As the Crow Flies Blog - Page 11 of 14 - The Upstart Crow Theatre Company

August 20, 2015September 3, 2015

A Child of the Theatre Part IV: Rawhide Court

It seems strange that we were only at Rawhide Court for four shows, but then a year is a very long time to a child. I have so many memories of that theatre, and yet, very few of them are theatre memories.

Characters in **Under Milk Wood** (1985) at Rawhide Court

I do remember that when I decided to set up a lemonade stand, as any proper American child should, I did it in the box office of the theatre. Since I only had a dozen or so customers (the actors building the set and costumes) I didn’t do very well.

Characters in **Touch of The Poet** (1985) at Rawhide Court

I also remember being in the theatre and trying to write a play about my favorite cartoon Voltron.

Characters in **The Miser** (1985) at Rawhide Court

But mostly what I remember, is the field outside the theatre where I looked for horny toads, and was terrified when I looked down into a prairie dog’s hole, and saw the prairie dog coming up. I remember that there were birds who built mud nests under the eaves of the theatre, but kept knocking their eggs out of the nests. I would search all over the parking lot, trying to find an unbroken egg. And I remember an August evening when the company got together at the theatre, away from the city lights, and watched the Perseid meteor shower.

August 18, 2015September 3, 2015

Rawhide Court: Little More Than Children

Characters in **A Midsummer Night’s Dream** (1984)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in November, 1984 was our last show at St. John’s. It had been a wonderful relationship; too good to last. Our rental cost was trivial, our attendance was growing; but we were over-filling the space, and we had to strike our sets into closets a couple of times every weekend. But we were flush. And our ticket price—remember, this was 1984, way back in the last millennium—was four dollars. (!) So we thought we needed to move, and, as it turned out we found a building that we could lease by the year. It was an industrial building, a manufacturing plant, at 5853 Rawhide Court, a mile north of Boulder. (That building became, last year, Boulder’s first recreational marijuana dispensary, but that is not to our credit—or blame.)

I no longer remember who found the building, I no longer remember what we paid for it, but I will never forget the work we put into it to make it a theatre. We built a stage, of course, and a grid to hang our lights from. We had to repair broken windows because our first show would be in February and it gets chilly in Boulder in February. We installed two restrooms and built a box office. The walls were concrete and the acoustics were too live. We padded the walls behind the audience to dampen the sound. So we spent two months building a theatre but we ran out of time and supplies to build the first set. Luckily the first show we did at the Upstart Crow Theatre was an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood. Luckily, because Under Milkwood is a radio play, and radio plays tend not to require sets. We had a table and a couple of chairs, we built a couple of benches and we played in front of a blank concrete wall. This is what it looked like:

Under Milkwood (1985) at Rawhide Court

I think I mentioned a couple of blogs ago that we were an ensemble company. See the two women in front? They’re still with us: Joan Kuder Bell is directing our current show, Misalliance, and Katherine Dubois Reed is in it.

Characters (Joan Kuder Bell, Katherine Dubois Reed) in **Under Milkwood** (1985)

And, by the way, Kathy wrote the fourth play we did at the Rawhide Court Theatre, York 8 Lancaster 6, but more of that later. Anyway, the building was ours and we could build our sets right there on the stage, and the next few plays we did there displayed some of the finest sets we have ever had. Here is what our second show, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet looked like:

Characters in **A Touch of the Poet** (1985)

We were able to augment our income (still $4 a ticket) by renting the space to other companies. I recall a production by the Boulder Civic Opera company and another by an ad hoc group that did a play about basketball players. (I don’t remember their name or the name of the play.) We were like children with a brand new playground of their own.

Yes, we were like children. We knew a lot about playing, but we didn’t know much about playgrounds. The county shut us down after a year. The building had no sprinkler system, and worse; it had no drinking fountain. So, back on the road again.

August 14, 2015September 3, 2015

A Child of the Theatre Part III: For Mature Audiences Only

Anyone who’s been around young children, knows how much they like to watch the same thing over and over. So I was never bored seeing plays over and over again as a young child, and I often knew many of the lines from the plays. I got to see every single play, until The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade by Peter Weiss, or Marat/Sade for short.

You see after The Playboy of The Western World by John Millington Synge, I got up on a pew in church one Sunday, and very loudly proclaimed, “Glory be to God, I’m crazy again!” One of my father’s line’s from that play.

Characters in **Playboy of the Western World**(1983)

So my parents decided that perhaps Marat/Sade was not a good play for me to see at 6 years old.

My older sister Vivian was in Marat/Sade, and sang several of the songs in the play. She didn’t think twice about practicing her lines and songs around my niece (who is three years younger than me) until one day in the grocery store my niece began to sing, “What’s the use of a revolution without general, general, general copulation.”

Characters (Dan McNellan, Vivian Bell Sutherland, John Stadler and others) in **Marat/Sade**(1984)

Maturity is after all, about knowing what you shouldn’t sing or shout in public.