It's Alive!
It is decades ago now, but the memories are as fresh as yesterday. At our little community theater, we were producing Frankenstein, a staid, classic adaptation for the stage of the well-known morality tale, even including the Doctor's diary and the chase across the Arctic tundra, details that are often left out of adaptations of this story. Of course, the set was the laboratory, with all the gothic and period tech we could muster. At the back of the room, we had a twelve foot Jacob's Ladder, the rabbit-ears-antenna-like structure that tosses around rising, snarling arcs of electricity, which required two operators, to prevent any possibility of it going off when anyone was close enough to bump into it and shock themself. There was also a two foot Jacob's ladder on one of the tables, with its own operator. You can train people to be careful, but when they're acting, they are someone else, and you must respect that, and protect them. One of us had a large white pet rat, and it was on a table every night. Few audience members noticed it. Not every treat is for every person. We had a Van De Graaf generator, flintlock dueling pistols, live flame, torches, pyrotechnics. Stunning period costumes. The top-notch talent in our pool, both on and behind the stage.
When I reported to the director, and asked what he needed, he told me he was hoping I'd handle the Induction Coil, which hangs over the body and channels the electricity to it. I said, "What do you want?"
He said, "What have you got?" License To Fly.
There's a lot of stuff hiding in the corners of a fifty-year-old not-for-profit all-volunteer community theater. As much as you have room to store. Because you never know what you might need. And when you do need it, you can't afford it. I started digging around. Instead of "What does an Induction Coil look like?" I asked, as I ransacked the junk, "What looks like an Induction Coil?"
The heart of the induction coil turned out to be a bizarre wrought iron clock I found. Around the clock face were 12 spikes of typical wrought iron design, twists and such, with a boxy thing at the end of each that had a bulb and socket, night-light sized, behind green patterned glass. About two feet across. Who would want this on their wall is a complete mystery, which is why, I'm sure, it was now in the basement of the theater, and had been for who knows how long. I turned it horizontal, hung it from a pipe in the basement, and started adding parts to it. I rewired it so that each bulb was independent. Another volunteer owned 2 mechanical chase units from some ancient marquee, and I attached those and wired them so that the bulbs had 2 out-of-phase chases going on, spinning in opposite directions. That meant wiring each bulb to the controllers. They also made odd whirring, humming, and clacking noises. Above that I added a cage sort of structure, similar to the wrought iron, whose origin is a complete mystery, but which served as a hanging point and gave the unit some top depth. Below, I found something similar to those cheap cages that hold your tomato plants up, which gave me a structure to hold a bunch of other items, each smaller than the last, so that the coil tapered down to a point. Some weird plastic thing got deconstructed to provide the actual nose cone, which had a bulb stuck down in it. Above that, some orange plastic bowl, also with lights. Then, a fake plastic cut glass cake cover, stuffed to the gills with strings of randomly blinking colored Christmas lights, which looked great through the distortion of the patterned plastic. There was already a lot of wiring in this thing, even before we added the special effects. Up close, it was bizarre. From a distance, such as where the audience sits, it would have done any sci-fi B-movie proud. It hung in the theater basement for many years before it fell apart, and every new volunteer who went down there stopped and asked, "What the hell is that?" "Oh. That's the Induction Coil." It did actually get used again. Twice. In the Sci-Fi musical parody, it got its polarity reversed.
We wanted the coil to raise and lower. There may have been lines in the script. That's problematic in a small space with a relatively low ceiling, but I was able to engineer about four feet of travel, at a 45 degree angle, with only about a two and a half foot drop, which we just barely had room for. You can't waste visual space on a prop that hides the actors, but we made a workable compromise, and could still have it travel in and out. This involved quite a bit of rigging, as we have no side-stage space to work in. A number of pulleys had to be installed, a number of holes had to be drilled and sleeved through walls and ceilings, so that the effect could be run from the next room, a pivot and lever had to be constructed, and safety latches had to be developed to hold it in place at both ends of its travel. An operator, who could not see the effect, had to be trained. That was the easy part.
A chain loop, heaviest chain we had, nearly 30 feet long, was hung from one of the light pipes. The Doctor's assistant would pull on the loop to raise or lower the coil. One night at notes, the director looked at the next note, paused a bit, and said that he had written a note to the actor to lower the coil more slowly, and had just remembered that the chain pulling did not actually control the coil. The illusion worked so well it fooled him, and he designed it. The actor pulled the chain less vigorously from then on.
Another of the odd things that theater has in its basement is a control panel of unknown origin, with an array of big black knob switches on it. It gets used in any kind of industrial set, and in 1950s spaceships, and it was just a tad too modern for Frankenstein. But I had realized that the black knobs were 120 volt, 12 position, rotary switches. That meant that I could wire 12 things to a switch, and send power to them one at a time, as fast as the stagehand could twist the knob. We had a guy building small pyrotechnic charges for us, in brass bullet casings, that would spray a small puff of smoke and some sparks if you connected them to a 9 volt battery. We had them all over the machinery and electrics, for the explosion scene, and also the creation scene, wired to a couple of switches. I took some of them and some flash bulbs in their sockets, and wired them all individually so that there was a string of 12 tiny explosions in a row down the length of the induction coil, some of them multiples, that would fire in order as the rotary switch was spun. Much more complicated visually than having them all go off at once. That meant that 12 pairs of wires had to run up along the mounting wire for the coil, which you will remember had to move, and 13 extension cords had to be strung across the ceiling back to the other room to provide power and control for all these effects. And all of these charges and flash bulbs had to be replaced every time they were used.
The table, or slab, if you will, that the corpse lay on, was constructed with hinged dog-legs on one end, so that a stagehand could yank on a rope in the next room and drop that end of the table forcefully to the ground with a resounding thump. That involved more holes through the wall, and training another operator who could not see the result.
There were a great many moving parts that all had to happen at what seemed to be all at once, but had to be perfectly timed. We practiced. We had good people. We had the best people. There were more than thirty people working on the show, with fifteen of them actively involved in the single moment of the monster's creation. And that's not the design of the moment, that's the execution of the moment.
Opening night is a deadline. Done or not, the show goes on. We opened. We were not embarrassed.
After each performance, there were inevitable tours of the set, which we were proud to do, since we found it as magnificent as they did. Always the children, and often child-like adults as well.
Towards the end of the show, the monster went berserk in the lab, tore things up, and caused an explosion. The explosion was mostly a sound effect, but under every place in the structure they would fit were all our old, typically useless, beam projectors, un-noticed. With the loud boom, the audience would get blasted with an unexpected wash of light right in their faces, and the curtain would close. A bold choice.
The monster also tangled with the electricity and shocked himself. We had on hand, from the guts of a fancy camera, the part that was the flash unit. It recharged quickly, and was often used to 'charge' the bits of glow tape on the sets. We had installed it on the set, attached to an electrical box in the midst of the jumble of ancient technology, one of those with a big metal handle on the side. Before the explosion scene, a stagehand would turn it on and push the button that gave it a fresh charge. When the monster got to that spot in the set, he would reach for the flash unit, make a big show of grabbing at the switch handle, set off the flash, violently throw himself back as if shocked, and get even more deranged.
By the time of the tours, that unit would have recharged, and as we walked folks through the set, pointing things out, letting them see the Jacob's Ladders up close, but not too close, and the like, we would get to that box, point it out, set off the flash, and react just as the monster had. Who says the technical staff can't act? And, I swear to the Lord above, every one of those visitors gasped in shock, and blurted out, "Omigod, are you alright?" And then noticed us smirking. Often, other stagehands would be lurking, pretending to do something, just to watch out of the corner of their eye as we sprung this trap.
Late in the rehearsal process, during the rush and tumble of building, wiring, testing, costuming, and coordinating everything in only three weeks on stage, we ran the creation sequence for the first time as a whole, with most of the parts in place, most of the operators involved, and most of the effects working. There were about fifteen people directly involved in the creation of this single moment. We got to see that with the finished pieces, the polish, and the practice, we would have something far greater than the sum of its components. We would have the dream we were pursuing together. We looked at each other, set down our tools, locked up early, and went out for beer. We deserved to be congratulated, and we knew it.
On a gloomy night, the Doctor and his assistant lowered in the Induction Coil, harnessed their electricity, twisted their dials and flipped their switches, and once again failed to achieve results. Glumly, they put away their implements, turned off their instruments, pulled the sheet back up over the body, shut down the lights, and carried their torch out of the lab, sealing the door behind them. There were a number of seconds of peace and quiet, dramatically split by a vicious bolt of lightning arcing past the window, and a huge clap of thunder startling everyone. With no pause at all, the lights and instruments in the room all flashed, as did the ones in the Induction Coil, sparks and puffs of smoke burst from much of the equipment, and a visible chain of lightning and sparks and puffs of smoke ran down the vertical length of the coil, as the legs of the table with the corpse on it collapsed at one end with an overwhelming thud.
As everyone jumped half out of their seat, gasped, and tried to get a breath, the lights faded quickly back to the dimness of the stormy night, the dust settled, the echoes faded away, and all was calm again. A few breaths later, the monster slowly, oh so slowly, raised up to a sitting position, the sheet gently sliding into his lap.
And everyone in that room said the same thing to themself.
"It's alive!"
Every night, a few even said it aloud.
Seconds later, the Doctor and his assistant burst back through the laboratory door, torches in hand, threw the switch that restored the lights, and confronted their creation.
"It's alive!"
You may or may not believe in telepathy, but we experience it in the theater, just as musicians do when playing together. Of course, the major problem with it is that nearly everyone is a sender, and almost no one is a receiver. But, those evenings, we heard them. We heard them all. Each and every one, in their own head.
"It's alive!"
We put that amazement and terror in their head, without a word spoken.
And that, that right there, and exactly that, that was our goal.
"It's alive!"
