Cowboy Mouth
Director: Jennifer Jellicorse
Music Director: Todd Siff
Scenic Designer: Shelby Ramsey
Lighting Designer: Katie Ward
Costume Designer: Tatyana Philbert-Hilsman
Photos: Katie Ward and Amy Holroyd
I stage managed Cowboy Mouth in the spring of 2017 at UNCG. There was a cast of three performing this one act play in a thrust space. This production included a gun, a switchblade knife, live music in a relatively small space, and a coordinated changeover during intermission into a completely separate one act. Music was written specifically for this production and the lead male actor had to learn how to play the drums and guitar for the performance.
Cowboy Mouth takes place in a trashed hotel room. Stage management worked closely with the set designer to make sure the placement of set dressing was in accordance with her design and with the action of the play. The trashed setting of the stage along with the variety of lamps created a unique challenge of safety considering the actors ran, waltzed, and tackled each other in this small space.
*End of Cowboy Mouth Production Shot
Act two was another one-act play called Waiting for Lefty. During tech week, I worked closely with the stage manager of that production on coordinating the changeover from Cowboy Mouth's trashed hotel room to Lefty's barren warehouse. We worked with the deck crew on doing this in a timely manner so that there could be a preshow element to the second show within the 15-minute intermission.
*Waiting for Lefty Production Shot
There was a drum kit, an electric guitar with an amp, and a live microphone on the set that were all used throughout the performances. I worked closely with sound, the music director, and director on finding and marking the levels and settings on the mic and guitar so that the actors could rock out onstage without making the audience's ears bleed. The male lead during this process learned how to play the guitar and the drums in ways that appeared very rock n' roll while not going full out so as to control volume level.
This production had a revolver and a switchblade. The gun was pointed at all three actors at different points during the show. It began preset onstage in a hat box that lived upstage right. During the process, I created a weapons sign in sheet and assigned an ASM to being a weapons master for this production. The props supervisor of the university and I worked with the actors on ensuring they felt comfortable and safe with the gun, especially the actor who had to point the gun at his own head at the end of the show and pull the trigger in a Russian Roulette manner. The switchblade required some choreographing as the two men using it fought quite physically and threw each other around while handling the knife.
The actors ate eggs and sausage onstage every performance. This required food to be cooked and properly stored for the actors throughout the run of the production. There was also glass onstage that broke one performance due to the actors' running around and throwing props during the play. Throughout the process, I worked with the cast, director, and props master on ensuring safety with food and the presence of glass for Cowboy Mouth and for the actors in Waiting for Lefty.
Below is some paperwork created during this production, my first one as a stage manager.
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I have included the performance report for the glass breaking incident to show the notation of an accident in a report.
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The rehearsal report is from a rehearsal that took place once we moved into the theatre to show a report from further in the process.
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Finally, there is a weapons policy written specifically for this production by myself and the props supervisor of the University.