Lights flicker in the lobby, signaling the start of the evening’s performance. People shuffle to their seats, and for the next two hours, are indulged in the lives of the characters personified on stage. It is easy to admire the work of the actors during the duration of the production, but it is also important to realize the work that it takes to get to the quality of performance. Long before the curtains open, long before the actors take the stage and transport the audience to another world, there are weeks of production that take place behind the scenes.

Millersville theater recently finished the show, Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Snapper spoke with members of the theater group to discuss the process for preparing a play.

There are many visual and auditory elements working as the skeleton of a play. Months before the show, Victor Capecci, a member of the theater faculty at Millersville, is in charge of designing and building the set. The set must be common to many of the scenes throughout the show, while maintaining the ability to convey different locations in the show.

The set for Two Gentlemen Of Verona was designed to be “in the round”, a format that places the audience around the stage, like a forum. This design allows the actors and actresses to enter and exit at four different points, the four corners. The set must also be built on a certain time frame. Adam Lauver, an actor involved in Millersville theater said, “the people who build the set are on a totally different timeline. They have to work to get everything done by the time the actors need the set.”

The sound and lighting cues are also a very important part of the inner-workings of theater. The key is to not have any dead time, so there are no breaks that will allow the audience to be broken from the world created on stage. The stage manager is a very crucial part of lighting and sound. It is the stage manager’s job to call all of the cues to begin music, to turn off the music and turn the lighting on and off.

The actors go through intense rehearsal schedule to prepare a production. There was a month and a half of full rehearsals, which ranged from two hours to four hours, everyday except for Saturdays. Part of preparing Two Gentlemen of Verona involved the intense Elizabethan language. Written by Shakespeare, the language can sometimes be inaccessible to people who are not accustomed to reading or hearing Elizabethan. While performing the play it is very important for the actors to convey the meaning of the lines. Linda Rae Krov, an actress who was in Two Gentleman, discussed the challenge of learning Shakespeare, “The audience really responded well; we’ve been getting a lot of laughs. Presenting this tough language really shows the ability of the actors and the director [Tony Elliot].”

In addition to all of the hard work in preparing the production there is also a lot of room for fun. The actors form relationships throughout that help them bond on a level of friendship as well as on a professional level.

“It is really important to have good relationships with the other actors”, Krov says, “if the actors are not working together, the audience can really pick up on that.”

Costumes can be a very fun part of the production. Linda Rae Krov was cast to play a sixty-year old man. Changing her walk, wearing facial hair and a fat suit were some of the things necessary to transforming into this character.

It is very important to remember how much work goes into these productions, before there is anyone in the audience, and before the actors even take the stage.