Diary of the Santaland Diaries

“It’s going to be easy. Just follow me, and you’ll do fine,” Bricks Theatre producer Dave Pausch told me with a grin, as we sat in the darkened backstage area of the Barrymore Theatre.

Easy for him to say. He wasn’t about to be tested in front of a crowd of people on his ability to carry a wooden box onstage without falling on his face. He’d be carrying a Santa chair. I, the little-trained, partially employed writer, would be expected to carry a wooden box with plot-important and easily droppable props hidden in the back.

Worse, I wasn’t entirely sure I had the tape cues right. Was the front of the box supposed to line up with the tape? Or the back? Fuck. I can’t remember. If I do this wrong, I could ruin the Santaland Diaries. Oh shit.

This all started with an assignment. Because it passed on the government arts funding that keeps some Madison theater companies afloat, Bricks Theatre has had to look for additional ways to cut costs and raise revenue. One of those is to offer Community Sponsored Arts (C.S.A.) Memberships, which is a fancy way of saying you can work for 16 hours and earn a partial “share” in the company, shares being ticket packages to Bricks’ four productions this season. My editor had the idea of having me work a shift with Bricks, and then reporting on it. That’s how I ended up backstage worrying about 3-inch strips of tape.

My workday at the Barrymore started briskly: Within three minutes of entering the front door, I was running with Pausch to the dressing rooms to start gathering up the elf costume of star Peter Hunt, who left it in his dressing room the night before. From there, we start setting the stage for the opening play, “The Student,” a quirky little one-act that is meant to warm the audience up for the big show. After arranging some chairs and a table just so, I’m done. “The easiest stage setup ever,” Pausch says.

Then it’s decided that I’m going to “usher” at a side door inside the Barrymore that we need to keep guarded in case people get crazy and decide they’d like to see the Barrymore’s really shady side hallway. I do less ushering than I thought. Mostly I stand sentry over the hallway like the meagerly paid security guard I am. Producer Molly Vanderlin worries more than once that I am finding the work boring—I am—but I am a trooper. “No one passes this hallway without proper accreditation!” I say to myself.

Then someone does, when I let a guy walk right past me and into the hallway. I froze up. I mean, who just walks up like that? Am I supposed to tackle him? Then Director George Gonzalez pops his head into the hallway and says the guy is cool. I ask Gonzalez if I should have tackled the guy. Gonzalez laughs.

I learn, quickly, that theater is all about waiting. You wait for the audience to show up—which was a question, since it snowed like crazy the night before and a lot of the other plays in town were canceled. You wait for the audience to get in and sit down; you wait for the audience to return after intermission; and you wait for acts to get finished so you can do your job. I guess what happens in between the waiting is theater.

My first set change goes off without a hitch, as I’m expected to just bum rush a chair off stage in between the first two opening acts. My big test onstage comes a few minutes later, when I awkwardly bound onstage with my wooden box in tow and make a mistake: I’ve buried newspapers needed for the first minute of the play underneath some other props. Pausch fixes this quickly, and I’m done. It’s the longest time I’ve spent onstage since I roadied my eighth-grade talent show.

It’s hard to articulate the feeling I have afterward, but I start grinning like an idiot. I felt like a bench player for the Jordan-era Bulls. I somehow helped the show, even though my existence was not really important and my work was impossibly menial. As I saunter through the dressing rooms, on my way back to the mixing board to hang out with Gonzalez as he runs the sound cues, I pass Hunt, who is in pre-play psych-up mode. I damn near high-five him as I go by. Instead I go with, “Good luck, man.” He says thanks.

It occurs to me, as I sit behind Gonzalez, watching him laugh heartily as Hunt jokes, “Standing on my box,” the irony involved in this here essay. Here I am, working at a play, in order to write something about what it’s like to work at a play, which is about a guy who wrote an essay about what it’s like to work as an elf. I feel the universe slowly pulling itself apart.

Because there were minimal set changes, set-building, and service jobs, I can’t really say for sure how my C.S.A. experience would compare to that of a normal person working toward a share in Bricks, and neither, probably, could the Bricks staff. There haven’t been too many takers on the C.S.A. program, mostly because it’s only been recently announced, and there haven’t been that many work opportunities. I really only put in about two hours of hard labor, which would leave me with 14 more hours of prop-carrying and shoddy security work before I could work off some tickets.

The one thing I can say for sure is that Santaland Diaries, as imagined by the Bricks, was funny and heartwarming, and Hunt is as good as advertised. He won an acting award from the Isthmus for a reason. And honestly, even though I’m not usually susceptible to the normal Christmastime emotion-bait that hits theaters this time of year, I got pretty close to tears near the end. But don’t trust me. I’ve got critical bias since I was a (very, very small) part of it.