A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare was the first show presented by UNCSA in its 2019-2020 season, it played in the Hanesbrand Theatre in downtown Winston-Salem, NC. The mounting of the production faced several challenges from time line to material choices. The first and foremost challenge facing the show was the extraordinarily compressed timeline of the show. From the beginning of engineering time to strike was only 35 days, with Tech beginning 24 days from that start date. Obviously this left very little time to adjust for any problems that occurred meaning that small problems became large and large problems were inherently catastrophic. A large problem that we had to work to resolve is that the design called for a large number of Umbrellas to be used as scenic elements. The problem arose in regards to flame proofing them as they are water proof and thus would not take the flame retardant. To solve this, we did several series of tests to discover the right combination of steps to finally get the flame proofing to stick, I believe the final process involved spray painting, priming, crystal gelling, and then applying the flame proofing. Smaller technical challenged also existed, such as transferring the main units to the offsite theatre and making sure that the rolling units did not tear the ground cloth. There were some choices in both materials and process pathing that I would potentially change going back. However, keeping both budget and time in mind I do not believe more advanced materials would be usable and the decisions made in the moment were better than perfect decisions later. Inevitably though all challenges were met and the show was ready for opening.