Ther Repo Treatment: A Tale of Danger, Heartbreak, Carbreak and Redemption (by Art Lyubimov) Act II

THE REPO TREATMENT
A Tale of Danger, Heartbreak, Carbreak and Redemption
(in three acts)

ACT II: It's a Thankless Job

We were up bright and early at 7:30 a.m. The idea was to get to the theatre by 8-ish a.m., get the costumes (Ashley) and props (moi) organized and set down where they're supposed to be. There were three separate, non-connecting locations (i.e. to get from one to the other you'd HAVE to appear on stage): floor right, stage right and stage/floor left. The "floor" areas on both sides could have no light because you could see that light from the audience. This would become a special nightmare on floor left, where I set up most of the props, that would get buried under costumes and, without any light, be impossible to find. On floor right we had only a couple of props, all for Shilo, plus a table for various costume and prop swaps, such as when I would have to change from Genecop riot gear into a suit for "We Started This Op'ra Shit". Stage right downstairs housed the props for Shilo's room and Rotti's office, while stage left upstairs had a few vital pieces for main characters: extra Repo scalpels, Nathan's stethoscope, Luigi's sleeve blade, Rotti's silver pistol and, tiny but top of the list: Mag's finger talons for Chromaggia.

Those were THE prop. They are the centerpiece of Mag's death scene, it's what she tears out her eyes with and during our opening performance they went missing. The frantic search for them right before Camille was up on stage caused her to do the scene with her boots half-unzipped, and the rush to get her clipped to the aerial rig caused a severe spinning problem. So, I had a checklist: no spinning (the new aerial rigger was on that), boots zipped (Camille was on that) and, most importantly (and my job) the talons had to be on. Camille, very aware of the importance of this, brought several pairs. I put them on the prop table in a baggie and hid one pair on Camille's purse, just in case the prop table became a mess. This would NOT go wrong on my watch.

Another big prop fiasco had been the absence of the Evening Slice magazine during "Everyone's a Composer". Somehow, each time we ran that scene, the magazine got lost. So. We had three copies now, one living on floor left for use in "Zydrate Anatomy", two more on stage right downstairs for "Everyone's a Composer". This would NOT go wrong on my watch.

At this point there was only one prop / costume piece that absolutely HAD to still be manufactured, plus a couple more that we could do without but would like to have anyway. The former was the spiffy new abdominal prosthetic I dreamed up for my victim character in "Thankless Job". In the previous show, the abdominal cavity prosthetic was duck-taped to my (hairy) somatch, with the guts and heart stuffed under it. So when Tim tore open my tank top, there was already a horrid gaping wound underneath, which made no sense in the scene. So, I came up with a corset of sorts, made out of flesh-colored fake leather. I cut a window in the middle, taped the abdominal cavity prosthetic to cover the window. And then I taped a cover (from the same fake leather) over the window. The idea was that Tim would fake-"cut" the abdomen, rip off the covering flap that would then expose the prosthetic, so it would look like I was being vivisected. And then the whole gut-pulling thing would proceed. It worked... okay, I guess. The corset itself was serviceable (and a HUGE shout-out to Repo Moms for working on that with - and for - me, couldn't have done it without you, ladies) but when I stuffed the guts and heart under it, the whole thing bunched out and peeled off on the top. So it was pretty obvious I was wearing something. And I looked pregnant. But it looked good under stage lights, apparently, so we rolled with it. (And when Eric the SFX guy arrived, he painted the inside of the flap to look like skin, for extra nastiness.)

Pretty much from around 9 a.m. onwards, I didn't stop. I made Shilo's torch for "21st Century Cure" out of a tiki torch Andie bought, by removing the bottle, putting in one of those backstage lanterns and applying duck tape. The thing was bright enough and worked perfectly. I made a shovel for Shilo to hit Repo Man with in "Let the Monster Rise" out of a broomstick and a piece of cardboard. It looked ludicrous, but it did the trick. I was going to fill some "Zydrate" vials with blue glowstick liquid, and Dani was dutifully on me about that, but at the last moment Ashley ixnayed the whole endeavour, and he had to make do with just the glowsticks. Oh well. Worked fine.

And then, while washing a bundle of guts in the bathroom sink...

(... wait. Washing a bundle of guts in the bathroom sink. And they're PAYING me to do this? Oh wait, no. No they're not. But a) they totally should because I'm AWESOME and b) ... aw hell, this is fun anyway. I have a day job, for Pete's sake!)

... while washing, I say, a bundle of guts in the bathroom sink, I get word that Ashley is looking for me. I find her. And I'm told to drop everything because we have a big problem.

Chris' computer crashed. Why is that a big problem? Well, the show we were projecting was not on a disc, like last time. It was edited (deleted scenes inserted, intermission inserted mid-movie, bows video inserted at the end, etc.) and had to be run from file because it wouldn't fit on a blu-ray disc. Chris had it backed up on four (4) hard drives, but what he didn't have a backup for was the actual hardware. Which crashed with just barely not enough time to fix it.

So what did I have to do with anything? Well, I made the final version of the "Your Brain on Zydrate" PSA that we would run before the pre-show, and I made the bows video and the intermission. Ashley told me to burn those on playable DVDs so that we would run the movie in pieces. It would be jerky, but it would be what we had. So I started burning the first DVD. Meanwhile, I had the following conversation with Chris:

ME: "Wow. This sucks."
CHRIS: "Yeah."
ME: "Too bad none of those backup drives are Mac-formatted."
CHRIS: "Well, two of them are."
ME: "Oh. Too bad the movie is not in the format my Mac would recognize."
CHRIS: "Well. It probably is."
ME: "Uh. You think we could run it on my Mac?"
CHRIS: "Fuck it, worth a try!"

So we tried.

And um.

There it was! Running gorgeously on my Mac, sound and all. (The Sacramento Press even commented on how fantastic the sound quality was.) Except the only version I had was in three pieces (Part I, Intermission, Part II with bows), plus I added the "Your Brain on Zydrate" PSA as the first item. I had to run it as a playlist in VLC. And it paused, twice, during the first run-through. This made Ashley almost cancel the whole idea and go back to our original plan of running it off DVDs, but I prevailed. We looked into it and realized that VLC randomly pauses if you run a movie off an external drive. Once copied to my laptop's hard drive, the whole playlist ran without a hitch. A few practice runs, and we were good to go.

So, folks, meet Art, Savior of the Show (tm). Yes. Thank you.

The hardest thing after that was keeping the props organized throughout two complete run-throughs. I must say, everyone was on their best behavior, the prop tables remained as clean of crap as possible under insane conditions in this horrid little theatre, nobody picked up a prop they had no business holding and made off with it, that sort of thing. However, the props move just because of the show. Especially Shilo's stuff, which ends up moving all over the place, because the character moves all over the place (and at one point dumps out her entire prop-laden bag). So I spent a lot of my time running up and down the stairs, hunting for props. By the time of the show I knew intimately the movements of pretty much everything. Things were under control. I obsessively went over the list to make 100% sure everything was in its place and nothing was forgotten. I bugged people about the little things. I worried myself sick.

By the time we opened the doors, I stood in the VIP room looking down at the steadily filling theatre. I was a mess. I hadn't eaten all day, especially since all Ashley would offer me was her crumb cake, which was delicious but way too sweet for a starving me. I made it a point to drink water, but it wasn't enough. I had time for one (1) bathroom break in 12 hours. I was getting the shakes. What if a prop is missing? What if the video skips? What if the sound doesn't work? As I realized that we nearly sold out the house, I began to feel faint. And then I found myself telling Catt that if something goes awry (she was worried about her contacts popping out on stage), she should just pretend that she meant it anyway and go on acting. We're past the point of no return. The show is set.

It sort of helped. But not really. The lights went down, the projector lit up and Michelle's face filled the screen. The "Brain on Zydrate" PSA was started... with no sound.

That, I think, was the worst 0.5 seconds of my life. My heart jumped up, then plummeted into the deep, dark abyss.

Amber's Sweets' second performance of Repo! Live has begun.

... to be continued ...