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For sale: used jacket, slightly stained, some wear and tear in back<\/p>\n
\u201cBy nature, theater is an inefficient model,\u201d says Francis Gercke, co-founder and artistic director of Backyard Renaissance theater company \u2014 a position that requires him to think about the \u201cbusiness\u201d part of \u201cshow business\u201d more than some. \u201cIt\u2019s just not conducive to streamlining. We have this bedding we used for Misery \u2014 a full set, with quilts and pillowcases. But not every play calls for a bed\u201d \u2014 and even if it did, \u201cyou don\u2019t want people staring at the same furniture for three years in a row. Companies have to reinvent the wheel every time out. We had a period refrigerator for Smokefall, and we were thinking about using it for A Streetcar Named Desire. But we stumbled; we started worrying, \u2018Is it going to look like the same refrigerator? We\u2019ve got to get a different fridge.\u2019 And that\u2019s how you start to acquire stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
This Sunday, from 7 am to noon at 7620 Lake Ree Avenue, Backyard Renaissance\u2019s decade-plus of acquisition will become their loss and your gain. The Big Theatre Purge will offer for sale \u201cthe things that make magic happen onstage \u2014 fabulous costumes, quirky props, giant set pieces, mysterious objects that we swore we\u2019d use again.\u201d The books piled under the end table of an associate professor of history in Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The handbag and luggage of a woman who\u2019s always depended upon the kindness of strangers in A Streetcar Named Desire? The hotel room chairs from Bachelorette that are lovely and comfy but a little too corporate for most of the company’s shows? All up for grabs \u2014 orphaned objects that Gercke hopes will find a home.<\/p>\n
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Now’s your chance to own Blanche’s baggage. The physical kind, anyway.<\/p>\n
Or how about this? \u201cWe have the jacket that the sheriff wears in Misery. He was played by Alex Guzman, and he gets shot with a shotgun by Maggie Carney\u2019s character. It was a really nice jacket, sort of an aviator style that a police officer might wear in a wintry part of the northeast. Our special effects coordinator Jeffery Neitzel blew out the back of the jacket and had blood and guts hanging from it. The spine was even showing. I couldn\u2019t believe he was going to rip it up, and then once he completed it, it was like this work of art. But I said to him, \u2018You\u2019ve really screwed Jess and me, because we\u2019re never going to get rid of this jacket. Who walks around with their spine out?\u2019\u201d Go ahead, prove him wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cJess\u201d is Jessica John Gercke, co-founder and executive director of the company. \u201cOne of her big loves is wardrobe \u2014 finding pieces that not only look good, but feel like the character has lived in them. That they purchased it themselves, and it shows them off in a good light even as it tells the story. She\u2019s putting stuff on the rack, and I\u2019m like, \u2018You really want to get rid of that dress? It looks dynamite on you!\u2019 There\u2019s great stuff: things with tassels, really nice faux fur.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, not every actor is supposed to look good. \u201cThere\u2019s this great pair of shorts that Mike Sears wore for our first-ever show, Parlour Song.\u201d His character, Ned, is written as being rotund. Sears was\u2026not. To drive the mismatch home, \u201cJessica specifically got him shorts that didn\u2019t fit particularly well and weren\u2019t particularly stylish. As weird and creepy as it sounds, I hope nobody takes those shorts, because they are the ultimate red badge of courage for me \u2014 that an actor put them on and performed a full run of shows in them.\u201d (For his bravery, Sears was awarded the Craig Noel Award for Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play.)<\/p>\n
Prepping for the sale has brought a thousand stories like that out of storage. \u201cMoving sucks,\u201d says Gercke. \u201cI am a hoarder. Everything has this deeply personal story for me. But it\u2019s still fun for Jess and me. There was this very nice futon, and we were trying to figure out what production it was from. And so we went through our old production photos, and that sent us down memory lane.\u201d Eventually, they figured out it was from Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, which they put on over at Moxie Theatre on El Cajon Boulevard. \u201cThe actors had to be careful not to lean on it in a certain way so that it didn\u2019t fall back and become a bed in the middle of a scene. That would have changed the tone of the play.\u201d Backyard Renaissance \u201cspent hours on that futon, and then we didn\u2019t touch it for seven years. And then it occupied two hours of a Friday morning. But we said, \u2018We can\u2019t be doing this. We have to let the kids grow up and move out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
There are other reasons for selling, both mundane and otherwise. The mundane: \u201cWe currently have three storage spaces, and costs have really gone up in the last year. We realized that if we could get rid of those three storage spaces, we could actually come close to affording a monthly lease on a property, so that we would have a commercial residency. It\u2019s not like we could afford a theater, but we could combine storage space, rehearsal space, and have the potential for a small cabaret space. It would be a better use of the contributions people provide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which brings us to \u201cotherwise.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re always looking for a way to engage with the people who come to our shows and support our company. We like to do things that are a little more personal than what\u2019s normally done.\u201d Hence the promo flyer\u2019s invitation: \u201cCome rummage through 11 years of theatrical history and take home a piece of the show.\u201d And maybe pick up a story to take home along with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For sale: used jacket, slightly stained, some wear and tear in back \u201cBy nature, theater is an inefficient…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[74,76,75],"class_list":["post-446713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}