Okoboji Begins

After a 13 hour drive to school and then a 9 hour drive to Boji on Friday with Gillian and Lauren, we unpacked our bags and settled in to the dorm. It's beautiful here. We have a small lot housing cabins, trailers,houses, our dorm and two theatres. There's a volley ball pit in the back and I played with the pre-season and staff on Friday night. We had a meeting with the company Friday night welcoming us to Boji and explaining some things about the lot, the dorms, and the ground rules.

There are 3 meals a day at specific times: 8:30, 1:00, and 6:00. The entire company and staff line up in the green room and you have 20 minutes to pick your food and eat it from the small table in the kitchen. It's some of the best food I've ever eaten. It all tastes amazing! Our chef is extremely talented and I can tell already I'll miss the food when I leave. After 20 minutes all of the food is taken away and you're expected to move onto your next job. They do it this way because one of the crews we're all assigned to is clean-up crew. So we have to have time to clean up the kitchen and wash the dishes and put away all the food before rehearsals and shop starts at 10 every morning. It took a little getting used to, but it's kind of nice. We aren't allowed to waste any food, because the budget is so tight (lets face it, it's summer theatre, there isn't one with a good budget out there)so you get smaller portions to make sure you don't waste anything and you don't usually go back for more because there isn't much time.

All of the staff have their own housing (some of them have their own houses on the lot). And the young staff also has their own separate housing. The next renovation for the lot (they redid the theatre a couple years ago) is redoing the student dorms. It will be nice, but I have to say it will be sad. These have been around since the beginning and it's kind of cool to be a part of the history, even if that includes splitting two showers between 20 girls.

Saturday morning everyone cast in a children's show (Bantam, as I'll refer to it) had auditions to be placed as specific characters. My Bantam show is East of the Sun and I auditioned for Poppa, Hob, and Snowdrop. I got cast as Hob(the non-human assistant of the Ice Witch), Brill (an old hag), and a sister who gets to use puppets. Our Bantam director A is getting her MFA in Directing Youth Theatre and she has a thing for making puppets. I'm extremely excited about getting to use puppets in her show. All of the shows have puppets and it's looking like Fantastic Mr. Fox will be the coolest with full size puppets that stand on the actors legs! I actually start rehearsal today for East of the Sun, all day. Everyone else (not in the mainstage Fantasticks) has shop to hurry and build the set for the mainstage show by Tuesday when it opens. Gotta love doing 13 shows in 10 weeks!

After auditions we had orientation all day. We got a tour of the lot including staff housing, lights/sound, theatre, hog house(secondary rehearsal space, was a hog house at one point but that building was torn down, and this replaced it), costume shop, prop barn, box office, Public Relations, and scene shop. There was a history lesson about the Okoboji Theatre (we're now in our 53rd season, performing in what used to be an airplane hangar) and about many of the buildings. The theatre had a recent remodel a couple of years ago which gave us a new rehearsal hall, and a nice tunnel to store things in.

From what we were told this theatre used to be an airplane hangar, surrounded by a lot of farm land. A college in Des Moines (Grinell) decided to purchase the hangar in 1953 when the regional airport moved to a new location. The theatre company used it for a year or 2 but without much success. However, the city of Okoboji loved the idea of having a summer theatre so much that when Grinell wanted to give up the building, they looked for a new buyer who wanted to continue the theatre. Bill West heard about it from a friend and decided it would be the perfect thing to help expand my college's theatre department. So in 1957 the Okoboji Summer Theatre Association, after repeatedly trying to sell the theatre to my college (who didn't want all the acres that came along with it and refused to purchase it even when the association lowered the acreage), raised the money to buy the theatre themsevles and then gave it to my school as a gift. So Since 1957, the Okoboji Summer Theatre has been up and running, producing 13 shows in 10 weeks every summer.

They say after just one show the people of the town will recognize us and give us their opinions on our performances. The box office opens today and there is already a line of senior citizens in their patio chairs lined up under the awning! This summer will be one amazing experience.

We had a large bonfire (something that will happen a lot while I'm here, and they say sometimes the community thinks it's ok to join us...) on Saturday night. They brought out some great lighting and sound equipment to the slab (our make shift concrete dance floor in the middle of a grassy field that is actually used to paint the flats and floors for every show) and we danced for a couple of hours and mingled with the staff.

Sunday we still had a little bit of orientation to finish up and then we had lunch and an hour before the Tech Olympics. This is a Boji tradition to kick off the season. The staff runs a torch around the lot (or in Prof L's case, they get to ride on the back of a truck :) ) and then the games begin. I was on overload from everything we had learned in orientation, and they had handed out study sheets but not much more could fit inside my head. While perusing a Chinese menu my team decided that we would be called the Assorted Meats! So I was Duck, and the we had Polar Bear, Pork, Beef, and Tofu. We split up to compete against the members of other teams by running around the lot. We had to do a timed test in each area: scene shop (we had to build a screw box, I wasn't very good at it), costume shop (we took a quiz and sewed on a label), prop barn (we solved riddles and found props to match them), lights and sound (we hung a light, striked a light, and put together a headset), box office (we filled out a long card to reserve a seat, I did it wrong), and then a break. We next went to the Bantam theatre and played Public Relations Jeopardy, which I thought my team did amazing on, but we still didn't win. I also broke both of my buzzing noise makers before the game was through. It was a lot of fun, but a little stressful.

Then we played team volley ball! Unfortunately my team was not so well versed in the technique of hitting a ball over a net so we were soon watching from the side lines as another team won.

All in all it was a fun day, but a little bit too much of a competition. I was ready to move onto rehearsal. Orientation has been so full of information that I was having a hard time enjoying myself yet. But the Tony party we had was really fun, and now I'm ready to move onto rehearsal! I have rehearsal morning, afternoon and evening. The next mainstage show starts rehearsal Wednesday and they still have night shop, so I suppose that's more like what my schedule will be like once I'm done with this children's show. Actually, I'll be in shop all day for a week or two first before my next show starts. But I'm opening on next Wednesday and there's a lot of fun to be had before then! I'm off to rehearsal!