure is the only thing people can rely on nowadays. Soon enough folks from far and wide show up to keep that pleasure going. I'm sure you know where it all goes.

The LA Opera production had a great cast. Patti LuPone played Begbick, one of the fugitives. Talk about a resume. Patti won a Tony for Evita back in 1979 when she was thirty. And the year after she did Mahagonny for LA Opera, she scored another Tony for the Broadway revival of Gypsy. The prostitute Jenny was played by Audra McDonald. Right after Mahagonny she became a regular on the Grey's Anatomy spinoff Private Practice. She's twenty years younger than Patti Lupone but already has an awesome theater background. By the time she turned thirty-five in 2005, Audra had racked up four Tonys: For Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, and A Raisin in the Sun. She's been nominated one more time as well.

I don't know. While the sets and everything looked neat, and Patti and Audra were awesome, I thought the music was only so-so. Maybe my expectations were high. When you go into an opera that has the same pedigree as The Threepenny Opera and stars people like Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald, you expect something above par. I mean it was okay and all, don't get me wrong, but I distinctly remember walking out at the end feeling underwhelmed. Kurt was a great composer, but he's not Mozart or Verdi or any of those kats LA Opera usually puts on. I suppose LA Opera has spoiled me. Don't take my word for it, though. The DVD recording of LA Opera's Mahagonny scored two Grammys: Best Classical Album and Best Opera Recording.

As I said above, our Mahagonny laid the fertilizer for Achim's vision of our Ring. He'd literally just been hired by LA Opera to do the Ring and had yet to decide how he'd put his stamp on the seventeen-hour behemoth. Wouldn't it be cool if he'd been there the same night as me, chillin' in the audience like one of us? LA Opera only does a handful of performances for each opera so it's definitely possible.

Tony chimed in to make sure we all knew how bloody expensive these Versa TUBES are. Manufactured by the Silicon Valley-based Element Labs, the TUBES go for seven hundred bucks...per meter. Mahagonny needed a thousand meters' worth of these things. That's seven hundred large before you even worry about the cast and crew and advertising. And those video screens and so on. For the Ring, Achim demanded so many lighting tubes that getting Versa TUBES for the whole thing just wasn't practical. His Ring is already budgeted at $32 mil, or about $8 mil per opera, so cutting corners with the lighting was unavoidable. The Versa TUBES they could afford are the stationary lights that lay flat along the stage, along the foot of the scrim and certain places on the rake. For the more mobile light tubes that the singers have to carry, Tony decided to use LEDs (light-emitting diodes). LEDs are used all over the place for all kinds of things. Traffic lights use them. They're efficient and cheap. Well, Tony basically got tons of them in strips. For the tubes he got these light-weight plastic tubes with frosted coating inside. A diffuse coating, as he said, similar to fluorescent light tubes. As diffuse as it is, though, you can still see the strip of lighting through the plastic. Accordingly the singers are told to hold their tubes with the lighting strips facing away from the audience so the lighting source isn't so obvious. Some are better at it than others. Jeff and Tony agreed that Placido Domingo is the worst. He played Siegmund in Die Walküre. It's been about a year since I saw that so I can't say for sure if I noticed the lighting strip through the tube. I do remember that his tube was blue. Freyer blue, as it's called, a special blue that Achim trademarked and also used for Siegmund and Sieglinde's makeup.


Tony's pretty clever with these things. His LEDs are all RGB lights. Red, green, blue. In other words, for those tubes that are supposed to be a color other than those three, they've got three switches for all three colors, and you turn on the ones you need for the right combination. You want a purple tube? Why, simply take one of those three-switch tubes and turn on the red and blue. Need yellow? Switch on green and blue. You get the idea. Speaking of yellow, Tony said that's the toughest color to nail down in stage lighting. Now that I think about it, I don't see much yellow light used in theater. I go to my fair share of operas and plays every year. I mean most lighting is just general lighting for the stage, but when color is used, it's usually red or blue. Maybe green. But not much yellow. Tony's been in the business a long time and says unequivocally that yellow is the lighting tech's biggest pain in the ass.


The second clever thing Tony did was make the tubes remote-operated. He and Jeff went to this store in the Valley and got a shitload of garage remotes and gave each one its own frequency. That way, the singers wouldn't have to worry about flicking the switch themselves if they didn't want to. Some didn't mind doing it, but other singers absolutely refused. "I'm a singer, damn it," one of them apparently said to Tony when he asked her if she could handle flicking the switch on cue. Wow, is that extreme diva-ism or what? No worries, though. Tony or one of his troops could simply use the remote from the wings. The LED strips aren't only put in simple tubes by the way. Some of the characters wear costumes with faux hands and arms that are supposed to light up. So strips have to be put in them. During their lecture, Tony and Jeff passed around some of the lighting tubes as well as one of the faux hands used for Fricka, pictured here. I wonder if she was the diva with the attitude about the flicking the switch herself. If she had three of the things, it's no wonder.


Yet another clever lighting trick they pulled off involved these little plastic balls. I forget which opera(s) had them. They could be for Götterdämmerung, which I haven't seen yet. Anyway, Achim decided he wanted a ton of diffuse plastic balls to light up. How to pull that off? First, since they couldn't find balls that were frosted like the tubes, they decided to use foam. Get this: They used a soup ladle to cast the foam so it would be shaped just the right size to fit into these little balls. And then the LEDs were placed inside the foam. Apparently the balls were a last-minute request by Achim. He's become notorious amongst the crew for last-minute mountain-moving requests. Since time was of the essence, Tony enlisted his wife to help find as much foam as possible. Tony swore he wasn't exaggerating when he said the missus hit up something like two dozen Michaels stores in Los Angeles County.


Winging it and improvising solutions is pretty much the norm. Tony only half-joked that whenever he sees Jeff coming his way, he knows Jeff has hit a stumbling block. And if it's something Jeff can't solve, it's got to be huge. Still, they've got a proud lighting tradition at LA Opera. Their production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in '87 was the first ever opera production that used a mobile lighting rig. That was only the second season for LA Opera. Jeff said that despite such milestones as the mobile rig, no one was sure how long the company would be around. Accordingly, the powers that be refused to hire anyone permanent. Almost everyone was an intern like Jeff. And they didn't want to buy equipment. Everything was rented. This included computers and printers. Jeff recalled how after literally each and every performance, they'd have to disconnect all the computers and printers and carry them out. For his part, Tony said the highlight of his early days included opening a lighting box backstage and seeing a nail hammered in there on top of a set of springs. Apparently the springs needed to be weighed down to keep some of the lights on, which would give me a heart attack if I were in charge of such an operation. Perhaps the person in charge was the one who posted that little note in the lighting box that made Tony laugh as he told us what it said: "Whatever you do, don't touch the nail!" I guess it worked. If there were any lighting snafus, Tony didn't mention them.

The adventures with lighting never end, it seems. When they did Siegfried last fall, one of the tricks they had to master was rearranging the Versa TUBES and LED tubes during the intermission. If you consider that most of these tubes have cables or pull cords attached to them, that's a lot of spaghetti to keep track of. When they began rehearsing this process, it took literally half a day, a good four or five hours or so. Not good. Intermissions are usually twenty minutes. Suffice it to say they had a lot of work to do. Eventually they whittled it down to two hours. It took weeks of practice to get it down to twenty minutes. When I saw Siegfried, the intermission was closer to a half-hour. Whatever. I didn't mind. Besides, after tonight, I have a much fuller appreciation of these poor saps.




A couple more audience questions had to do with Bayreuth's lighting setup as well as Achim's use of the scrim. First of all, and not very surprisingly, Bayreuth is more technically advanced, Jeff said. Ed didn't say anything to that. Considering how disappointed he was with Bayreuth last year, I wonder what he thinks of their having more sophisticated lighting. Does technology even matter if the stage director ruins the libretto? As for the scrim, Jeff said it serves both a practical and aesthetic purpose. The former has to do with, as he called it, "hiding the technology." If the scrim wasn't there, the audience would see a little too much of the stage and lighting rigs, the LED strips in the tubes, perhaps some of those cables and pull cords, all that stuff. The aesthetic part comes from the scrim adding height and width to the proscenium. Jeff gave us the exact dimensions. It was something like an extra four feet in height and an extra twenty feet side to side. That doesn't seem like all that much to me, but Jeff made it sound like a big deal. I guess if you're the stage director, having even a little bit more space affords you more room for creativity. At the Opera League seminar on January 30, one of the lecturers, Simon Williams, an Englishman who teaches theater at UC Santa Barbara and reviews operas for The Wagner Journal, went on and on about how the scrim drives him nuts. Sometimes it prevents him from seeing what's happening toward the back of the stage, at the top of the massive rake. And plenty of other critics and opera goers have bemoaned the scrim. Even without the extra space, though, Jeff said the fact remains that the scrim is necessary to hide the technology, to keep the magic in stage magic.



Jeff and Tony love working with Achim. Again, the work's extremely challenging but very rewarding. Although it's too soon to tell, I think this Ring will be one to remember. Perhaps it won't be hailed as a landmark like Patrice Chéreau's centennial production at Bayreuth, but still. The one thing that really gets Tony about Achim, though, is that Achim doesn't seem to have a clue what his ideas require in terms of time and labor. Tony enlisting his wife to drive to all the Michaels in LA County illustrates that. He never would've made Achim's deadline without her. What makes matters hairier is that, like most Germans who hail from what used to be East Germany, Achim's English is only so-so. He's gotten better in the three years since he signed onto the Ring. I read in the LA Times a couple months ago that he's living in a loft apartment in downtown LA. So at least he's immersed in American culture. Nonetheless Jeff and Tony both said that his limited English means sometimes he'll issue an edict that is, in fact, the opposite of what he wants. This is one of the main reasons he never goes anywhere without an entourage of what Tony and Jeff called "sub-directors." One of them is Achim's daughter, his principal translator.

One very interesting thing Jeff told us tonight was that whenever they upgrade to the next generation of stage and lighting technology, they keep the old stuff. As the nail anecdote indicates, they don't throw anything away. Jeff said they've got stuff that literally goes back to the sixties. The Chandler opened for business in the fall of 1964. They keep the oldies but goodies and make it all work. Even more interesting, it's not clear how much stage lighting in the sixties was any different from the thirties, forties, and fifties. And of course electric lights were only invented in 1877 by our man Thomas Edison in New Jersey. Jeff said the Chandler represents the complete history of stage lighting. That's pretty cool, I never thought about that.