The Good Bones of a Theatre
There's a saying in the home renovation world when one encounters an old house that is sturdy, but needs - not just updates and upgrades - but for someone to live in it and love it a little.
They say, "This house has good bones."
It’s said to ease the concerns to the person renovating it; to suggest the work won't be too hard. The foundation is laid. The walls are strong. It's a house that's ready to be turned into a home.
That was my solid impression of the Studio Theatre at Lowe Mill back in February 2020 when our Technical Director, Josh Phillips, invited me to tour the place with a few other Theatre Huntsville folks. Mostly he wanted me to come cast an eye over the lights and give some suggestions about possible improvements, but I'll be honest - I just wanted to see the place.
I like theatres. I like the theatre arts, of course, but I mean the actual buildings themselves. They feel alive to me, much like I imagine historical houses sometimes feel to renovators. There's an energy, a story, and there's a history there as well as potential. And this felt doubly true for the Studio Theatre. Not only has it played host to multiple theatre companies throughout the years as well as musical acts, comedy shows, and even a group of swing dancers, but its first life had been as a part of the greater Lowe Mill building. First as a textile mill and then as a shoe factory. Quite a history to say the least.
You could feel it as we walked through the theatre, looking at the infrastructure and just breathing in the air (and probably some dust that carbon dated to the Carter Administration). I remember having that very thought I mentioned earlier as I listened to my feet on the worn hardwood floor and looked over the hodgepodge of decor and equipment left by the different groups that had called this place home over the year.
Setting lights for Love, Loss, and What I Wore, the first production in the new space, prior to stage renovations.
This theatre had good bones.
Sure, I saw no shortage of work to be done. The green room needed cleaning. The stage needed some extensive work. The electrical system had to be stripped and re-wired to accommodate some of our more advanced fixtures. The shop needed to be re-organized to make room for our equipment and supply storage, and so on and so on.
All of that aside, one thing was still true. This was an old theatre with good bones, and would prove a great home for Theatre Huntsville. And even pre-renovation we were able to put on a fantastic, nearly sold-out run of Love, Loss, and What I Wore. The Studio Theatre had already started to feel like home.
When the papers were signed and arrangements finalized, we spent a lot of time talking about the plans for the Studio Theatre. The trick was going to be figuring out how to get all the necessary updates and renovations done while also finishing out our current season and spinning up the next one to partially utilize the Studio Theatre as a performance space. A tall order for our small technical team to manage. Even with the Studio Theatre having its own shop, we ran serious risk of getting spread too thin. We scratched our heads as to how we would have time for it all.
Want to know another saying that's popped up lately?
Be careful what you wish for.
March arrived, and with it the sudden onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Seemingly overnight, everything closed up tight. No more shows. No more rehearsals. No more anything. The slate of all our planning had been wiped clean.
Half the fun of cleaning out the theatre was all the fun art and doodads found from the previous owners.
But we had one thing going for us. We had the Studio Theatre, with its good bones and laundry list of renovations. And though our budget has become tighter than ever, we had a treasure trove of potential supplies and materials, and the time to salvage them. It would be slow going, sure. We couldn't have crews of more than two or three people at any one time, each working separately as much as possible. Supplies were not easy to come by since shopping trips had to be limited. But there was work to do, and while we might not be able to do it the most efficient or effective ways, we could do it. Especially since time was on our side again.
I hesitate to say we were lucky. Luck implies that good had been caused by the pandemic, and that's not at all the case I wish to make. But the crisis did find us in a fortunate spot. Our only option wasn't to lock the door and turn out the lights and wait for everything to blow over. There was work to be done that wasn't performance-related. So work we did.
With virtual content coming front and center, we decided the stage should be the primary focus so we would have a nice filming space. Pulling the old stage proved challenging. We dealt with dust and dirt, yes, along with lost guitar picks, drumsticks, and costume pieces, but the biggest surprise was the GLITTER! We found it everywhere! I've never seen so much glitter, and I used to work at a ballet company. We swept and swept and more just seemed to well up out of the cracks. I felt like a sparkly Sysiphus with a broom.
But even clean (or as clean as we could get it without having a glitter-induced psychotic break) the floor itself still presented a problem. It bowed heavily in the middle of where we wanted to build the stage. We hypothesized some piece of machinery once sat there causing the wood to sag. With no way to support the floor from underneath, we opted to built a support system on top and shim it to be level.
The original stage's construction was clearly solid, seeing as it stood for so many years. But Josh designed a great many improvements to help with stability, evenness, and noise level. One of which is the smaller square supports in addition to the larger supports. These help distribute the weight of the platforms and decrease rocking and noise.
While Josh and his assistant Cuinn worked in the shop both reorganizing the lumber storage and building new stage supports, I handled the leveling job. Along with our friends and colleagues Cynthia and Richard, we spent days with a level, string, straight-edges, and wooden shims of every size. Every single one of the supports had to line up with all the ones around it, on a floor, I'll remind, that wasn't level to begin with. The task felt like one of those puzzle-based video games where you have to get everything aligned just so and the door will unlock. I felt frustrated beyond belief. With much cursing and laughter, we got it done.
Next, we laid platforms to make the stage floor. One of the previous issues with the old stage was that the platforms had migrated around on their supports. This rendered the stage uneven and wobbly. Josh planned to correct this with a series of braces meant to hold the platforms flush together and prevent them from scooting around on their supports. This resulted in a much sturdier structure even though we built very few things from scratch. We modified the platforms likewise, with some minor repairs. We addressed the supports next with a few new pieces of hardware. The only things built from scratch were the small square supports and the braces, and we even used salvaged wood in some cases. But I can attest as someone that walked on the stage before and after the renovation, the difference is night and day.
After the meticulous and hard work of building the stage, with the minute leveling details and the platforms that took no less than three people to move, everything else felt like a breeze. The stage walls were next, also built using salvaged flats from both from the old stage and from previous Theatre Huntsville productions. A few clamps and screws later and we had a nice, tidy box. All it needed was a healthy coat of black paint, and presto! We had a black box theatre ready just in time for Nina Soden to come film her production of The Belles of Whitechapel!
Installing new default stage flooring donated by Michael Anders.
I started off talking about good bones because one of the best feelings about this renovation was being able to look at that shiny new stage and think, “We built that from the ground up, but at its heart it's the same stage. All we did was fix it."
Certainly, some heavy fixing sometimes. I felt sore for days after laying those platforms and if I ever have to sweep up glitter again, I might have a dissociative episode. But while there's a new stage, it's the same theatre. The bones are still the same bones.
That's important to me, and I don't think I'm alone in that. We've had people who worked in the theatre before come through "just to see" and they all have a story about this place… a concert, or the burlesque show, or other events stretching back decades. And it means so much to see them smile and say, "Wow! You guys are really fixing this place up! I'm glad it's in good hands." Because they still recognize the "house" as the one they knew and called home.
I like that we aren't just moving into an empty space, but rather we are being given the responsibility of carrying on a tradition of meaningful art being joyfully made in this place. It's played home to so many artists, all of whom left their mark in some way, be it a cabinet full of audio equipment, or all the weird and wacky signs and art we've found backstage. And now it's our home too. A place where we can create, and invite others to create too. Collaboration is at the heart of theatre after all, and it's amazing to not just collaborate in the here and now, but to work with those in the past whose performances I never saw and whom I might never meet.
I'm grateful for our new home. I love its potential. I love the work it's given us to do, which has no doubt kept us all sane during the pandemic. And I love that it weaves Theatre Huntsville even more deeply into the long and wonderful traditions of the arts here in Huntsville.
But for now, you'll have to excuse me. I hear a lightboard has been delivered to our booth so I'm going to go play with some of these old instruments, along with our fancy new moving lights.
Melissa ‘Birdie’ Jones is Theatre Huntsville’s Production Manager. She has worked with Theatre Huntsville in recent years as stage manager, lighting designer, and combat choreographer.