Acadia Repertory Theatre Mt. Desert Isle, Maine I was the Technical Director Summers 2012/13

In the summers of 2012 & 13 I had the brilliant experience of being the Technical Director for Acadia Repertory Theatre on Mt. Desert Isle, Maine.

http://acadiarep.com/ 

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Desert_Island  

We built 5 shows in 3 months with a crew of 1-6 people.  All the sets, props, and effects for all 5 shows averaged a new show every 2 weeks.  I had a crew of novice actors who would assist me between rehearsals and an incredible TA.  A "prodigy" who was like a cross between Radar from M*A*S*H and Mozart with the skills of a stage craft technician way beyond his years.   The minimal and archaic shop was in the basement of the Masonic Temple that housed the theatre in the summers.  The "Temple" was actually an old firehouse.  And this is old by Maine standards, which in America, is ancient.  It was seated on the edge of an inlet from the Atlantic.  The ceiling of the shop was barely over 6 feet - a good size for me, cuz I'm an elf, but impossible to build 20' tall sets.  We had to do all major construction in a cracked uneven parking lot.  Imagine the weather that flies over an Island in Maine.  Yeah, it was terribly unpredictable and would go from perfect 70 and sunny to gales of wind with horizontal rain.   I rigged a ninja tarp and rope shelter system with the help of the phone company's bucket genie truck in the background of this first shot:

Every morning my crack crew of theatre geeks would hoist the lines and fly the tarps as we assembled the set pieces in a methodical order that would have made my college tech theatre profs proud.  And they were never proud.  I never imagined myself a Tech Director before this job.  In the spring of 2012 I was building a banana tree in a parking lot out of my Volvo (like ya do)  and a this wizard walked up to me and asked me, "Brently, whatya doin' this summer, cuz I got this theatre on an island in Maine, and we need a tech director and you'd be perfect."  I was finishing up as Prop Master for "Learn to be Latina" at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis.  I knew loads about Technical theatre, and yet I'd never put myself mentally into the job of being a TD, until then. As it turned out, I was perfect.  And my magical summer began... (cue dulcet string music)...

Francis the prodigy technical theatre geek, musician, and composer.

My brilliant intern gold lettering an Irish Pub sign.

 The shop>>>

I am a Social Distancing Expert.

I am a Social Distancing Expert.

 

Beyond any NPR reporter may ever know (Mary, I heard you.), I am a Social Distancing Expert.  

     I have been social distancing myself for 9 months.  Since July 1st 2019.  Did I somehow have an inkling of thinkling this Pandemic would be occurring?  Did my flight from all friends and family and everything I know of social comforts come from some place of self protecting or preparation of what is to come?  I may be the safest person I know. … in spite of the coming eviction and theft of identity and the un-contagious disease that inhabits me causing squirting blood from my lowest orifice and racks me spasms and cramping pains, or the hunger and the endless effort to keep myself fed,,, or the,,,, or the ,m,,,, and the ,,,,,,,,,,, Here I sit, typing this;;; the world’s greatest isolationist socially distancing expert.  So socially distanced even media is blind to me.   

Apocolypsico Later by BrentlyMD March 18th 2020 4:20pm Part 1: “the End”

Apocolypsico Later by BrentlyMD March 18th 2020 4:20pm 

Part 1: “the End”

“All the surge protectors blew.  If it weren’t fer them, all It’a’been fried. “  He said, saidingly.  He followed the wires.  He knew them by color, but all the blues, greens, and reds were nearly black, and the blacks were, well, blacker than black.  Only the yellows and oranges peeked through with glints of whimpering hue against the dim beam of his last working headlamp.  Whatever had flowed through these wires wasn’t just electricity.  “It was full on ultramega-radiations.” He thunk, thunkingly.  He scratched his natty hairs.  What he’d give for another hand to comb out his gnarls.  Scrape his scalp, and pick out the gnyts.   To have water to bathe with.  He’d take a sip, let it linger on his tongue, swish it till his cheeks ached, and swallow as slowly as he could without making himself choke.  He’d done that too many times.  Taken too long to swallow, and held his breath too long, and then that tiny trinkle trinkles into his lung ways and —> Bah’HA’Kqchoooof’UuuuH! He’d spit it out with a cough.  Wasting that precious swallow, as he gasped and coughed and weeeazeled in an angony’fic ca’cough’ony of diaphragmatic spasms lasting beyond time until there he was, with his precious sip all splashed spittled every where, and he sucking in, blowing out, the dry dusty airs he was trying to save himself from.  And now the electricity.  The wires.  The lights.  His precious Rosalina, all dead.  More alone than a man before this time and space of electric salvation has ever been,  he wondered wonderingly.

His omni-present genius zipped his mind’s eyes back to when he’d had everything.  He was a tenured professor of Physics and Biology at Quynnton University in Hollinland, QZ.  He had 3 laboratories, a full mechanical workshop, and even his own theatre to present his latest inventions and discoveries.  Despite all this, he’d never lost the roots of his earthen rich childhood.  He always thought that language should be spoken in the most lingual of tones.  To meet him in his worn work torn tweed coat, hunter’s vest, and waxed denim over alls, you’d never know the light that shine in his being.  Unless he let you really look him in the eye.  Then you saw the brilliant sun that shown there.  Throughout his life he would meet the ignorance of those who saw his complexion, his gnatty gnarly hairs beaten into a bun, his beard which every hair seemed a different color and texture and had it’s own unique direction to which it fled from his face at an incredible rate to which he’d long ago given up any hope of shaving or controlling.  And after decades of barreling through the ignorance that would dismiss him the moment anyone met him until he thrust forward his brilliance in a blade of pure understanding… and thusly was reluctantly given respect.  For genius is only recognized when the ignorant are bitch slapped into perceiving it.  

And then the pandemic came.  And the hording.  And the conclaves of “reservations” and concentration camps.  And he’d fled.  To here.  This abandoned High School that had collapsed, and he found a room.  The Science Room, in the middle of fallen beams and cinderblock walls all leaning in toward it in the center of this old sandstone building, like arrows, leading him to the one room that was saved, and had everything he needed.  Until now…

Apocolypsico Later by BrentlyMD March 18th 2020 4:20pm 

Part 2: “the End of the Beginning”

COMING SOON!