Olivia Killingsworth

NOTE: I am currently working as an assistant director for a play with an all-male cast at an off-off-Broadway theater for part of the week, and working as a server at a French restaurant with an all-female wait staff the rest of the week. I’m documenting my experiences in this series of posts. The production is The Changing Room, directed by Terry Schreiber at the T Schreiber Studio. The names of the restaurant and my coworkers are withheld for privacy.

Tonight is opening night! It’s too busy and I’m too overwhelmed this week to write anything. I’ll leave you with a link to a feature article about our show on NearSay, a production photo, and a special video of our delicious TD Mike Dazé, who, after a long night of building sets, likes to lip-sync to Disney songs.

NOTE: I am currently working as an assistant director for a play with an all-male cast at an off-off-Broadway theater for part of the week, and working as a server at a French restaurant with an all-female wait staff the rest of the week. I’m documenting my experiences in this series of posts. The production is The Changing Room, directed by Terry Schreiber at the T Schreiber Studio. The names of the restaurant and my coworkers are withheld for privacy.

I’m reminded this week how exhausting it can be: both restaurant work and theater work are, at times, physically, mentally and emotionally draining. As a server, especially on a busy night (as we just had this week, with Valentine’s Day), you can get so overloaded with tables and orders that your brain goes on the fritz and you get down “in the weeds”, as they say; then there’s all the bustling around and running back and forth you have to do, which takes a toll on your body; as well as the fake-smiling and smothering your contempt for difficult customers, which can be emotionally taxing. Add it all up and by the end of some nights, you feel like your body is one big ball of soreness, your mind is gone to mush, and you just might strangle the next person who looks at you. On nights like those, after closing, some of the girls (myself included) will often steal away behind the bar and pour ourselves a quick glass of wine before heading out, just to help ease ourselves back into the real world.

In the theater, the week prior to opening night is always an exhausting one: the actors, crew and designers spend eight to twelve hours a day in the theater, several days in a row, meticulously and carefully putting the finishing touches on the show, trying to nail down every last detail – sound, lights, cues, props, sets, costumes, entrances, exits, actions, reactions, etc. We aren’t there yet with The Changing Room, but it’s fast approaching: opening night is Saturday, February 26, and tech week starts TOMORROW! Even though I’ve only recently discovered the exhausting nature of restaurant work and am only now starting to adapt to it (it’s a miracle that I managed to be an actor for so long WITHOUT working in food service!), I have been working in theatrical production for at least 15 years now, so I’m all prepared for tech: I’ve taken most of the next week off from work at the restaurant, I’ve done all my laundry, cleaned my apartment, and stocked up on plenty of snacks and made-ahead meals to keep in the studio fridge during rehearsals. I once worked with a producer who stated that she didn’t “believe” in tech without food, and would always keep snacks and beverages around for her cast and crew during technical rehearsals. Because it’s tech! And tech is exhausting.

Rugby is a pretty exhausting game as well – especially rugby league, the type of game played by the lads in The Changing Room. In his background notes on the text, playwright David Storey writes that it is “a very tough, professional, tackling, running and kicking game” in which the players “wear little or no padding,” and that it is “full of fouling and physical exhaustion.” Even acting like a rugby league player can be physically demanding: for instance, in the second act, when the players run back into the locker room for the ten-minute break between the first and second halves of the game, they have to look as if they’ve just been playing hard and fast for the last forty minutes or so, on a field that’s nearly frozen and in weather that chills to the bone. The actors have to psych themselves out right before this scene: jumping jacks, running up and down the hall, push-ups, rubbing hands together, tensing up their backs and shoulders… anything to trick their bodies and their subconscious minds into believing in the circumstances of the cold and the game, leading them to more authentic behavior as they walk onstage. It’s gotten to the point now where every time we come upon that point in the play, I involuntarily shiver with the “fake” chill the actors are bringing in with them as they enter!

Of course, all of this exhaustion isn’t for nought; after all, nothing really worth doing is easy. We made a lot of money on Valentine’s Day at the restaurant; and although tech can be tedious, by the end of it you (hopefully) have a fully lit, fully cued, fully costumed show, ready to open; and for all the bumps, bruises and cuts a rugby player may endure, the aches and pains eventually fade with a hot bath, a stiff pint, and the thrill of victory.

NOTE: I am currently working as an assistant director for a play with an all-male cast at an off-off-Broadway theater for part of the week, and working as a server at a French restaurant with an all-female wait staff the rest of the week. I’m documenting my experiences in this series of posts. Details on the production – The Changing Room, directed by Terry Schreiber at the T Schreiber Studio in New York City – are here. The names of the restaurant and my coworkers are withheld for privacy.

Uniforms: my life is filled with them right now; both of my teams wear them. In the show, the lads all have their numbered rugby jerseys, black shorts, knee-high socks, and rugby boots; at the restaurant, our servers are required to wear something resembling a (conservative) French maid outfit: black v-neck top, black pencil skirt, black tights, black patent leather shoes, white collar, white apron. Some of these items are provided by the management, some of them come from the members themselves: for instance, all the actors had to go get their own jock straps, tie-ups for their socks, and period underwear (which made for some pretty hilarious emails back and forth with the stage manager and costume designer, i.e. “Boxers or briefs?… No Calvin Klein or other writing on the waistband, please!… Make sure you label your jock!”). At the restaurant, we are provided with shirts, skirts, collars and aprons, but we must buy our own tights and shoes; on top of that, we’re responsible for laundering and maintaining everything (except the aprons, which must remain pristinely white and starched, so they’re sent out to professional laundry). It’s a constant battle to keep up with the wear and tear: one finds oneself doing laundry twice as much as one used to, lest one should find oneself wearing (as some girls do who are desperate, or just laundry-impaired) last night’s dirty shirt at this morning’s lunch shift. I often find myself cursing for forgetting to file my nails after I’ve ripped through yet ANOTHER pair of black tights, and I end up scouring the shelves at DSW for a new pair of black patent leather shoes every few months (they wear out real fast, and hurt your feet in unbearable ways when they do! It’s almost the same frustration that one of the characters in the play expresses in the first act, when he complains about a missing stud on his shoes: “Come up to training and nearly bust me bloody ankle!”).

But it’s more than just the clothes: the lads have all been asked to grow their hair, facial hair and sideburns out in period-specific ways (lots of mutton chops and mustaches in northern England in the 1970s!) and many of them are having to cover up any tattoos they have that wouldn’t be appropriate in our setting. At the restaurant, we girls are asked to keep our hair pulled back and up, to apply a small amount of tasteful makeup, if any, and to wear only conservative jewelry and neutral nail polish. All these little details really add up to generate a real sense of uniformity and homogeneity, which, though it serves the purposes of the rugby team and our restaurant, can also sometimes end up hiding a lot of individuality. It only takes going to a social gathering of either team outside of our normal environments to realize it; we take for granted that we all look the same, until we all go to some party somewhere and see each other in our street clothes, with our hair down, flashy jewelry out, piercings and tattoos displayed proudly, fingernails painted in reckless colors – “Oh my gosh, you have HAIR!!!”… “You look so different in a suit!”… “I almost didn’t recognize you without your apron!” Then we remember that under those somewhat invisibility-inducing uniforms, there is a panoply of unique individuals, just waiting to break out, come quitting time. It’s one of the things I like about David Storey’s play: each member of this 15-man rugby team comes in to the changing room his own man, with his own hat, coat, wife, children, aches, pains, worries, hopes and fears; we see how each of them peels off the various layers of his individuality to transform himself into a perfectly fitted piece of a sleek, strong, solid rugby-playing machine; then after the job is done and the game is over, each of them gradually slips back into his clothes and his life, heads off to the pub (or the hospital, as the case may be!), only to come back and do it again next week…

NOTE: I am currently working as an assistant director for a play with an all-male cast at an off-off-Broadway theater for part of the week, and working as a server at a French restaurant with an all-female wait staff the rest of the week. Hilarity and drama may very well ensue, so just in case, I’m documenting my experiences in this series of posts. Details on the production – The Changing Room, directed by Terry Schreiber at the T Schreiber Studio in New York City – are here. The names of the restaurant and my coworkers are withheld for privacy.

Another striking similarity between my two separate (yet equally lovely) workplaces this month: the strong sense of family in both environments. The restaurant is a fine example of this: not all food service establishments make an effort to foster a feeling of togetherness among their staff, but ours does. Before the restaurant opens for each shift, both lunch and dinner, we all sit together for “family meal”, a (mostly) delicious and (somewhat) nutritious hot meal, served at no cost to the staff and while we are all on the clock. Additionally, we all change in and out of our uniforms before and after each shift in the same locker room (just like the boys in The Changing Room!), and as I noted in my previous post, we all work as a team while we’re on the floor. All of these factors work to create an intensely close-knit sense of community among the staff: we are not just co-workers, we are friends, drinking buddies, workout partners, sympathetic ears, open hearts, and helping hands. Some of us live together as roommates; or we crash at each other’s apartments when the trains are down; or we spend the holidays with each other when we can’t go home to be with our (real) families. Many of us spend so much time together that, as previously noted, we are even on the same monthly hormonal cycle! As with any family, we may have our little tiffs and stand-offs with each other every once in a while (especially during that special week every month when we all need lots of chocolate!), but things usually blow over; and the same two girls who were at odds one month are best friends the next.

There is a similar sense of family beginning to develop among the cast and crew of The Changing Room, not only because theater is naturally a collaborative art, but especially because of the subject of this particular play: team sports and male bonding. At the director’s insistence, the cast all refer to each other by their character names, both in and out of rehearsal; he has also required them each to write a character biography, which they then shared with the rest of the cast (in a previous post, the boys have also been required to attend rugby practice sessions, during which they learned the ins and outs of the game and practiced playing together as a team. We have also had several “team outings” outside of rehearsal, where we all gathered together at some appointed place and time for dinner, drinks, and general carousing. All of this served to encourage these men to get to know each other more closely, both on a character level and personally as actors. I hear them greeting each other now in the morning when they all arrive for rehearsal, and they sound just like their characters in the play – checking in with each other about illnesses, aches, pains (unavoidable at this time of year); asking after wives, girlfriends, children; gently teasing about the hijinks that went on the night before at the bar, etc. Some of them even built backstories into their bios which featured other characters, so that when they shared them with their fellow actors playing those characters, those actors were instantly inspired to continue building and contributing to the team’s collective history with one another. And of course all of this leads to more specific, realistic and truthful moments happening onstage. Can’t wait to buy your ticket, can you?